Interview with Gabe Martinez, Creator of Martin the Satanic Racoon
Oct 14, 2008 7:26 PM
- You listen to goregrind and draw lots of gore. Clearly you are into some fucked-up stuff my friend. When did your fascination of the fucked-up arise?
As near as I can tell there were two major components to my fascination with the grotesque during my formative years:
1) My parents, who are both teachers, always enrolled me and my siblings in some variety of summer school program, whether it was required or not. I think they just wanted to keep all of their kids busy. One summer I was enrolled in a basic biology class that involved a lot of dissections--starting with simple things like nightcrawlers (jumbo-sized earthworms), crayfish, clams, trout, and eventually working our way up to a frog. I even got to take some pieces of the frog home with me after I successfully extracted them. I was about 9 or 10, and I've been fascinated with anatomy, entrails, and the insides of bodies ever since.
2) Both of my parents are devout Catholics, and I spent 11 years in tiny parochial Catholic schools. That's pretty much guaranteed to do a number on your head growing up.
- I always thought your artwork could be in a children's book if it didn't have such sick subject matter haha. Did you choose to make your comics look like a kid's book (but perverted) or does that just happen to be the style of art you are most comfortable with?
As a child I was not allowed to read comic books, due to my mother's belief that they corrupted children somehow. (Between my mom and my dad, it's my mom who's the real religious zealot.) So my main artistic influences growing up were newspaper strips, primarily Garfield (when I was younger) and Bloom County (when I was a little older).
Of the two, Bloom County was the much bigger influence. I loved the contrast between the animals' behavior and their appearance, and the obvious parody of other "funny animal" comics aimed at kids (like Garfield). I would have been overjoyed if Bill the Cat was allowed to decapitate people in the strip; it would've seemed totally appropriate. So when I started drawing Martin I consciously decided to appropriate a lot of that contrast--cute furry little animals doing horribly violent, disgusting things to people.
It's also important to remember that a) when I started drawing Martin it was as a strip in my college newspaper, so I decided to keep that format, and b) I'd spent so many years imitating newspaper comics that I really didn't know how to draw in any other style at the time.
- Your work is pretty damn offensive as you know. What groups have been critical to you the most though, Christians or PC Hippies? And what kinds of stuff have they said before?
By far the most negative reactions have come from the PC police. Part of that it because the strip was born when I was attending UC Santa Cruz, and was deliberately designed to rebel against and provoke the nauseatingly PC-atmosphere of UCSC. Most of the comments I've gotten have been pretty nonsensical and don't bear a whole lot of relation to the actual strips--I had several negative emails when the "mung" strip ran, most accusing me of advocating violence against women, despite the fact that the only female in that strip is a long-dead corpse. Likewise with strips about the lives of serial killers, as if by depicting their crimes I am somehow endorsing them.
On the other hand, I have had Christians stop by my table at numerous comic conventions, asking me to explain my work and why Martin is satanic. Those conversations are always... interesting.
- Who do you hate more, Christians or PC Hippies?
Christians, hands down. PC hippies can usually be dealt with. They are more amenable to reason--not that it's very hard to poke holes in their arguments--and on the occasions that they aren't, your fail-safe is their fear of looking hypocritical. They'll scream at you a whole lot, and put pressure on your advertisers, but they have a problem calling for you to be censored altogether, since they don't like being accused of infringing on your First Amendment rights.
Christians, on the other hand, cannot listen to reason by their very nature. Faith is the antithesis of reason, and no amount of logic or debate can sway faith.
So yeah--I hate Christians a lot more, even though the PC police have actually given me more trouble in the past.
- Can there ever be such a thing as a comic/porno/movie/art too gross to look at or even think about?
There is no such thing as anything too gross to look at or think about. If there is, it is a sign that you are mentally weakening, and must train yourself to conquer your innate revulsion.
Case in point: the owner of the sadly departed Mondo Video store (purveyors of fine filth for many years) once dared me to watch a gay scat porn tape a customer had given him, saying it was one of the most disgusting things he'd ever seen. He was right, and it was. In fact, in the middle of the scene where the scat fetishists are fisting each other and rubbing liquid diarrhea all over each others' faces, I found myself, not nauseous, but no longer hungry, and I'd been starving before I popped the tape in my VCR. It was so gross it actually took away my appetite! I realized that here was a challenge, and I resolved to not rest until I could watch the entire thing while eating a bowl full of chocolate pudding. I even made an event of it, and had a couple friends over to participate. My girlfriend and I succeeded; others did not.
- Fecal sex, bestiality, and midget porn...Are they funny, sexy, or both?
