20 Questions with Pab Sungenis

How does one describe the comic strip THE NEW ADVENTURES OF QUEEN VICTORIA?

Let’s let creator Pab Sungenis take a stab at it. From the blurb at GoComics:

Join HRH Queen Victoria as she daily levels her regal gaze upon the fools and tomfoolery of our time. Along with her classically-rendered co-characters Prince Albert, Anne Boleyn, George III (aka "Grandpa"), Mrs. Clipart and Maurice, Queen V grapples daily with the strange state of our affairs, whether it be resisting a vicious comic strip jihad, surviving a visitation by Howard Stern, or hosting a special edition of "Victorian Idol". Never has a sovereign quoted the Marx Brothers with more aplomb, paid such heed to the fate of the lite-brite, or dared to go where a comic strip has never gone before: shopping for a Wii. Join the Great Lady as she dares to do battle with Oliver Cromwell and James Cameron, and rules with a steady hand over people who can’t tell the difference between the Virgin Mary and Mary Worth. "Curse you, historical accuracy!"

Irreverent, ascerbic, and wickedly smart, TNAOQV burst onto the Internet comics scene in 2006 and was an instant sensation.

Follow the Queen Mum’s adventures daily at GoComics and enjoy Pab’s entertaining and educational 20 Questions. (Where else will you hear about characters from La Commedia dell'Arte?)

1. When you were a kid, did you want to be a cartoonist? Did you draw?

Very much so. In fact, emptying out one of my mother's storage units last week I found a "comic book" that I drew at the age of six, considerably earlier than I had remembered trying to draw. (To be honest, my drawing hasn't progressed much beyond what it was at six.) My next memory of cartooning is at age eleven, when I wrote and drew a daily comic strip for my own consumption for a little over a year (early 1980 to mid 1981). So, yes, I would say "cartoonist" was certainly an early career choice, even if it was one I gave up for a rather long time after my teenaged years.

2. I’m sure you get this a lot: Your name is quite interesting. Is Sungenis Italian?

You're the first person to guess it correctly. Most people think it's Greek. My original family name, four generations back in Pisa, was "San Genesi" after St. Genesius. I may be descended from the 16th-century composer Giulio Bonagiunta da San Genesi, but we haven't managed to confirm the family line back that far.

3. THE NEW ADVENTURES OF QUEEN VICTORIA is certainly a unique comic strip. What’s the story behind its creation?

As I said, I wanted to be a cartoonist when I was a kid. Unfortunately, that career got sidelined before too long for one simple reason: I literally don't see the world in the same way as most people.Back in the fourth grade, we discovered (after much wailing and gnashing of teeth by an art teacher who was trying to explain perspective) that I don't see in 3-D. My eyes literally don't work together. At first we thought it was a lazy eye, but as time went on we managed to confirm that my brain was getting two separate signals from my eyes and I had learned to filter one of them out after growing up seeing double. I still see double when I'm tired, or if I don't wear my glasses for a while for some reason.

As a result, I've never been able to master perspective, the vanishing point, or even proportion when drawing the human figure. This severely hampered my attempts to actually draw comics. Back in late 2005, after years of working with Ulead's Photoimpact program for graphic design for the web, I thought it might be fun to try and use the program to once again be able to cartoon.

I started working on ideas for a strip called IN THE LAND OF WONDERFUL CLIPART (an homage to Winsor McKay and the alternate title for LITTLE NEMO), which was going to use nothing but clipart images to tell gags. (Very much like the wonderful but defunct RETRO GEEK strip.) One of those characters was a clipart from a painting of Queen Victoria.

On February 8, 2006, I was reading a discussion in Ferrett Steinmetz's blog about how GARFIELD was funnier if you wiped out all of Garfield's speech balloons and had him behave like a normal cat.

Just for fun, I took the four-panel grid I had created for WONDERFUL CLIPART and took a goofy looking shot of Garfield paired up with my clipart of Queen Victoria. After three panels of silence, Victoria said, "We are not amused." Obvious punchline, but people loved it.

The next day I thought I'd do another, and put it up on my own blog. Then another followed, and then another. Before long, she had her own blog at LiveJournal and over 300 readers.The final result was a strip where I didn't have to draw, or find an artist collaborator, in order to tell my jokes.

4. Describe the process you went through to get the strip syndicated online at GoComics.

Thinking that maybe I had something half-decent, I decided to seek out a larger audience and added the strip to the Comics Sherpa service, which is owned and run by uClick, the parent company of GoComics. I seemed to become a favorite of some of the staff there, and after proving I could produce the strip consistently over the course of a year, they asked to move it to the main GoComics service. (I think it was still called uComics at the time.)

