Grant Snider: The Pattern Recognition Interview / R. W. Watkins

Photo: Mark Woolcott Photography

Grant Snider:

The Pattern Recognition Interview

by R. W. Watkins

Watkins converses with the man behind Incidental Comics and The Shape of Ideas

(Originally published in Pattern Recognition No. 3, Summer 2018)

Okay, Grant, let’s kick this off with some basic stuff. Where and when did you grow up? What was your schooling experience like? How many Big Star bootlegs did you own?

I grew up in Derby, Kansas – a suburb of Wichita, the air capital of the world. I was a studious kid, into drawing, dinosaurs, and Ninja Turtles. I watched not much television (aside from PBS), played very few video games, read lots and lots of books. Much of my time was spent roaming the neighborhood and our acre lot with my twin brother. I give my parents credit – this media deprivation may contribute to my love for spending time lost in my imagination. My favorite part of school was independent study – as a student in the gifted program, I could create my own assignments, follow my curiosity, and force myself to complete a project of my own making. It’s basically what I do with my current comics work. Technically, I’m a millennial—I was born in ’85—but I have difficulty identifying as one. Unfortunately, no Big Star bootlegs in my collection. ‘Thirteen’ and ‘September Gurls’ were in heavy rotation on my iPod in college, however!

Well, I had no idea you were that young. I figured you were part of the former half of Generation X. I’m surprised that you’ve even heard of Big Star! If you hail from that birth era and don’t look and dress like an overgrown little leaguer and wear your baseball cap to bed, then it’s probably better to refer to yourself as a ‘Gen-Y’er’. I recall that that was the term which was originally applied to those born in the early to mid ’80s back in the ’90s. Back then, it was more associated with the younger disillusioned ‘cool cats’ who hit puberty while Soundgarden, The X-Files and Hate! comics were all the rage.

Oh yeah, I am of the Soundgarden and the X-Files era. Gen Y it is!

So what kinds of books were you reading, growing up in Kansas? And at what point did comics figure into the equation?

I loved the imaginative picture books of Dr. Seuss, Shel Silverstein, Chris Van Allsburg, and David Wiesner. Maybe my favorite book that I read as a child was an anthology of illustrated poems called Sing a Song of Popcorn, with illustrations by Arnold Lobel, Maurice Sendak, Leo and Diane Dillon, and other Caldecott Medalists. It was my introduction to notable poets like e.e. cummings and Langston Hughes. To this day I return to it for inspiration. Later I devoured Bruce Coville’s Book[s] of Monsters, Ghosts, and Aliens from the Scholastic Book Fair. And for some reason I tried to read all the Newbery-medal winning books (I’ve always trusted critics) – A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle and The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin I read again and again. Teenage years were marked by an unhealthy obsession with Stephen King.

I always read newspaper comics (with Calvin and Hobbes by far my favorite), but it wasn’t until around age 12 I discovered comic books. My dad gave me a stack of some of his old books: B. Kliban’s cartoons (he drew frequently for Playboy), Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers series, and most importantly, The Big Book of Hell, a collection of Simpsons-creator Matt Groening’s strip Life in Hell.

Reading Life in Hell was the first time it really struck me – comics could be about ANYTHING. There was social and political commentary, dumb jokes, visual humor, comics as charts and lists. Most of the sex, drugs, and rock and roll references were over my head. But I understood there was a vast world of adulthood that the strip was grappling with. So much creativity and experimentation with a clear, simple line-drawing style. I feel like Life in Hell, if it was created in the Internet era, would be one of the most popular webcomics out there.

Part of the reason I thought you might be in my age category was the fact that your images quite often remind me of the illustrations I saw in literary readers and other textbooks when I was in elementary school in the 1970s. Some of the early animated sequences on Sesame Street and other shows also come to mind. I’m not sure if you would have had access to such stuff, growing up in the ’80s and ’90s. Whatever the case, there’s a similar intrinsic innocence or something. Quite often, your strips have a nostalgic effect on me as a result. Do you get that response from many people?

