In The Park With Matthew Thurber

In the Park with Matthew Thurber by Edward Carey September 2008 As Matthew Thurber sits down on a bench at Madison Square Park, it is only fitting that he should be surrounded by trees, which play a major role in his book “1800 Mice” [PictureBox Inc]. “Trees are characters because they’re always around. They’re around in every urban environment, but they’re just taking up space. They are left lining the streets, if you’re lucky or crowded together in parks, so you can take in a simulated natural experience in a completely landscaped form. People stick stuff to them and they play this decorative role in the environment. I think about trees as characters and addressing these issues of environmental despair and dread,” said Thurber. These issues show up in allegorical stories in “1-800 Mice,” two books which have been published by PictureBox Inc.

“Like in 1-800-Mice, there’s a comet that’s hurtling towards the earth, everybody thinks it’s a comet, but it turns out to be a vampire with a banjo in his hand; but it’s understood by the populace to be this apocalyptic comet that’s gonna destroy everything and it’s making everybody really depressed,” said Thurber. Another influence for the story came from watching “Serpico” and the idea of a conflicted cop who “loses his identity as a policeman” when he goes undercover and starts “hanging out with the freaks and getting involved in the subculture, so he’s sympathizing with them.” He created a character that’s a cop for the surreal world of Volcano Park, inhabited by Peace Punks, Mice Messengers and Tree People.

A two-panel spread from “1800 Mice”

The series may have been cancelled in favor of turning it into a graphic novel, but Thurber said he’s always preferred working in zines rather than graphic novels. “Yeah, I like little flimsy books that are portable. I like putting things out regularly in some fashion, a new something every couple of months. Just maybe even as a diary sort of thing, show people what I’ve been doing, rather than working on a big story for years. I guess that’s the way I’ve always done it in self-publishing,” said Thurber. Thurber has been self-publishing comics since he was twelve years old and made a comic which he then sold to his friends called, “Killer Pigs: Target U.S.A.” While in high school, he made a zine with some friends and tried to distribute it through “Factsheet Five,” an alternative zine which reviewed thousands of privately produced zines and gave the contact information of the editors and publishers. It began as a zine for sci-fi fanzines. Some of the comics which influenced him at the time were Batman, ElfQuest and later RAW (“when I found out about it”).

A page from “1-800 Mice”

When he came to New York, he went to Cooper Union and received a fine arts degree, though his interest “was always storytelling.” He did various animation and drawing projects related to storytelling while there. “They were kind of like comics; big scroll drawings that were like hand drawn animated films,” said Thurber. After school, he went back to making mini-comics and submitting them to places like St. Marks Bookshop and Jim Hanley’s. “I feel like it was with the same enthusiasm as when I was a kid, though. It seemed like a way to present an ambitious story with almost no means,” said Thurber. Thurber is currently featured in the new anthology “Typhon,” a 192page anthology edited and published by Danny Hellman, who produced the critically acclaimed “Legal Action Comics”

A panel from “Typhon” with unnamed main character

anthologies in 2000 and 2003. The book features new work by forty-two talented cartoonists from across the US, Canada, South America and Europe. “I think that anthology is taking up a necessary role of presenting freaky art; a lot of weird, outlandish, underground-descended art that you don’t see in a lot of anthologies. There’s not really a forum for that. I’m happy that it came out,” said Thurber. His contribution to the anthology is an outlandish sci-fi story of sorts featuring an unnamed character that has “a malfunctioning, external apparatus” which is picking up sounds and images from an unknown source, until he learns they are premonitions. In the two-page story, Thurber said, “there was only enough time for him to freak out about these visions and quit his dangerous job where these people are throwing TVs at his head from on top of this log and realize what’s happening to him.” After the character kept reappearing in his work, he decided to give him more of an identity and a name. “Diamond Duck Cratty . . . he’s a long haired guy, kind of an urban survivalist, an Indian sheik type guy,” said Thurber. He relates the story to i-Pods and the use of such technological devices. “What if your i-Pod picked up transmissions from the White House or something? Everybody has this data that they’re pumping themselves full of, with all this garbled information,” said Thurber. He also admits it’s a love story with a happy ending of sorts. “One thing I try to do is wrap everything up in an enclosed A panel from “Typhon” circuit, like a short story. If you wonder why things are happening, I like to try and make it complete. In most cases, in anthologies, it’s difficult; you don’t want to read an excerpt from somebody’s longer story in an anthology,” said Thurber. Another story of his appeared in the anthology “Kramer’s Ergot #6” in 2006, called “21 Jaguar Street,” inspired by Mayan mythology and the pilot episode of “21 Jump Street.” Though he only saw the one episode, he liked the central concept of a special squad infiltrating a high school. “If anything, I was making fun of my old school and the strange textures of places like that. There are a lot of power struggles in high school you might never figure out.

I liked the idea that a Mayan god was hiding out and posing as the high school principal,’ said Thurber. The story revolves around “two foolish characters” that go undercover to figure out a plot that “involves Mayan resurrection, Mayan gods and the decapitation of the high school football star.” He was also inspired by a trip to Mexico with his girlfriend, visiting Mayan temples in the Yucatan and the museum of Mayan mythology in Chetumal. “We descended into a cenote, an underground lagoon, which is in the comic,” said Thurber. “21 Jaguar Street” from Kramer’s Ergot #6

Thurber concluded, “It’s a goofy story, but I was thinking a lot about how my high school was and the banal cement brick building which came around in the seventies and trying to relate it to these deep mythologies.”

Aside from making comics, Thurber is also in a band with his girlfriend Rebecca called “Ambergris,” a catch-all term he uses “for any performance project that I do.” “We just did an art gallery installation; we were performing a little play and that was interesting, because it was kind of like a comic book, a narrative from a comic book, but we were acting it out as a musical,” said Thurber. When asked what made it like a comic book, Thurber said, “The characters were really silly; the story was a fantasy about this school for time travelers, located on a glacier somewhere, and two characters are trying to return to their school in time for their 10,000th class reunion and they get stuck in time, so they’re kind of acting out their plight.”