Talking With Sam Henderson, Creator of The Magic Whistle

Richard Caldwell of ComicNews.Info recently had a chance to talk to one of the funniest indie cartoonists ever to put pen to paper- Sam Henderson. Having been nominated for the Harvey Award’s Special Award for Humor every year from 1999-2004, as well as his Emmy-nominated work on SpongeBob SquarePants, the humor that Sam has brought to the comics & animation industries is self-evident. His best known publication, The Magic Whistle may come across as crude to some but it is without a doubt one of the funniest pieces of work being published today.

So Sam- first off, congratulations on the fifteenth anniversary of your Magic Whistle series. The book arguably sets the standard for lowbrow comedy, but I always saw a kind of brutal honesty in your style of semantic humor.

Thanks, it’s kind of like how Woody Allen makes serious movies once in a while to prove he’s not just Mr. Joke-Man, though he keeps making the point after proving himself 30 years ago. I guess I feel the need to show to the world that I’m not as dumb as people might think from having a 12-year-old sense of humor, that despite the dick jokes and lack of draftsmanship, I know what I’m doing and have an above-normal IQ.

I know that you started with the mini-comics at a very young age; and now with your more recent work for the likes of Nickelodeon producing stories for younger readers- does it feel like you have come full circle?

Yes and no, The Magic Whistle itself doesn’t make any money, but it does lead to other bigger jobs. I have a collection of the strips I’ve been doing for Nickelodeon coming out next year that will hopefully give me more credibility in the book world. It’s taken me 20 years to realize if I’m not doing superheroes or fantasy there’s no money in this comics thing.

Conversely, when I was fired from my last animation job, people said at least I have the Magic Whistle to fall back on. The general public doesn’t realize that most comics will never have an audience larger than someone like a local DJ and few cartoonists earn more than 10-year-olds making toys in China. They’ll see a Chris Ware cover on ‘The New Yorker’ or an Art Spiegelman article somewhere and think everyone must have the same success.

As varied as your career has been thus far- from Heavy Metal to LowJinx to the excellent God Hates Cartoons, does having a baby like Magic Whistle to come home to still feel like a cathartic release from aspects of the more commercial work? I mean- somebody like Jonathan Winters, who is huge in the world of comedy, was very capable of the right roles garnering name recognition. Yet he was naturally drawn to a cruder and more self-deprecatory humor. In my mind he and Woody Allen both are fine examples of comedy as therapy, not to imply that you need psychiatric assistance. Realistically, even dick jokes have their place. Is there a balance to the process, for you?

The three examples you mentioned aren’t much different from what I do in Magic Whistle, except I may be restricted to a theme or size. The material is still the same. Magic Whistle is mostly what I do that wouldn’t fit anywhere else, and sometimes that gets reprinted in bigger venues. It is a release when I have done work for hire with previously created characters, since I don’t have to answer to anybody. It’s kind of a circle, I do the comic so that I can get bigger jobs, and support myself with the bigger jobs so that I can do my comic. I need both to show I can do both, otherwise it wouldn’t even occur to some editors.

Winters did the improvisational comedy albums while being a character actor for the same reasons without compromising his own sense of humor. Stan Freberg is similar in that respect. I assumed what you meant by ‘brutal honesty’ is some of the text pieces I do about the trials and tribulations about being a cartoonist, occasional things about my own life, and analysis of humor tropes. It’s sort of a way of making references smarter than those that wouldn’t work in the more lowbrow pieces. I need to balance 95% of the dick jokes with the other 5% to show I’m more than what I do best belies, making people realize I’m not some guy that goes around cutting people’s ties and squirting them with seltzer bottles and capable of not always being “on”. That’s what I meant with the Woody Allen analogy, though Jonathan Winters is probably a better example. I don’t expect to be doing serious work to break from screwy joke-a-minute material any time soon.

The readers of Heavy Metal sharing even the same universe as the readers of Nickelodeon is a hard thing to swallow. Financial needs of the freelance aside, I know some creators who would be intimidated from running such a gamut, thinking it would be that much harder to find definition. While idiosyncratic potty humor may be frowned upon by many, brutal honesty is that everybody gets a fart joke. What you do is like going as the crow flies.

Now I think we’re on the same page. I guess the fact that I sometimes explain the joke justifies its infantilism and keeps me from having to say “I’m not as dumb as you think I am”. I don’t think HM and NICK have the same audience, but they did have a lot of the same contributors. As did SCREW, which I was contributing to at the same time. Initially I was worried editors of children’s material would care, but they didn’t. As soon as I realized that, I was less afraid. Those who pigeonhole themselves either have found their gimmick or have not experienced the same revelation that they needn’t restrain themselves. I mostly do what I want to do and am lucky sometimes that there are some who see it and are in a position to get me to apply it to something else.

However, as you firmly expressed in LowJinx #2- there are always Those Who Don’t “Get It.”