Interesting! Yes, I do think they evoke a feeling of nostalgia for some readers, although I didn’t have access to the work you are describing. One fellow cartoonist described my comics as “informed by affection”, which I thought was a huge compliment. I think this is partly due to the simple clear line style (which does have some parallels in classic animation), as well as the color palette. I try to use two or three bold, bright colors in most pieces, with brown or grey tones for background elements. I’m trying to evoke wonder more than nostalgia. But I really enjoy pre-1990s New Yorker magazine covers, which have been described (pejoratively) as having a “cat on a windowsill” aesthetic. Hopefully there is enough humor and surprise in my drawings to balance sentimentality.

How about Schulz’s Peanuts? Were you influenced to any degree by the strip or Bill Melendez’s animated treatments? I ask, because some of your backgrounds (parks, puffy clouds, high wooden fences) evoke memories of that classic strip and the television specials at their best.

Good question! I recognize that Peanuts is perhaps the greatest newspaper comic strip ever made, and it directly inspired Cul de Sac and Calvin and Hobbes, two of my favorites. As a kid, however, I was ambivalent toward it. I think a combination of the over-commercialization of the creation (Snoopy was EVERYWHERE – toys, t-shirts, insurance commercials) and the more subtle, adult-oriented humor made me take it for granted. But as an adult I’ve returned to it and found inspiration – I show my kids the Thanksgiving and Christmas animated specials every year. I think they’re among the best television ever made. Right now I have three or four of the Complete Peanuts collections (with cover art by Seth) on my shelf from the library. So I consider Peanuts an indirect influence, but still a powerful one.

Now that’s a surprise: you have children and are presumably married! Seriously, I would never have guessed that from the bulk of your comics. With its rather lonely rainy-day scenes in parks, wooded lots and coffee shops, and references to John Coltrane and Tom Waits albums, The Shape of Ideas struck me as the work of a somewhat introverted forty-something bachelor!

Ha! Yes, I am married with three children (and a fourth on the way!). But in my comics I am mostly wandering around inside my own head. I have drawn a few comics about parenting – they’ve actually been some of my most shared work online. But most of the comics in The Shape of Ideas take place in a mental, metaphorical landscape, where the only other people are anonymous men in hats, women walking dogs, and the occasional elephant or alligator.

A father of four – I would never have guessed! So is your wife supportive of your cartooning, or does the hours at the drawing board try her patience? Does she fear that your artistic avocation may come to take front and centre in your life? What has been your main vocation up until now, by the way?

Oh, now the secrets are coming out. I work four days a week as an orthodontist. It’s a great job that allows me plenty of time to draw – there is no overtime or after-hours commitment. My wife Kayla has been incredibly supportive as she’s seen my comics work grow. She knew me long before I drew comics. As one of my first readers, she is a great judge of what works and what doesn’t – it helps that she’s read nearly all of my creative output. Initially it was a struggle, as I was spending whole weekends working on comics, at the expense of reality. But when our first child was born I restructured my schedule to fit in with family life. Now I draw early in the morning when everyone is sleeping. In the future I may transition to being a closer-to-full-time author, which she is definitely okay with. I recognize that spending more time alone with my ideas is not necessarily a path to happiness and sanity – it will be interesting to see how my work/life balance changes in the future.

Sounds like you have a good arrangement there. (The only time I can really write or edit at any length is fresh out of bed in the morning—at this stage in my life anyway. On some occasions when I’m up late, I’ll find some energy to jot something down just before I hit the sack—as is the case tonight.) Does Kayla have an artistic side of any sort, by the way? How about the family you grew up in? Any artistic history there?

Yes, I agree – mornings are best for revision and actual work. Coffee helps. For me, evenings are good for exploring new ideas and jotting random thoughts in my sketchbook. Kayla would probably not identify as an artist, but she is a good writer, close reader, and de facto editor. As for the rest of my family – my twin brother Gavin is an illustrator and songwriter who works as an architect in New York. He’s also a first reader and “second brain” behind my comics. My parents are creative in a more practical sense – my dad is an avid woodworker, my mom quilts, and both garden. And they’re not quite hippies and own only one Grateful Dead album, but they wear a lot of tie-dye. My maternal grandfather was a landscape architect – I’ve seen some of his drawings from college, and I trace my knack for drawing to him. But the idea that someone could be a cartoonist or writer for an actual career... I’m still coming to terms with that notion.

