Virtual Memories Show 696:
Karl Stevens
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More
“I have 40,000 followers on Instagram, and I’d say 39,000 of those are people who like cats.”
With PEPPER (Toon Books), Karl Stevens brings us the latest adventures of existentialist housecat, Penny, and her eponymous sister. We talk about the fun of making a sequel to 2021’s PENNY, the challenge of getting all the cats’ markings right, how he found the right balance in the voices & outlooks of his main cat-characters, how giving Pepper mystical powers allowed him to get away from drawing his apartment over and over, and how cat comics PULL. We get into his realist drawing style and the underexamined potential of realistic art in comics, his upcoming gallery show of oil paintings, how he might fuse his interest in comics and oils by exploring narrative genre paintings, his collaborations with other writers (and the cartoonists he’d love to write for), and how listening to music on vinyl gives him an excuse to get up from the drawing table and stretch every 20 minutes. We also discuss Something Fell, the page-by-page podcast he co-hosts about Dave Sim’s Cerebus comics to try to appreciate Sim’s art and storytelling modes, his recent focus on Pre-Raphaelite painters, his progress with finishing the last book of Knausgaard’s My Struggle, his thoughts on making one more big autobio book, life after having to say goodbye to Penny and whether he’s drawn her since, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read PEPPER!
“When you’re making comics, you have to draw the words and write the pictures.”
“It’s madness, this style that I’ve adopted for my career, to draw everything. . . . I feel like if I simplify, it’ll be cheating.”
“The idea of narrative painting is something I’ve been concerned with for a long time.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Karl Stevens is an artist whose work is said, per The Boston Globe, to “blend and blur high art and low… the result is a singular visual and storytelling experience”. His graphic novels include Whatever, The Lodger, Failure, The Winner, Penny, and Mother Nature in collaboration with Jamie Lee Curtis and Russell Goldman. He is also a regular contributor to The New Yorker.
Go listen to our 2019, 2021, and 2023 conversations.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Karl’s home on a pair of Shure Beta 58A microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of me & Karl by me. It’s on my instagram.