The creator of indie comic faves Milk and Cheese and a mainstay on animation programs ranging from Superman to Shin-Chan to Space Ghost: Coast To Coast, Dorkin talks his new projects, the differences between the worlds of comics and animation, and some of the writers and artists who influence his work.

Milk and Cheese.

The name makes them sound so innocent, right? But in the hands of Evan Dorkin, Milk and Cheese are anything but—they are transformed into a carton of hate and a wedge of spite whose vicious and violent anarchic tendencies are dispensed with biting social commentary! Two dairy products hell-bent on destruction and violence, all served up with a great deal of comic relief. Therein lies the beauty of Evan Dorkin's work, he has the unique ability to take both the ordinary and the absurd, and make it sublime and absolutely hilarious.

The multiple Eisner and Harvey Award winning writer and artist first broke big at Marvel, when, fresh off the success of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Dorkin was selected to write the comic book adaptation to the not so great (or "non-non-heinous," as Bill & Ted might say) sequel, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey. His take on the dynamic duo led to their own Excellent Comic Book, and the Evan Dorkin ball started rolling.

From there he went on to create Milk and Cheese, Hectic Planet and Dork, which he published through Slave Labor Graphics, a.k.a. SLG Publishing. In between his Slave Labor work, Dorkin worked on numerous miniseries for Dark Horse comics, including two Predator series and a Mask mini.

By then, Evan Dorkin and his (future) wife Sarah Dyer had become one stop, multi-media moguls, writing for Cartoon Network's Space Ghost: Coast to Coast and the Superman animated series, among others, and later producing a pilot for Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block called Welcome to Eltingville, based on Dork's Eltingville Club characters.

Staying true to his comic roots, Dorkin continued to put out Dork and wrote World's Funnest and contributed to Bizarro World for DC Comics. His latest work with Dyer, Biff-Bam-Pow! #1, was recently released through SLG Publishing.

Thankfully for the readers of PLAYBACK:stl, Evan Dorkin took the time out of his hectic schedule to answer a few questions about his art, his life, his new book with his wife and the everlasting legacy of Milk and Cheese.

Enjoy.

Happy New Year to you and to your family! Since it is the beginning of a brand new year, what projects are on the horizon for you in 2008?

I've been contributing semi-regularly to MAD and Nickelodeon Magazine as of late. I've also been writing for the Bart Simpson comic from Bongo, I'm working on a script for them right now and I expect I'll be doing a few things for them in the coming year, if all goes well. That's really all I have on deck right now that seems solid. I'm mostly pitching material and seeing what happens. My own projects are all stuck in the mud at the moment. A project I have at Dark Horse Comics has been languishing in the contract stage and I hope that gets going soon. We've been offered some TV work but you can never count on that actually happening. Really, at this point I'm unable to figure out how the hell next week is going to go, let alone 2008. I might be rolling drunks under the Williamsburg Bridge for all I know.

In addition to your comics work, you've worked on Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Superman, and had a cartoon on Adult Swim, Welcome to Eltingville, created from your own characters. As someone who has their feet planted firmly in both the animation and comics worlds, what are the best and worst aspects of each medium?

I haven't had a solid footing in animation since the Welcome to Eltingville pilot crashed and burned in 2002. I botched another pilot at the Adult Swim semi-recently and we've picked up a few odd jobs since then on Shin-Chan and Yo Gabba Gabba, not exactly what I'd call a firm footing. I'd call that shaky and sporadic. My accountant calls it dogshit. I won't tell you what my mother thinks of it, I can't even type compound curse words like that without blood spurting from my nose. As far as comics go, well, you can Google my credits for the past five years and see how great that's been going. But let's pretend this is 1997 and I actually have a burgeoning dual career and I'm full of pat answers:

I enjoy working in animation because of the opportunity to have my work seen by an actual audience of some size, as opposed to my various comics, where the readership is relatively small and more often quite pitiful. I do enjoy some aspects of the collaborative process in animation, sometimes it can be rewarding. Oftentimes, it's a complete and total pain in the ass. In that way, comics and animation can be similar, because both employ people, and people are more often than not complete and total pains in the ass. We've been lucky in many regards because the folks at the Cartoon Network/Adult Swim and the Yo Gabba Gabba producers were really great to work with and trusted us to do what we do without political bullshit, ego clashes, or a lot of pointless interference. Space Ghost, Eltingville and YGG were terrific experiences. It's also nice to work with professionals who more or less know what they're doing, although that's not always the case in animation, it just seems that comics are so much more ass-backwards that animation seems sometimes seems heavenly. There's a semblance of marketing and promotion for the project, it looks professional, there's a bit of a budget, people generally do what they say they'll do...things like that can be a real eye-opener after working in comics for a time. Plus, you don't have to work to sell your project to direct market comic shop retailers, which is depressing and generally fruitless. It's also nice to get paid decently for your work, something that doesn't always happen in the world of comics, and rarely happens in the world of small press comics. I know, play that world's smallest violin for myself and the small press cartoonist waifs of America. Play Vivaldi, if you don't mind. Thanks.