There are some who don’t ‘get it’, but mostly they don’t know it exists. For example, I think anybody that watches Comedy Central would like my comics, and any popular media entity would have a comics equivalent with the same appeal. When the general public just sees talking heads in the paper that would work without illustrations and grew up only seeing superheroes for an adolescent audience on the newsstands, its not surprising they have the prejudice of comics as ‘just kids’ stuff’. Comics being considered a medium like movies or television is a relatively new phenomenon that will gain acceptance when later generations come along that weren’t affected by that stigma. Terms like ‘graphic novel’ help a little too, despite it being like a garbageman calling himself a ’sanitation maintenance engineer’.

On that note- was God Hates Cartoons like a random party, or was there disappointment that it was not better received?

Animation is slightly above comics, but only because it has wider access to a mass audience. God Hates Cartoons has the stigma of combining the perceived limitations of the two. It’s also part of the end of the ‘potty humor’ spectrum of indy comics that people think is holding mainstream acceptability back. I like highbrow work too, but I think going beyond the NPR/New Yorker audience would help more. Not everybody agrees.

How wonderful would it be for someone at Williams Street to view it as a kind of 2.0 of MTV’s Liquid Television?

Ideally it would be perfect if more people in power had similar aesthetics and money wasn’t the bottom line. I’m unfortunately in the minority that prefers the creator over the character. People ask me all the time “How come you don’t have your own TV show?”. It’s not for a lack of trying. It’s not as if mediocre material is only being made because someone like me hasn’t come along. It’s just less profitable doing comics where I consider myself the main character than doing a commercial for ancillary merchandising. I lived in Atlanta briefly and tried to get a job at Cartoon Network there, on Williams Street specifically. I told a friend I didn’t and he said “Why? The pot wasn’t good that week?” My inability to speak stonerese may have been one reason, but the lack of a budget was the main one. There needs to be a breakthrough hit that makes it possible to expand the empire and throw money at things that could be risky.

What of the future? Magic Whistle #11 is still available from Alternative, and you have the aforementioned Nickelodeon collection coming next year. What else is Sam Henderson looking forward to?

When I get enough material, I’ll do another Magic Whistle. There’s no frequency, it’s published when I have enough pages. I’m going back to 32-page comics. I did a few 96-pagers so that I could do color and make more inroads to bookstores. Instead it’s kept me out of the public eye and people have told me a more disposable format fits my work. I still have the web to impress people with my coloring prowess. As far as commercial projects, there’s the aforementioned ‘Scene But Not Heard’ collection from Top Shelf next year. They asked me a few years ago, but I was holding out for a larger publisher, and now they are that larger publisher. I also did illustrations for a book called “Well-Defined:Vocabulary In Rhyme” for Boyd’s Mills Press, a subsidiary of Highlights. I’m leaning towards doing more childrens’ books. It’s ironic that books for children are more acclaimed and lucrative than books that until recently were considered only for children. It’s also hard being part of the end of “arty” end of comics that like I said mostly believe comics would get more respect by appealing to literary circles. I agree but also think comics would get more respectability if there were some that would appeal to someone that reads ‘People’ or watches ‘Dancing With the Stars’. They’ve been doing it with manga for years.

I would argue that comics have always been a broad medium and this is why comparisons to Hollywood are so easy right now, as they suffer the same damn blinders with the majority of attentions focused on the big names, the bigger explosions. I say let Miller go on dressing like a pimp. Let Tomine go on soaking up the NPR adoration. There will always be a new flock of kids carving their names onto their desks. Personally- I really look forward to all of your future endeavors, and I thank you for your candid willingness in sharing yourself with our readers. Any closing comments, before the defense rests?

I only make comparisons to Hollywood because it’s something people know about. I agree with you about comics being marginalized the same way, but when you say movies to a person in the street, despite their preferences they’ll know you could mean ‘Spider-Man 5′, a Jane Austen/Victorian drama, or a basketball-playing cat. Not so with comics, where the same random person would probably say, “Comics? You mean like Superman?” and when you say adult comics, they’ll say “oh, you mean porn?”, and they’ve probably never read a comic in their life. There are probably more ichthyologists than comics readers. Before ‘Star Wars’, nobody would never have imagined heroic fantasy would have big-budget releases. Who knows, the way movies are being marginalized and as older generations die, maybe thirty years from now the person in the street will say “Movies? You mean like Superman?” and they’ll see that comics are equally eclectic. I like both Miller and Tomine as well as Johnny Ryan or some anonymous schlock I found at a thrift store, but that’s just me. Comics will have limited perceptions as long as people view comics 180 degrees instead of 360.

I realize this is supposed to be more about me than my thoughts on comics. Though sometimes the two intertwine as I continue to make sense of where I belong in this sub-sub-culture. Sometimes I feel like I’m the greatest person who ever lived and other times I feel like a complete nobody. Sometimes I feel like a washed-up has-been and other times I realize some people did their best work after fifty. Usually I’m a combination of all of them, just like everybody else. To define my work in five words or less, I guess I would describe it as “semi-intellectual bathroom humor”. Let others decide if it’s something for them rather than me defending it. I don’t have any closing comments now but I probably will after this is printed. I’m a perfectionist with 20-20 hindsight.

http://www.tomhart.net/magicWhistle/

http://www.webcomicsnation.com/samhenderson/…/series.php

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