I was one of the first big batch of Sherpa cartoonists to make the leap, coming hot on the heels of THE ARGYLE SWEATER, BLEEKER THE RECHARGEABLE DOG, and 44 UNION AVENUE. I was thrilled to be picked out of the bunch to make the leap. Even if I'm not getting paid much for the strip (I think it works out to something like 71 cents a strip), I'm still getting paid for something I had been doing for free, so I can't really complain.

5. Will Queen Victoria ever do a nude scene?

She's come close. I'll leave it to you to find those strips if you can. I also have a stripper named Bertram who's an on-again off-again beau of Her Maj, so who knows what could happen in that area.

6. Where do you stand in the print comics vs. web comics debate?

Is there a debate? They're two different animals. Both have their benefits and both have their drawbacks. I've seen some web comics that deserve to be in newspapers and others that could never be done on the printed page, which is not a bad thing.

7. The web affords great creative freedom for comics. Knowing that you’d have to tone down the material, would you consider doing a newspaper strip?

It's always been my dream to be in newspapers. I would jump at the chance to take Her Maj into print. In fact, last November I started producing the strip at 300 dpi instead of 72 with an eye toward getting into papers down the road. (You can't really see a difference on the screen, since I still have to scale everything down to 600 pixels across for GoComics, but readers will really see a difference in the fourth paperback collection when it comes out this fall.)

The problem wouldn't so much be "toning down" the material as "dumbing" it down. In the discussions at GoComics (where I’m proud to be one of the few creators actively engaging with his audience), I've often threatened to rename the strip I DON'T GET IT. I love being able to get esoteric, or obscure, or surreal when the need hits me, and have an audience that either understands the joke or is willing to run to Google or Wikipedia to figure it out. I doubt I'd have that kind of freedom on the printed page.

As for my more controversial material, I'd probably go the route of Walt Kelly and produce alternate strips for when some of my storylines get too hot for papers. Kelly called them "the bunny strips" because he would always draw all these adorable fluffy little bunnies telling innocuous jokes that could be substituted for controversial stories. Then he'd tell his audiences that if all they saw in POGO was fluffy little bunnies, then their paper either thought that they couldn't think or shouldn't think. I think I'd go down that road.

I already have a pseudo-strip I've done a couple of times called FUMETTO DELL'ARTE (based on characters from La Commedia dell'Arte) so if I went into papers and did a week of politics, I'd probably do a backup weeks' worth of FUMETTO DELL'ARTE strips that papers could substitute. I would do fluffy bunnies, but the only bunny in my strip right now is a homicidal zombie rabbit named Aleister, so I don't think he would fit the bill.

8. Name five of your favorite comic strips or cartoonists.

I really can't limit it to just five, mainly because the first four were ones I grew up reading in paperback form and are no longer with us. So let's say five classics that influenced me, and five current strips I can't live without. Is that okay?

The first two were the ones that taught me literally everything I know. I grew up with old paperbacks of PEANUTS and POGO in my house, and read them until they fell apart. Then my father taught me rudimentary bookbinding so I could repair them and read them until they fell apart again. I always kept a PEANUTS book and a POGO book (usually Pogo's Romances Recaptured) on my nightstand growing up, and when I suffered one of my frequent bouts of insomnia I'd sit up reading them for hours on end. Schulz and Kelly were masters of four-panel storytelling, and no one has even come close to doing it as well as they did. That's where I learned my pacing. Especially when I will have a silent panel or two in the middle of a given strip; that was a trick I learned from Charles Schulz.

Third would have to be George Herriman's KRAZY KAT. I inherited my love for the Kat from the same source as my love of Star Trek: my father. He had an embroidered Ignatz patch on the inside of the hutch where he kept his most personal belongings. When I asked him about it, he sent me to the library to look up Krazy Kat and I've never been able to thank him enough for it. I never would have studied postmodernism and dadaism if I hadn't read George Herriman. It's also heartening to look at what he was doing before Krazy Kat (THE DINGBAT FAMILY, a distressingly pedestrian strip even for its time) and imagine the amazing artist that he became bursting forth almost like a butterfly from a cocoon.

Fourth would be LITTLE NEMO. I mentioned McKay earlier, and I think it's a sin just how little acknowledgment he gets for his contributions. This is a man who almost single-handedly invented animated cartoons. Without Little Nemo and Gertie there would be no Mickey Mouse. McKay was also a master of surrealism, decades before there was even a name for it. I love looking at his huge Sunday pages and seeing how he refused to let himself be trapped by a grid of panels. Sometimes I think I would love to be able to have the kind of room to work with that he did, but then I realize I would never be able to do it as well as he did.