So you obviously come from a rather talented family. What I’m wondering now is, when you started getting serious about your art—presumably in high school or university—what illustrators or cartoonists were ‘pushing your pen’, so to speak?

I trace the start of me actually beginning to draw cartoons to two moments in college. First, my brother brought a stack of New Yorker magazines back to our apartment—the School of Architecture library was getting rid of them. Though I was aware of its existence, I’d never read The New Yorker. I was drawn to the cartoons, the illustrations, and especially, the cover art. (Okay, the journalism is pretty good, too.) I specifically remember reading a spread in the Cartoon Issue by Roz Chast. I thought the drawing and sense of humor were exceedingly WEIRD. I didn’t like it—at first. I picked the same piece up a week or two later—and I loved it. Roz Chast was soon my favorite cartoonist, and someone whose work I wanted to emulate. I also discovered that Charles Barsotti, another iconic New Yorker cartoonist, lived and worked not far away, in Kansas City. Maybe I could be a cartoonist?

There was an opening on the opinion page of my student newspaper, The University Daily Kansan. So I started sketching and submitting single-panel cartoons. The first time I saw one of my drawings in print, it was a jolt of adrenaline. Other people could read and react to my writing and drawings? This was an incredible concept. My early cartoons weren’t good, usually. But I got a positive response from friends, strangers, and most importantly, the editors. Soon I was drawing for the paper five days a week. I can’t imagine a better way to learn a craft than to constantly create new things and show them to the world.

I find that most university-newspaper and college-radio experiences are win or lose situations. I can recall being invited to participate in both but declining. I’m still not certain if that proved to be the right or wrong decisions for me in the long run. Sounds like you had a definite positive experience, however.

So where did you go from there creatively and publication-wise?

I took the most obvious creative path – I went to dental school. Makes sense, right? But at the same time my head was buried in tooth anatomy and microbiology, I was shopping my work around to local newspapers. It appeared in a couple alternative weeklies, and later, The Kansas City Star. I had just won a major college cartooning award, so the Star gave me a once-per-week half-page strip. This was exciting, but daunting. I’d never had a regular gig at this scale, or with this size of audience. I studied the work of Roz Chast, Matt Groening, and Tom Gauld to figure out the inner workings of comic panels, pacing and storytelling. A while into it, the editors asked me to start working in color. I was resistant at first – but I think this was the most important artistic change I ever made. The addition of color to my line drawings made me consider each piece as a standalone work. I began posting my comics online and selling them in poster form. Around this time, people started sharing them on Tumblr and other young social media platforms. Soon I realized more people were reading my comics online than in the newspaper. I started to see myself as primarily a web cartoonist, with an international audience. I had the revelation that Incidental Comics could be a lifelong creative pursuit – with me as artist, editor and publisher.

A fella who goes to dental school and becomes a cartoonist – I can’t help but be reminded of Hermie, the (Jewish-symbolic) elf from the old Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer special, who wanted to be a dentist!

Can you tell me a little more about this award you were given in college?

It was the Charles M. Schulz College Cartoonist Award, sponsored by the Scripps Howard Foundation. I submitted comics I drew for my student newspaper (University of Missouri – Kansas City) while in dental school. It came with $10,000 (!!!) and a trip to speak at the National Journalism Awards at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. There I mingled with REAL journalists and photojournalists. Paul Krugman of the NY Times was another awardee, though he didn’t attend. One of the other winners that year won for combat photography in the war in Afghanistan. I was the young cartoonist in an ill-fitting suit, excited but out of place. One of the highlights of the banquet was getting to meet Snoopy. He was played by a very nice, very short middle-aged woman. I still have the picture.

And what year was this?

