When Tasmanian cartoonist Simon Hanselmann moved to Seattle, he instantly became one of the biggest cartoonists in town. His Fantagraphics comic Megahex attained the kind of critical and commercial success that a very small sampling of cartoonists manage to achieve in their careers. Hanselmann is a natural provocateur — in the span of a half-hour interview, he manages to say four or five things that could get him in trouble on social media if taken out of context – but he’s so cheerfully sarcastic about it that you can’t help but feel warmly toward him. Further, he’s such a fun interview that I barely noticed all the depressing stuff he lobbed at my head over the course of the conversation. We talked about illness, watercolor, the Hot Off the Press Book Fair at Fantagraphics Bookstore and Gallery this Saturday, and the problems with the Seattle comics scene. The following is a lightly edited transcription of our talk.

I don't want to take up too much of your time.

Thanks for that. I just did an interview with Dan Nadel from the Comics Journal last week and he just had no questions, no preparation. It was a shitstorm of rambling.

But the Comics Journal runs those novel-length interviews! I thought they would have tons of questions.

No, Dan's very lazy. There's stuff that got cut out of the interview where I talk to Dan about how shit the Comics Journal is now. He used to run Comic Comics, and then that merged with TCJ and combined they both became less than what they used to be. And he agreed: "Yes, it sucks. I'm terrible." But he cut that out of the interview. Anyway...

Well, we should definitely get that in this interview. You know, I was looking through your books and it just struck me for some reason: I was like, oh, holy shit, you're like a real cartoonist now. You've got three books from Fantagraphics! They're real, and they exist on bookshelves. Any idiot can get published, but you've been published three times so you’re at least a special kind of idiot.

Yeah, totally. Didn't totally screw it up.

Right.

I may have plateaued. Hopefully not.

They do make a chunky pile of books.

I look at my bookshelf, and I have books by Clowes and Burns and I have sort of a similar level of thickness going on. I've really been cranking this shit out. But really, it's still just battling to get work done and hating everything I do, trying to get better. And it normalizes the whole publishing thing.

Do you look through your old stuff? Some cartoonists don't.

Oh yeah. I do, I read all the reviews online. I read Amazon, GoodReads reviews. Probably shouldn't, but I do. There's valid criticism to be found, and people often pick up on things that I'm not picking up on. I think it's helpful to read the criticisms.

But yeah, I do look at my old stuff. Like for instance, I hate Megahex now. I just, feel all the older stuff, looking back on [work from] 2009, 2010 — it just looks horrible to me.

Is it just the craft of the drawing that you don't like about it?

Yeah, the influences are showing more. Sort of the Paper Rad, Fort Thunder influences. I've tried to sort of beat that out.

It just looks bad to me, but people still like those books. I think a lot of people aren't aware I have other books after Megahex. It’s sort of become like: [TV announcer voice:] "Megahex: Available at Hot Topic." The popular cultural item.

Yeah, I can't stand it anymore. It's less mature than the other books. They're still all silly. I mean the new book's got a ridiculous big boner joke in it, it has pooping, and low-brow shenanigans.

I like the third book the most of the three. Some of the material in there is from like 2013 and it sort of collects of the dregs, the remnants with a bunch of new stuff. I think overall it's the strongest of the three. My personal preference.

Where do you feel like you grew the most in this book? What about your work is the strongest in this one?

Well, some of it is quite old. Some of it I drew before Megahex. It was in a book called Life Zone that Space Face put out. It's been out of print for a while, but I still like that material the most. I think Life Zone is my best book, those four stories worked well together.

So [One More Year] combines [Life Zone] with some of the Vice strips from last year. Some of them are terrible, but some of them I quite like. Really, it’s just a clearing-house kind of book. I wanted to get all of these out-of-print things together and it just kind of finishes off the trilogy.

Then, that's it — I'm moving on with Megg and Mogg, and it's gonna start progressing a lot more, with more forward momentum. It said in the back of Megahex, “To be concluded in Megg's Coven,” and then I never did that book. I've sorta been just putting it off. But now I'm finally going to start doing Megg's Coven, in which Owl has moved out, and everything progresses a bit more.