There's your longwinded answer.

Which medium do you most enjoy working in and why?

I prefer comics. The complete control over the work is very important and attractive. Whatever you say goes on the page, goes on the page. You're the storyteller, the joke teller, the scenarist, the director, the voice of the various characters, the art director, designer, background designer, etc. You're a small god, creating your world in however many days it takes you.

Basically, I love telling stories on paper, it's an attractive and seductive medium for me, making marks on paper that register as words and pictures and become narratives or jokes that can make people laugh, or piss them off, or upset them, if you're good enough to elicit a response at all. It's very powerful. Words and pictures. It's amazing it's taken this long for folks to wake up to that. I'm talking about the medium here, not my work in it. My stuff is half-assed horseshit that cheapens the work of countless talents struggling to bring comics into the clean pink hands of New Yorker subscribers everywhere.

Animation is great, but it can be a hassle, and it can distill what you're trying to do even in the best of circumstances and even when working with the best of people. The collaborative process can be tough, and the amount of work needed to get anything done sometimes seems overwhelming. I wanted to be an animator early on, I attended NYU for film and studied animation there and at SVA as a kid when they had an after-school and summer animation program. I got kicked out, but that's another thing entirely. I appreciate and admire good animation, the work and thought and artistry that goes into it, and how effective and wonderful it can be. I just naturally gravitate to comics, myself.

Your latest book Biff-Bam-Pow!, a co-production with Sarah Dyer and in stores now, seems to be more of an all-ages book than a typical issue of Dork or Milk and Cheese. You seem to easily bounce between all-ages content and more adult-themed content without ever sacrificing the comedy. How difficult is it for you to juggle the two very distinct worlds?

I don't really find it difficult at all. I find writing itself to be arduous, but as far as keeping a particular audience in mind goes, the project usually calls the approach, and I can easily fall into line with that approach while I'm working. Keep the heroin jokes out of the Superman cartoon; avoid amputations in Yo Gabba Gabba segments, that sort of thing. Sometimes you feel hobbled because you have an idea or a line you really want to use, and it just isn't appropriate. But if you have half a brain, and I do, you can work around the limitations, and quite often, you find that working "cleaner" can force you to work smarter. Although for the most part, when left to my own devices, I write a lot of foulmouthed, ugly garbage. I blame my parents.

When creating characters do you consciously set out to create an "all ages" character and story, or do you simply create a character and let the story dictate the tone which then sets the age level? 

Characters generally come to you, and as I said, the situation, or the project, or in this case, the character, calls the shots. I knew from the first drawing that Milk and Cheese weren't kid's characters. Sometimes, though, you're hired for an assignment, and you know you've got to come up with something kid-friendly, and you are working with a mandate or a set of parameters. Kid Blastoff, who we brought back for Biff! Bam! Pow!, was originally done for Disney Adventures, so of course we knew going in not to work up something like Milk and Cheese or the Murder Family or Vroom Socko. It's not rocket science. You don't come up with South Park for Disney Adventures. Common sense. And there are ways to punch things up for a slightly older audience without going over the top, I have a style that can be very aggressive, and I can bring that energy and pace and dialogue into play to allow a somewhat tame strip to seem more aggressive than it really is. For years people thought Milk and Cheese was a strip stuffed with foul language, and it wasn't. It just came off that way. They really don't curse that often, they just do a lot of horrible things and say a lot of crazy things. The overall effect leads some readers to recall a harsher tone than what was in the comic. Sometimes. Sometimes they do say bad things. I blame society.

I guess I should have just said "sometimes" and let it go at that. I don't know what the hell I'm even talking about.

Is it harder writing for kids than it is writing for adults? Why or why not?

I find it can be harder because you have to run the straight and narrow, hopefully without turning in material that's lame or corny or boring. Things need to be clearer, less difficult or complex. But as I said, writing is something I find very difficult in general. Ideas come easily, organizing them and expressing them in a manner that I am pleased with is an ordeal.

Milk and Cheese were drawn on napkins after a night of drinking, correct?

Yes. I was waiting for food after a ska show at CBGB's and I was very drunk. That's the secret origin of Milk and Cheese. Well, not so secret, seeing as how you knew about it.

Are you ever surprised by how much longevity a carton of hate and a wedge of spite still have after being out of the spotlight for close to ten years?