Fifth is BLOOM COUNTY. Breathed was a true descendant of Kelly if you ask me, and was as much a genius at balancing political and social commentary with whimsy and lighthearted throwaway gags. The original BLOOM COUNTY had something that was missing from its later incarnations, OUTLAND and OPUS. It was lightning in a bottle.For five that I can't live without today, I would have to say MYTHTICKLE, TOBY, DILBERT (although I'm souring on it since I've escaped from the cubicle existence), NON SEQUITUR, and HEART OF THE CITY.

9. Who’s more likely to cheat on his taxes, Dagwood Bumstead or Rex Morgan, MD?

Dagwood.

10. How do you develop ideas? Which comes first, words or pictures?

It varies. Sometimes the words come first and I have to go looking for pictures. Other times I'll have a visual in mind and need to find words. I really like coming up with a visual gag and trying to get strips out of it, especially because the look of the strip can get very static when all the gags are in the dialogue.

11. Do you ever worry about running out of ideas?

Every...freakin'...day. I've started re-running old Sunday pages lately mainly because I can't come up with enough ideas for the larger format. I haven't let myself fall into that trap with the dailies, only doing re-runs due to medical or family emergencies, but every day it gets more tempting.

One way the reader can tell when I'm writing my way through writer’s block (willing to spill the beans on one of my secrets here), is when I devote a week to a stupid visual gag or two. That's when I'm scrambling. Then I'll have ideas flood to me and do a week or two in a clip.

12. TNAOQV is a very political strip. Is there any subject you won’t tackle?

None. I'm a member of a long-standing online community whose motto is "if you can't be offensive, then why bother?" I also believe that people who are easily offended should be as often as possible. Thus, I'm not afraid of rubbing someone the wrong way.I got a lot of flack from readers who assumed that I was your typical liberal (I actually am on many, but not all, issues) because I kept making fun of Bush and Cheney. I wonder what they have to say about some of the swipes I've taken at Obama. I have no compunction going after even people I've supported when needed; I'm considering doing a week with Obama in a very loud checked suit as a Used War Salesman, for example.

13. When you die, what do want your Wikipedia entry to say?

"Citation Needed."

14. You’re also a talk show host. Tell us about lowbudgetradio.com.

Actually, that's pretty much in the past for me. I hosted "The Pab Sungenis Project" from 2000 until 2007, featuring a selection of comedy and novelty songs. I've been playing around with a new podcast to replace it called "This Is Inaudible," but hardware problems have sidelined it for the time being.

15. What are your favorite books, TV shows, songs and films? (Yes, that counts as one question.)

For books, I'm a voracious reader and a voracious re-reader. I love going back and discovering something new in something I've read before. Stranger In A Strange Land is probably my all-time favorite book, since I've read it about 20 times over the years. Which is funny because I hate nearly everything else I've read by Heinlein. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy is another I love rediscovering. Recent favorites include Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, Chuck Pahlaniuk's Rant, Frank Portman's King Dork and Will Clarke's The Worthy.

I don't watch nearly as much TV as I used to, and almost nothing I watch is actually American-made any more. My current favorite show is the revived and revitalized "Doctor Who." Monday night is usually TV night around Casa Pab, with my partner Bryan and I religiously watching "How I Met Your Mother," "Big Bang Theory," and "Heroes." I'm very sad to see "Pushing Daisies" go. We were recently introduced to three amazing British sitcoms: "Peep Show," "Gavin and Stacey," and "FM," all of which have me hooked. I also love the CBC's "Little Mosque On The Prairie." I've also gotten hooked on British game shows like "Golden Balls" and their version of "Deal Or No Deal" with Noel Edmunds. There are very few things in this world that can't be made better by not using Howie Mandel.

Films, my all-time favorite is Gone With the Wind. I would say Wizard of Oz if that wouldn't make me a stereotype. Also the original Back To The Future and anything by Pixar.

16. What are your tools of the trade?

Ulead Photoimpact version 13 (although they call it X3 because they're superstitious).

17. Have you met any of your idols? Under what circumstances?

I met Maggie Thompson at Wizard World Chicago in 2008. I got to meet Nana Visitor and Nichelle Nichols once at a convention. That's about it.

18. What advice would you give aspiring cartoonists?

Don't. If you must, don't listen to people who give advice.

19. How important are awards?

I don't know, as I've never had any.

20. What’s something that nobody knows about you?

That would be telling.