Mark Newgarden: The Mr. Skin Interview

Does the publication of We All Die Alone, the twenty-year retrospective of your work, make you feel like you're ready to die alone?
My book is all laid out in black flocking and gold foil stamping, just like a funeral director's date book, and now that the project has finally been put to rest, I suppose I'm ready too. The bus should be here any minute. Ideally I'd like to be cremated and have my ashes extruded into 365 Barfo Family Candy containers.

Is it true that you live in a converted funeral parlor in Brooklyn?
True. It was built in 1929 and served long and honorably as The Francesco Cuccurullo & Sons Funeral Home of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. They embalmed in the basement and stacked the clientele in the garage. Since then it's been an after-hours social club, trendy performance space, daycare center, and God knows what else.

I've been told that back in the day it was "the biggest mob funeral home in the neighborhood" by a local old-timer, who presumably had seen many of his paisans laid to rest in what is now my studio space. No, it's not haunted; we all die alone, but we all don't die in funeral homes. No angry spirits, except maybe me when I can't find my shoes.

Death must be pretty funny; after all you're very funny. So funny in fact, that your strip once published with only the words "Nothing funny this week." Did that get you into some trouble with a New York alternative weekly?
No, it didn't; in fact it was so funny it was basically ignored by the newspaper's management. The next week's entry, which read "YOU WOULDN'T THINK I'D HAVE THE BALLS TO DO THIS 2 WEEKS IN A ROW," that garnered a similar lack of editorial enthusiasm. I actually never got into trouble with them. They dutifully ignored everything I ever did except [cartoon character] EM, which they tried to build into a service-award mascot one season.

I still occasionally see faded weather-stained NY Press signs in the dusty corners of obscure Queens Chinese restaurants featuring that dubious EM recommendation. I sure did get loads of hate mail though!

Death and sex are often mixed together, which leads me to some of your earliest works in Raw, where you deconstructed the classic Nancy comic strip. Have you ever drawn Nancy naked?
No, I haven't. I haven't even seen her naked. But I bet Sluggo has.

Do you think her pubic hair resembles that Brillo Pad hairdo she sports on her head?
That's something only Ernie Bushmiller knows for sure--and he's not talking.

Your art has affected the world beyond comics. When you worked at Topps, the bubblegum and baseball trading-card company, you developed the hugely popular Garbage Pail Kids. As gross and hilarious as those cards were, there must have been some that went too far and were rejected, right?
Yes, quite a few were rejected. But we kept dutifully resubmitting the rejects until we ultimately wore the management down--or more likely they just forgot what they had rejected last round. Nevertheless a few paintings never did see the light of day.

My memory of those includes a smiling GPK fetus in a briny lab jar--Abortin' Norton--and some others involving gunplay, a dungeon, and nuclear devastation. We would get them returned to us from the front office with penciled notes on the back reading "OUT!" and explanations like "NO CHILD ABUSE" or "NO VIOLENCE." Since practically every accepted image fell into one of those categories it wasn't always easy to discern the fine points of their criteria.

There was also the Toxic High series, but that didn't come out quite as you wanted. What happened there?
What Topps ultimately released was a heavily censored series, which resulted in a rather disjointed narrative. The original cut went much further in its depiction of the various horrors of public education to the point of extreme absurdity.

Topps was planning a bigger release with an accompanying High School Year Book and national TV promotion, but they became very, very antsy about the project with the breaking epidemic of lethal violence in schools around the country. They nearly canned it, but in the end they released a watered-down product, which did not do very well, to nobody's surprise. C'est la vie.

Do cartoonists have groupies, and do you have any dirty adventures with promiscuous art lovers?
Cartoonists don't have groupies. Cartoonists eat tuna fish straight from the can.

Do you recall the first sex scene you saw in a mainstream movie when you were a kid?
As a child I was invariably subjected to movies like The Gnome-Mobile, The Three Lives of Thomasina, and Those Calloways--not very much opportunity for overt titillation there.

As an adolescent in the '70s I do vividly recall being transfixed by the occasional flash of frontal nudity slyly offered on PBS, like the topless Valerie Perrine (Picture: 1 - 2) in Steambath or the "naughty bits" of Monty Python.

They were indeed providing a public service for publicly airing such wonderful stuff and I salute them for that.

Do you have a favorite nude scene in film?
I once had a date with an actress who previously had done a topless scene in a mainstream motion picture (sorry, no names!). I rented the film and, in preparation, I suppose I watched that scene quite a few more times than absolutely necessary. I don't recall any second date.

Are you turned on by any of the erotic cartoons, from Tijuana Bibles and underground comix to sexy animation?
Not really, I'm more aroused by fantasies of the anonymous sleaze-meisters and thugs who drew, printed, and distributed them. Very little data is available, leaving abundant room for sordid conjecture.

I always got the impression that some of the cruder bibles were drawn by low-level hooligans while working their way up to being made men. "Sal, we got an attitude problem on South 4th that needs some correctin'. But first draw me up another Toots and Casper will ya?"

If Nancy is your muse, how about flesh-and-blood characters, who, for instance, is your favorite sex symbol on the big or little screen?
This week: Irene Dunne.

How about cartoon characters, are there any that irrationally arouse you?
Not really, but as a toddler I do recall my first conscious moment of arousal, which was ushered in via a rubber squeak-toy incarnation of a Keane-eyed enchantress in a party dress hiding a goofy-looking doll behind her back. I guess somehow it spoke to me. Yes, I do still have access to that toy.

Did you ever work for smut magazines or produce dirty comics?
In art school, Drew Friedman, myself, and several other cartoonist classmates compulsively drew an excessively vile series of comic strips about one of our crowd, by the name of Greenberg.

Those Greenberg comics obliterated just about every taboo imaginable and unimaginable, often in the same panel. We only printed up about a half dozen issues of Greenberg Comics, strictly for contributors only. And Greenberg just sat there and grinned, despising us all for it. And he probably still does.

I.D. magazine counts you as one of "The I.D. Forty" who deserve more attention, so what are you working on currently to garner more attention?
I'm currently working with children's illustrator Megan Montague Cash on a series of kid's books in a comic-strip format. Longer-range projects include a biography of early-twentieth-century Jewish cartoonist Milt Gross and a picture book about the nature of anonymity and fame. No frontal nudity in any of those, I'm afraid.