I've always been surprised at how the characters took off; certainly I'm surprised anyone other than myself still cares about them at this point. The last regular issue of Milk and Cheese came out in 1997, and that's a long time, especially in comics, where there's a lot of audience turnover and readers giving up comics completely. I know my overall readership has tumbled quite a bit as my productivity has lessened over the past decade, I've lost a lot of folks who used to pick up my books, and not having a new issue of Milk and Cheese in a decade has definitely contributed to that fall-off. Which is okay, the strip is very one-note, and I never wanted to burn people out on it, or myself, so I put the strip away for a while. But there are still some folks out there who still care about the characters, which really knocks me out. We've put out some new merchandise recently, partly to help keep Milk and Cheese visible to some degree while the book is on hiatus, and while the sales haven't exactly been stupendous, the reaction from fans who remember the characters has been gratifying. I can't complain. They were just napkin doodles; they weren't supposed to be a cottage industry or career boost. I owe a lot of what I've been able to do in my life to those two little bastards. So, long live my two little bastards.  

What does it say about our society when we giddily cheer on and encourage drunken, anarchist dairy products in their exploits as they terrorize the populace and destroy everything that comes into their path?

Society is stupid.

Will we ever have the pleasure of seeing more Milk and Cheese?

Hopefully there will be an eighth issue out in my lifetime. I've got about a third of it done, compiled from strips done in the past few years, and I'm slowly working on a new three or four pager right now. I just haven't been able to schedule a solid block of time to get the rest finished. I've wanted to complete a new issue for a while now, but things have been pretty hectic these last few years, especially since our daughter was born. I'm really hoping I can get it done sometime this year, but I've been saying that for a while now.  

In World's Funnest, you took Mr. Mxyzptlk and Bat-Mite on a hilarious tour de force through DC Comics history, alternate earths, various timelines, and out of continuity stories such as Kingdom Come and The Dark Knight Returns, with a variety heavy hitters including Frank Miller, Alex Ross, Jamie Hernandez and Dave Gibbons providing the artwork. What was your favorite era to drop the two characters into and why?

Probably the Fourth World Apokolips section, because I was doing that in homage to Jack Kirby, who created that universe and those characters. And Kirby's the King, as anyone who knows superhero comics knows. Or should know. And I knew David Mazzucchelli was drawing the sequence, which meant a lot to me, as David had not done any mainstream superhero work for a long time, and he was doing me a huge favor by agreeing to be a part of the project. My other favorites were the Silver Age era, which was the heart and spine of the book, and which Dave Gibbons knocked out of the park. And the Fawcett Captain Marvel family sequence which Jaime Hernandez drew. The Dark Knight section was a lot of fun to write, as well. Most of it was fun, actually.

Which era was the toughest to recreate?

I spent the most time on The Fourth World because I was fanboy nervous about getting the Kirbyisms right, or at least close. Some folks who have seen the pages on the web have been fooled for a few moments by both the art and the writing, momentarily thinking it was an obscure Kirby bit, which is gratifying to hear. A lot of the eras were tough to do because of space limitations, I wish I could have opened up Earth X, for instance, and destroyed the remaining Multiverses in a double spread rather than a single splash. Earth Prime was possibly the biggest pain in the ass because we needed photographs for the backgrounds and DC was a cheap pain in the ass on that and after it finally got settled we needed a photo of Julie Schwartz and he agreed to do it, but since it was Julie Schwartz he had to be an Earth-Prime pain in the ass about it.

Actually, the Vertigo universe sequence was axed by DC editorial, so I guess that was actually the toughest to recreate, because they wouldn't allow it. 

You have written for Marvel, DC, Dark Horse and continue to put out your own material through Slave Labor Graphics. It seems like there is a pattern of working for a mainstream publisher and or corporation like the Cartoon Network and then kicking back to an independent book of your own. Do you make an effort to balance the mainstream work with the indie work?

That's pretty much how it's always worked, although when I was younger, less responsible, and more energetic I could get more small press books out. It used to be that the commercial work supported our small press work. Nowadays the commercial work supports the household. I'm hoping things can balance out better in the future so I can get more of my own material out there, but a lot has changed in my life and in the direct comics market in the last few years, and both have affected my ability to work on my own projects. I'm pretty much off the rolodexes at DC and Marvel, so these days it's whatever we scrounge up with Dark Horse or Bongo, odds and ends in the small press, whatever magazine and TV work we're offered. I just muddle through and see what happens, pitch and pray, see who calls, wait for death.

Continue on to page 2 to read Dorkin's thoughts on the revealing "break down issue" of Dork, his influences as a writer and artist, and some of his current favorite musicians and comic creators.