Fecal sex is funny, but I've never found it to be sexy. Bestiality is mostly funny, although I knew a girl who loved to be humiliated and fantasized about being forced to fuck dogs, so I guess I can see the appeal there. Midget sex is both funny AND sexy. C'mon--like you wouldn't jump at the chance to bone Bridget the Midget?
- Bat Day, do you celebrate it? And with who?
Bat Day is more of a state of mind than an actual event. I'd love for it to be an actual event, but de gub'mint says smashing people's skulls in with baseball bats is a no-no in the real world.
- You seem to know a lot about serial killers, bizarre suicides, cannibals, disgusting bible facts, and other unwholesome trivia. What's your source of knowledge for this stuff?
I read voraciously, and I'm the type of person who is always flipping through the bibliography of books to see where the writer got their sources, which usually reveals more nuttiness. If someone mentions an unbelievable story or you read an article so ridiculous it beggars belief, check out the book they sourced. Chances are there's even more ridiculous details in there that they forgot to mention or didn't have space to mention.
I can't say that there's any one good source for all of this stuff, or else it would probably all be common knowledge. You want to know more about serial killers? You're gonna have to read a lot of really bad true crime books written by semi-competent newspaper reporters, and half the book will be the mind-numbing details of the trial, but that's what you have to do to get the good stuff. You want to know more about decidedly un-holy passages in the Bible? Sadly, you'll actually have to read the Bible.
The internet has made some of this easier. Dailyrotten. com is a great source for weird and gruesome news around the world. Amazingly enough, Rotten. com even has good ARTICLES on terrorism and other such topics, including bibliographies. Whenever I can, I read as much of the latimes. com as possible (particularly the World, National, and Local sections). The Rejection of Pascal's Wager (http://www. geocities. com/paulntobin/) is a great site by a former fundamentalist Christian tearing apart their belief system brick by brick. Exiledonline. com is a wonderful source for news on Russian and Eastern Europe by bitter American expats. Even taking the time to run through the photo section of Yahoo!News will turn up tons of shocking photographs every time there's an assassination or bombing somewhere in the world (although they usually skimp on the goriest ones--I really miss Ogrish. com). And of course enough time spent on Wikipedia and Google will allow you to turn up almost anything.
Seriously, though, there is no one trick to any of this. You just have to be curious and follow through. Learn to enjoy the research.
- I've tried to get a lot of my buddies into reading your comics but they just end up wasting their money on lame stuff instead. Seems like nobody is willing to read not only your comics, but all comics in general. Is it just me or are comics a dying medium? How many copies do you sell on average?
Judging by the size of crowds at the Comic-Con this past year, comics are definitely NOT a dying medium. If anything, the problem is that they're going completely mainstream. Not that I have a problem with comics getting a bigger audience--far from it--but even the independent and self-published comics now are just aspiring, watered-down versions of mainstream comics. Nobody's doing the sort of underground comics in the style of R. Crumb or S. Clay Wilson, so that's why I do mine.
As for how well mine sell, that's hard to judge. I sell most of them at comic book conventions, and I usually sell enough to pay for my table, which is all you can really ask. I know I've sold over 800 copies of Martin #1 (the first, massive print run I did when I was still working at Kinko's) because I've already had to reprint that one, so my best guess is that I've probably sold around 2000 copies of Martin throughout the years. Not bad for a sporadically produced mini-comic that is mostly sold at conventions.
- Blasphemous humor is a recurring theme in your comics. What is your experience with religion and your thoughts on religion?
As I mentioned earlier, I was raised by devout Catholics, spent my entire childhood in Catholic schools, and was a true believer myself until the time I was around 15 or so. (I was also an altar boy, choir boy, and a Boy Scout, if you can believe that.) Unfortunately, since I took my religion seriously, I read as much as I could about it, and the more I read about the history of the Church, the more obvious it became that there was nothing holy about the Church, or Christianity in general. In fact, reading the history of the Catholic Church reveals that all of their ironclad dogma they defend so vigorously today as being inherently true was actually pieced together over hundreds of years, frequently contradicting what came before it, as they essentially made it all up as they went along. Why the hell would I choose to believe something like that?
Add to that the history of Christianity. If there's one thing Christians love more than exterminating the peoples of other faiths, it's exterminating hordes of fellow Christians who believe slightly different interpretations of Christianity than they do. For fuck's sake, the Catholics and the Protestants are still fighting out the Reformation in North Ireland, hundreds of years later!