2009

You also mentioned that you’ve made your comics available in poster form. I was wondering, is there any real potential in merchandise for independent cartoonists and the like nowadays?

Yes, absolutely. I could be mistaken, but I think merchandise is how most web cartoonists profit from their work. Publications don’t pay much, not every webcomic translates into a bestselling book, and commercial work can take over from the process of making personal comics. Prints, stationary, t-shirts – people love to have the work they respond to in physical form.

I guess I should look into the merchandising potential behind some of my publishing ventures! I’ll keep you in mind as a consultant.

How long has your Incidental Comics site been up and running now, by the way? Nearly a decade, isn’t it?

Yes, Incidental Comics has been around since 2009. That’s about 70 years old in internet years!

Now, turning to The Shape of Ideas, how did you come to decide that it was time to publish a full-length solo volume of your strips? Had you received any offers from publishing houses at this point, or was the submission process left solely to your discretion, so to speak?

Around 2012, I got a couple comics in the NY Times Book Review, and I thought, “This is it, I’ve made it.” I thought for certain I’d have a book published in a year or two. It didn’t work that way. But I found a great agent, Judy Hansen, who works primarily with comics artists. The book happened, slowly – like everything else I’ve experienced so far in book publishing. Where I can draw and post a comic instantaneously, there are so many moving parts that go into making a book. Most of these are out of the author’s control. So it wasn’t until 2017 that The Shape of Ideas made it out into the world.

There were a couple near-misses (probably for the best), but eventually Judy connected me with Charlie Kochman at Abrams Books. As editor of Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, Charlie is a publishing legend. And he has a deep knowledge and appreciation for comics and their history – in one of our first conversations he had to step away from the phone to check an eBay auction for some Rube Goldberg originals. He’s been very supportive of my work and was key in figuring out the structure and content of The Shape of Ideas.

Oh, don’t get me going on all the bureaucracy and arbitrary foolishness associated with traditional publishing houses—not to mention their royalties scale! Is it any wonder that online platforms like Lulu and CreateSpace/Amazon are doing such booming business?

So it was Kochman who suggested that you compile the book according to all the usual creative elements and give each resultant section a title in the ‘-tion’ noun form – ‘Inspiration’, ‘Perspiration’, ‘Exploration’, etc.?

Yes, that was all his idea! As well as the die-cut light bulb cover, introductory letter to the reader, and finishing—literally—with a blank page.

Well, I think they were all good calls on his part. It sounds like Kochman has his wits about him, and you seem like the sort of creator who can ‘bend with the wind’, provided the ‘wind’ is not an arbitrary tornado without a clue. Now, were you sticking with collected material at this point, or did you find yourself having to create new strips in order to fill the demands of the chapter themes that Kochman suggested?

There were some gaps to be filled, for sure. I found that many of my comics focused on the negative aspects of creativity. I haven’t done a tally, but I bet the most common image from the book is a wastebasket filled with crumpled paper. You’ll notice the chapter ‘Pure Elation’ contains only one strip. Maybe because the moments of undiluted joy in the creative process are exceedingly rare.

And Kochman was good to work with every step of the way? No ultimatums or stepping on toes?

Yes, for sure. The work took place in a whirlwind, but that made the process more exciting. I’m hoping book #2 will happen much in the same way.

I’m glad to hear it. I mean, some editors and producers can hijack a project and snatch it right out from under you.

We’ll get to book #2 in a bit. Right now, I’m interested in learning a little more about the content of The Shape of Ideas. For example, I’ve been wondering how come you tended to avoid winter scenes.

Interesting question! I live in Kansas, where lately we get only an inch or so of snow once or twice a year. (I blame climate change.) Winter is typically cold, gray, and windy. The trees are gray, the grass is beige. It’s like the landscape is drained of color. My comics center heavily on color and the emotions associated with it. So maybe the colorlessness of winter doesn’t spark my imagination. Spring in Kansas is beautiful –colorful flowers and blossoms, an overflowing of green. And fall can be pretty dramatic as well. Summer is long, hot, and unforgiving, but at least there’s the pool. But in my ideal Incidental Comics world, it’s always a Kansas spring or autumn.