That was something I was going to ask you about. Do you think these Megg and Mogg stories are going to be your life's work, or a significant part of your life's work? Are these the characters you're going to follow, like Peter Bagge with his character Buddy Bradley?

I think so, yeah. I've been doing this for almost ten years now, which is terrifying. Next year, 2018, will be the ten-year anniversary of the first Megg and Mogg strip. It's gone by very quickly.

And this big Megg’s Coven project I'm planning will be minimum 400 pages, in European-style larger albums, hardbacks. One a year is my goal, starting next year.

So yeah, I've got plans for these characters. I've written very far ahead, like Werewolf Jones’s children — I know what happens to them, what they're like when they're teenagers, adults. There are still loose ends I have to sort of figure out. I'm still growing older and growing up, going through different phases.

Anyway, just how interesting could Megg and Mogg be when they're in their fifties? We'll see. It'll be the future then, so what kind of crazy technology will we have? It'll be about VR, and cyber-sex. It'll be amazing.

Yeah, there'll be camouflage pants that actually work — make our lower halves truly invisible.

Incredible.

Peter Bagge once said that Buddy Bradley was always 10 years behind him. is that something similar with you and Megg and Mogg, like they're at a place that is behind you in your development?

It's definitely predominately based on my times in Tasmania in my twenties — early to mid-twenties — hanging out in the Tasmanian noise and art scene, and all the shenanigans that happened. People in a small place, incestuously fucking each other's boyfriends and girlfriends, terrible alcohol problems, small-town pranks.

And then also my friend Grant [Gronewold], HTML Flowers, he's kind of like my co-writer. He and I get up to a lot of pretty cool shenanigans — or used to, before I moved to Seattle. So a lot of it's based on us doing horrible stupid things.

I'm in my mid-thirties now. I really shouldn't be climbing cranes, breaking into construction sites, and vomiting everywhere. We went to the Sydney Writers’ Festival in 2015. It was terrible. Throwing glasses off balconies, really drunk, and we accidentally kicked Alan Cumming on a panel.

Wow!

It was terrible, I think Alan Cumming was very upset.

Hold on, just to be clear: Alan Cumming the actor?

Yes. We were on a panel with Alan Cumming, for some reason. It was a weird festival — a very posh festival. The hotel was a five-star hotel. Grant vomited everywhere, it was quite terrible. We had just gotten back from Toronto, made a bunch of money — just throwing cash everywhere and just looking like rock star dickheads.

We're not really doing that anymore. I've moved to Seattle and I'm married and Grant has cystic fibrosis. It's kicking him in the balls, so he's in the hospital again. We’re both workaholics, so it must be really difficult for him, too.

I’m so sorry to hear that. To make an awkward transition, I know you get this a lot, but the coloring in your book is just amazing —

— I get the opposite also.

Really? That seems unbelievable. I was reading the book earlier this week and I was thinking to myself how different the impact of the strips would have if they didn't have that lightly washed-out watercolory feel to them. I kept trying to picture it with a gaudy digital overdone palette, and it just hit wrong.

Did you see the Free Comic Book Day Fantagraphics book?

Yes.

It had flat computer colors and it was fine, but also it just looked dead and lifeless.

So yeah, I agree with you. I think there's something about that homestyle, mom-and-pop food coloring kind of washed out vibe. It doesn't look right with the computer colors.

Yeah.

I wish it did, because it would be much less laborious. But then I'd actually have to learn to use a computer. It’s nice of you to say, Paul, because I have heard people say, it’s bad coloring. It’s probably the thing I'm most proud of, in a way.

It’s such a significant part of your work. I'm a very bad comics critic because sometimes I will not even notice the color on a book at all. But it feels like such a significant part of your work. Some pages, you could almost take the lines out and you would still have the strip there. The emotional story would still be there. It's just really remarkable to me.

I'm working on a bunch of paintings right now. I’ve been doing sort of landscape paintings for an art show in October so this buoys my confidence while I'm painting. Thank you, Paul.

You’re welcome. I try not to gush in these interviews, because it always feels weird.

I do feel like a bad artist. I do look at my stuff and hate it. I do have a tendency to rush things.

I mean, I put a lot of work and a lot of time into things, but at the same time I'm barreling through them and just trying to desperately finish them. If I used computers, I could fix some of the mistakes through Photoshop but I kind of like that little mistakes are there.

But I have one chance — if I fuck up I cannot fix it. Because if I put whiteout or anything on a mistake, that will soak up the food coloring that I use for water coloring. So if I fuck up and make a mistake, I have to live with it.

And I kind of like that. Dangerous.

It must slow you down a little bit. I don't know much about physically working with materials but it sounds like watercolor takes a while for it to dry at least. Doesn't that change the rhythm of your work?

It dries quite quickly. I put an application down and it will dry in a minute or something, usually.

I don't do it page by page. I'll have a thirty-page strip and I'll go through and do all the fences, all the couches, all the bottles, all of Megg's faces, all of Megg's hair, the eyes, the cats. I use food coloring and it’s great — it's a certain Australian brand and it goes on really smooth, really flat.

Anyway, I've figured out the system over the years. It's laborious and horrible in the summer, particularly, because it's so hot and the watercolor dries really fucking quickly. You can see the steam coming off the page. I’ve got to be really quick.

Sometimes, I can't answer the phone, [Hanselmann’s wife] Jacq [Cohen]’s always like, "Simon, can you answer the door?" And I'm like "I can't — I'm in a paint hole."

That's my thing, paint holes, I'm always stuck painting, and if I stop it'll fuck the whole thing up and I'll have big streaks through it. When I'm painting I need reality to fuck off. I need to be in the zone.

Do you ever worry about the longevity of the physical work? Is the food coloring going to hold, or does it fade or get runny? Do you resell your work or anything like that, the originals?

Oh, I sell my originals like crazy yeah. Alvin Buenaventura was my art dealer. He worked with Clowes and Burns and with other amazing artists. He really got my prices up, and then he killed himself while owing me 10 grand. Which is unfortunate.

So I sell my artwork. But I do have pages from ten years ago made with the food coloring, and it's still just as bright as it was ten years ago. It seems to age quite well.

Okay, all right.

My prices are so high now, I sell a page for like two grand, but a lot of my fans are schlubby burnouts, they can't afford that. I kinda feel like an asshole moving over into this posh art realm. But I need to pay the bills, I have health care because I'm an American now.

Ha, ha. Joke’s on you!

Yeah I know. I move here and everything just falls to pieces. I really miss my free universal health care.

My mother’s quite sick now and she's just getting ambulances every day and they're nice and it's all free as it should be. I was saying to her, "bright side to this, Ma, is you're in Australia. If you were in America you'd just be fucked. You'd just owe a million dollars."

Like Grant, my best friend, he's from Chicago. But he moved to Australia for the health care, because he'd be dead now if he didn't move away.

Oh my god.

That's why it's so funny, that “America's like the greatest country in the world” talk. I'm like, “it's ... okay ... but it's pretty fucking shit, really." A bit dissatisfied with America.

But, anyway. I don't want to get deported. So, yay! Go Trump. I love America. Please don't let them beat me to death for being a crossdresser.

Oh my. That's a quote to take out of context! Kinda speaking about Trump, I was thinking about your Fantagraphics labelmate Matt Furie and Pepe the Frog and all that, and I was wondering: do you ever worry about Owl being co-opted by men’s rights activists or other terrible online people?

It could happen, there is a certain panel from Megahex with Werewolf Jones saying "It's going to get weird ... I'm going to make this weird." And that is re-blogged fucking everywhere. It has watermarks on it from meme people, I've seen it have like 300,000 notes on it on Tumblr, there's a rap album named after it, it's a low-level meme. It fucking gets around so easily someone could throw a Hitler mustache on it and it could end up a hate symbol.