Your autumn scenes in particular have a contemplative look and feel about them – the sort of look and feel that’s conducive to haiku. I was wondering, have you ever written haiku?

Yes, I’m a fan of haiku and I’ve written some (badly) myself. There’s a collection of Basho, Buson, and Issa translated by Robert Hass that I revisit. And I started into the complete Basho, but haven’t made it through. I try to achieve a haiku-like effect in some of my comics as well (‘Good Morning’ from The Shape of Ideas, for example). I think there’s a close connection to be drawn between comics and poetry. Both deal in series of images and use constrained language. Both are highly underrated art forms!

Photo: Davey Stuhlsatz

Actually, I think ‘Good Morning’ was one of the strips that got me interested in your work in the first place. I remember including it on the Comics Decoder home page that year. I edit Eastern Structures, which specialises in Asian verse forms, including traditional 5-7-5 haiku. Anytime you’re feeling confident or lucky, please feel free to submit!

Interesting – I’m a believer in the non-syllabically constrained haiku (at least for English writers). But I’ve seen great work done in the 5-7-5 form also.

A poetic element is quite easy to detect in a large percentage of your strips. While I’m on the subject, what other poets have inspired you? And which usually comes first: the poem or the image(s)?

I’ve been inspired by Kay Ryan, Billy Collins, Langston Hughes, Naomi Shihab Nye, and William Carlos Williams, Ted Kooser, Mary Oliver... I could go on, but that’s a good start. I like poetry with a good dose of humor and wonder. And I’m not allergic to rhyme, although modern poetry does interest me more than pre-20th century verse.

Usually, but not always, the image comes first. The visual feel of each piece is the hardest part to figure out, but once it’s set, everything else tends to fall into place. In the very best cases, the words and images arrive at exactly the same time. In this sense, comics are never just ‘illustration’ – text and drawing are intimately connected. One can’t exist without the other.

I was thinking yesterday about the relative importance of words versus pictures in comics. In my comics, I think the words do about 25 percent of the work, the pictures about 75 percent. This number definitely varies per cartoonist.

Speaking of the words vs. pictures ratio, this seems like a good point to ask you about Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Reading The Shape of Ideas, I kept being reminded of that earlier (1993) book. Have you ever read it, and has it influenced your work or your view of comics to any degree?

Yes, I’ve read it and enjoyed it – I don’t own a copy, but I think I’ve checked it out from the library at least twice. I’ve never thought of it as a direct influence, but much of McCloud’s thoughts on comics rang true. One of the most interesting parts in the book was about the level of detail in character design. As the drawing of a character approaches abstraction, the reader has to put more of themself into it. Although the character I draw is ‘me’ to a certain extent, I also want it to be a blank slate so the reader can apply their own emotions and experience to the comic.

I was particularly reminded of McCloud’s chapter on creative development, ‘The Six Steps’, when reading The Shape of Ideas. Your book could be viewed as an extrapolation on the ideas discussed in that chapter. I’ve also been wondering how his thoughts on colour strike you. Do you agree that colour works best when applied to more ‘shapely’ artists such as Jack Kirby and Carl Barks?

At the risk of appearing ignorant of comics history, I haven’t read Jack Kirby or Carl Barks. I didn’t specifically remember McCloud’s thoughts on color, but I googled some pages from the book. I like his take on color in comics – it’s interesting to me how artists’ use of color has developed based on available printing technologies. Now with webcomics, we can use an infinite range of colors in infinite combinations, but many artists intentionally use color to look like a screen print or other analog color technique.

For me, color conveys the emotion of the strip. It also is a key design element – it should draw the eye to what’s important. I typically use one or two dominant, contrasting colors, then fill in the background with levels of gray or midtone. I spend a long time obsessing over colors – maybe too much, because when the comics are viewed digitally, various screens will show a different color palette. And when printed, it may not have the same effect as the original piece, since pigment of print and light of the screen are perceived very differently.