But you can’t worry about that. For years the comedy page on 4Chan had a Megg and Mogg panel — a particularly offensive one that I never officially published. It involved rape. They put all these bits of paper with rape puns on Owl’s bedroom walls while he was out — just covered his room.

It could be offensive but at the time, 2008, it was like "ha-ha." But then I had several friends say "Look Simon, I was raped. This is not funny."

I didn't publish it in Megahex. It was in a mini-comic, but I left it out of the main stuff. The point of the comic was that Megg and Mogg were insensitive fucks. It succeeded, in a bad way.

I try not to worry about that stuff anymore — the censorship stuff. Most of my stuff is based on reality and real life things that have happened to me, so if someone complains it's like "Well, this is my experience. Sorry." It's not for everybody. Megg and Mogg are kind of horrible.

But who knows? The Internet's terrifying. Who knows what could happen? It's terrifying out there.

So next Saturday you're giving a presentation to celebrate the release of One More Year.

Yeah. I have it written on my hand, actually. My publisher said make sure to mention the thing on the 8th. So, yes! I do.

What a happy coincidence.

You've done your legwork, Paul.

Look at that! I know you're going to be at a place at a certain time.

More than Dan Nadel did.

I'm going to get that tattooed on me. Different cartoonists do different sorts of things when they project comics on a big screen: some people just put panels up and read the balloons, some people take the word balloons out. What do you do with your comic performance?

I'm pretty meat-and-potatoes really. I've seen all that bubble-taking-out stuff, which works quite well for Gabrielle Bell. She's great.

I use, first of all, single panels. I hate when people put up a whole page. That just subtracts all of the momentum from the reading. I cut out all the individual panels, and click through them, and do the voices, and try to keep it well-paced and lifelike. You want all the beats to hit.

I used to get audience members to do the voices. I'd say "I'll do Megg. Who will be my Werewolf Jones? Who will be my Mogg?" And it'd often work out quite well, people would have fun with that. There'd be some fuckups and it would be funny.

The thing I'm doing this Saturday is the drone story from One More Year. I assume you read it.

Yeah I did.

Yeah, I hope so, Paul. Nadel didn't.

I'm doing that story, and I'm doing both voices, and I have the musical element. I've got my keyboard, when they sing the songs [in the story] I sing the songs and play the music along with it. I've done it a few times and I've kind of enjoyed doing this one.

And I like that drone story. It's nice and depressing. I've done it two or three times now and people seem to have enjoyed it. I'm an entertainer, Paul.

So, yeah, I’m going to Hot Off the Press Book Fair at the Fantagraphics store in Georgetown on the 8th. I’ll be selling some zines there, and I guess [Fantagraphics Bookstore manager] Larry Reid will have me selling some books and I’ll be doing my little performance.

Nice. Who else do you know at the Fair?

I don't interact with the scene out here, with Seattle. I was actually trying to get a job at a Fanta store recently, like a Sunday job. I wanted to be the Sunday girl there, just to get me out of the house, doing something community-based. But they really didn't want me to work there. Thought it would be weird.

The thing I'm most excited about is Breakdown Press, which is a great British publisher. It's frustrating that the thing I'm most excited about at Hot Off the Press is a British thing.

I don't like the Seattle comics scene. It's okay, but it could be a hell of a lot fucking better. Melbourne had fucking great comic scene. There's some cool shit in Melbourne.

I think Seattle's kind of aggressive in a way. Gentlemen in flannels with beards just doing angry comics about being drunk. Short Run’s all right. I don't go to Dune or anything here, I'm too old to go to drawing nights now. That's a young man’s game — people figuring themselves out.

Okay. I think that’s all the questions I had for you.

We kept it focused! In the Nadel interview we didn't mention One More Year, and we did talk about it a bit in this interview. And we mentioned the Hot Off the Press event, so I think we've done it. We've done it, Paul!

Yup. Suck it, Comics Journal.