Some of my favorite comics to make are actually about color itself. I’m fascinated by Edward Albers’s Interaction of Color. And I found a used copy of Johannes Itten’s The Elements of Color that has proved useful and inspiring.

One of my favorite picture books is Martin Pebble by Jean-Jacques Sempé. It features his trademark amazing line work, but also some of the best use of color I’ve seen in cartooning. The only color is a watercolor wash of red on the main character’s face (he is a chronic blusher), as well as some limited blues, greens, and yellows in cityscapes and the character’s imagination. Color manages to convey worlds of meaning in a book that’s nearly black and white.

Speaking of Jack Kirby, I always thought that one of the things that made the four-colour system so appealing in the old superhero, war and horror comics was actually one of the process’s shortcomings: the ‘shiftiness’ that often resulted when the colours didn’t line up exactly with the black outline. As long as they weren’t too out of kilter, it contributed a certain energy or vibe that added to the action and tension. The same thing can be said of the old Warhol silkscreens where things didn’t line up right.

In contrast to the traditional newspaper strips—where only the Saturday or Sunday ‘funnies’ supplement would be in colour—webcomics virtually demand colour. Do you think this has created any sort of gap between young and old or new and old-school? Furthermore, most daily strips are now also made available in colourised versions for the on-line editions. Are we gradually losing appreciation for black and white comics in our tech-driven modern world? By the way, did you prefer Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, etc. in colour or in black and white?

Yes, great point about the messiness of the four-color approach! Unfortunately sometimes the shiftiness translates to illegibility in reprints based on old newsprint that has faded. There are some full-size, full-color book reproductions of Frank King’s Gasoline Alley and Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland I’ve seen that are phenomenal, but I can’t help but wonder how great they looked on a freshly printed Sunday paper.

I do think appreciation for black and white is dwindling. It’s hard for simple linework to grab the eye in a social media environment where GIFs, video, and screaming in-feed ads are the norm. Would Jules Feiffer, Shel Silverstein or Saul Steinberg get as many retweets or likes as they deserved? I’m probably the only person who loses sleep pondering these questions. Although I might be wrong – a current New Yorker cartoonist I admire, Liana Finck, does some great (and very popular) work in black and white.

Good question on Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes – I think Peanuts was better in black and white. Schulz’s line is among the greatest ever. It has enough expression in itself that color was nice but not necessary. I think Calvin and Hobbes was enhanced by color, mainly because Calvin’s imaginary alien landscapes and monsters under the bed looked more dramatic in color. And the iconic strips where Calvin and Hobbes tumble through the forest on a red wagon – color added to the contemplative mood.

I may have mentioned my love for Roz Chast’s work previously in our conversation – she’s another artist whose use of color is so essential to the personality of her cartooning style, I think she should never be published in typical New Yorker grayscale.

Getting back to poetry, I was meaning to ask you what you thought of the so-called ‘poetry comics’ or ‘comics poetry’ that first started making waves a decade or so ago. How do you view your Incidental Comics in relation to the work of people like Bianca Stone? Is there any comparison? I remember covering the relationship between the two art forms in The Comics Decoder in 2011, and including a strip or two by Stone.

I think it’s an area with much room to be explored. But there’s also the risk that in trying to be both things at once, the work fails to do either well. I’m not familiar with Bianca Stone’s work (my ignorance, yet again), but I think some of my Incidental Comics can be classified as poetry comics. I’m interested in the rhyming of words and pictures together – where both text and drawing are essential to the meaning. In pure poetry, words can stand apart from the pictures. In wordless comics, the pictures can stand apart from any words. But a poetry comic (in my mind) would fall apart if words and pictures did not exist in perfect balance.

Your view on the matter is not significantly different from mine. Yeah, I pretty much lost interest in the whole idea of ‘poetry comics’ fresh out of the starting gate. Yes, I like poetry about comics and comics characters, and I like comics that incorporate poetic elements, but attempting to establish a particular balance that constitutes ‘poetry comics’ sounds like a recipe for disaster. Half the examples that I was seeing seven or eight years ago looked like little more than Raymond Pettibon’s album covers for Black Flag and Sonic Youth in decades past. In turn, I think Raymond Pettibon was seen as the Warhol or Lichtenstein for Generation X! It all gets very murky and confusing, existing between mediums.

Speaking of album covers, music of various genres and eras are referenced from time to time in your comics. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about the role music plays in your life and how it translates into the strips.

Music used to be the primary focus of my comics. I didn’t play in a band (except for a few months pretending to be a bassist in my brother’s indie rock band). But I went to a lot of shows in my college days and amassed an extensive library of digital music (before Spotify rendered it all irrelevant). I still get a pang of nostalgia for cheap beer and sweaty concert venues where I saw bands like The Mountain Goats, The Hold Steady, Joanna Newsom, and Ted Leo and the Pharmacists.

Artists I’ve directly referenced in my comics include the Wu-Tang Clan, John Coltrane, The Beatles, Steve Reich, Prince, The Replacements, and many others. And Bob Dylan, who I nearly worshiped in college. The musical references in my drawings are rarely so overt nowadays. I’m mainly interested in artists who have long and fruitful careers in music, and who constantly reinvent themselves and find new avenues of creative expression. Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, and of course, Dylan. I want to have the cartoonist version of this wealth of inspiration and devotion to craft.

When I work on a more abstract comic I often have in mind instrumental music – Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports, Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, Max Richter’s Blue Notebooks. I’m drawn to the somewhat boring everyday rhythms of life captured in two of my favorite bands, Yo La Tengo and Lambchop. So music is important to my comics, to say the least. But I mostly write, sketch, and ink in silence. It’s easier to reach a state of flow if I’m not thinking about what track is up next.

But I guess you’re not really writing, sketching and inking in silence—at least if we’re to take Mr. Cage seriously.

Ah yes, John Cage is my soundtrack!

You mentioned your “extensive digital library”. You never got into vinyl LPs as so many of us ‘artsy types’ do?

I have always had the intention but never the effort to start a vinyl collection. I’ve spent hours delving into my dad’s collection, however – I’ve only truly enjoyed the Rolling Stones on vinyl, for some reason. My parent’s collection tends to mild ’70s pop rock: James Taylor, Carole King, Harvest-era Neil Young. Some of the weirder stuff includes Shel Silverstein’s Freakin’ at the Freaker’s Ball. His sometimes vulgar genius never ceases to amaze me.

Recently I visited the house of an acquaintance whose entire living room was dedicated to music – a huge vinyl collection, expensive instruments and recording equipment, mixing software. In another life, my house would look like that—with pen nibs and paint brushes instead of guitars and a drum kit.

So what’s your next major project? I understand you’re working on some children’s books. What’s that all about?

Yes! After a few years of work, the process finally clicked. I’m finishing final art for my first picture book by mid August. If all goes well, it will be out by the fall of next year. It’s a ‘Good Night’ book, and also a colors book. This will be followed by a ‘Good Morning’ book (a less-explored genre of picture books). After that, I have plans for a third book with a different publisher. It will be an intense, immersive, and creatively challenging year! Picture books are a different language than comics, but one I’m equally fond of reading and writing.

In fact, more of my bookshelves are devoted to picture books than any other type of book. I’ve been reading them closely from childhood to adulthood—even before I had kids of my own.

So can we expect anything resembling a sequel to The Shape of Ideas anytime soon, compiling or incorporating more of your Incidental Comics?

Yes, but how soon—I don’t know. My plan is for a compilation of my reading-, writing- and literature-themed comics. But whether it comes out in two years or four is left to the whims of the publishing world.

Well, the best of luck with whatever finally comes down the pipes. I’m sure it shall be something that makes people sit up and take notice. Thank-you very much, Grant, for taking the time to talk with me. It’s much appreciated.

Thank you! It’s been great to talk with you!

Snider lectures at his old middle school, October 2017 (Photo: Rita Snider)

(Read R. W. Watkins’s brief examination of The Shape of Ideas here.)