But I think the final nail in the coffin was the gulf I increasingly observed between what people said they believed and how they acted. Most of the nuns at my grade school (and my grade school was so Catholic, they imported all their nuns directly from Ireland), who spoke so eloquently of the love of Christ, were some of the grumpiest, bitterest, angriest people you've ever met. All of my parents' friends seemed utter oblivious as to what Catholic doctrine actually said--they just repeated what someone had told them, and went about indulging in their learned prejudices anyways. And if you decide to live your life your own way, making your own rules, heaven help you--a God they don't pay any attention to six days out of the week will send you to a hell they can't prove exists because a bunch of fairy tales in a book written thousands of years ago said so.
So I'm done with religion. Christianity is the devil I know, and so I'm harder on it than anything else, but they're all full of shit. Eastern Religions (Hinduism, Buddhism) offer some interesting philosophical viewpoints on the transience of life and the integral role death plays in the cycle of life, but are ultimately undone (in my opinion) by their insistence on reincarnation. As far as I'm concerned, this is your one shot on Earth. It's good not to attach too much importance on your life, because it can end in an instant, but that's no reason to let someone else tell you how to live it. Anyone who tries to do so is your ENEMY and should be resisted at all costs.
To quote Lydia Lunch--"GOD was the first COP."
- The ultra-violent mice comics are some of my favorite stuff. What was your inspiration for those mice?
The mice are my version of Tom and Jerry, or Spy vs. Spy. I loved those cartoons/comics for their pure, sadistic joy in violence for the sake of violence--and they were always funny. It probably helped that my mom hated those, too. The taboo is always more appealing.
- Have you ever had an idea for a comic so vile that you didn't do it? And what comic do you think is your most vile to date?
No. Anything that pops into my head and passes the humor test ("Is it funny?") gets drawn at some point. It doesn't have to be funny to other people--just me.
The only time I even thought of censoring myself wasn't in regard to subject matter, but language. I almost didn't use the line in the Cannibal Corpse strip where a fan calls Morrissey a "fucking British faggot" because it sounded too harsh, and I came up with something tamer. Then I remembered that Morrissey *IS* a fucking British faggot, and wound up using the line.
To date, "Pyronecrobestiality" and "Erotic Diarrhea Fantasy" are probably tied for most vile, I think.
I am always guided by a line (I think I read it in an interview with S. Clay Wilson, but I'm not sure) -- "A thought, once thought, cannot be unthought." So you might as well draw it anyway.
- What music do you blast while you work on comics? Any new shit coming out by the way? Come on, we need more new shit!
I listen to a LOT of different stuff while drawing; it all depends on the mood I'm in. People who reliably show up in my CD player while drawing would include: Nile, Kreator, Vader, Cryptopsy, Slayer, Napalm Death, Darkthrone, Emperor, Gorgoroth, Pig Destroyer, ANb, Cripple Bastards, Dissecting Table, NON, MZ412, Skinny Puppy, Ministry, Laibach, Regurgitate, CUM, Anal Cunt, Deicide, Malevolent Creation, Enslaved, Burzum, Impaled Nazarene, Satyricon, CSSO, Disgorge, Zeni Geva/K.K. Null, Cephalic Carnage, Nasum, Dark Angel, Electric Wizard, Cathedral, St. Vitus, Carcass, Doom, Discharge, Dead Kennedys, Sunn O))), Earth, Boris, Suffocation, Exhumed, Carpathian Forest, Whitehouse, Obituary, Judas Priest, Motorhead, Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Terrorfakt, Front 242, Revolting Cocks, CCCC, Merzbow, Genocide Organ, Grey Wolves, Cannibal Corpse, Krisiun, CBT, Suicidal Tendencies, Vio-Lence, Coil, Godflesh, Neurosis, Mastodon, Secret Chiefs 3, Naked City, Fantomas, At The Gates, Dismember, Grave, Anaal Nathrakh, Sigh... I think you get the point.
Generally: Fast stuff or familiar stuff to get me through the day or to a deadline; slower, weirder stuff late at night to keep the mood going.
Martin #5 is in the works, have no fear.
- Correct me if I'm wrong but Martin hasn't been printed on a standard comic format yet right? Are you going to just stick to printing mini-comics?
Martin has so far only been published as a mini-comic, and I'm trying to save up the money to have it printed in a regular, full-size comic format. Once that happens, and if I can get decent distribution for it, then we'll see about doing that on a yearly basis.
- Well that's it for the interview, any last words or fun facts of life that we should know about?
Fun fact: I'm four months away from finishing my apprenticeship and becoming a fully licensed embalmer. At my job we recently purchased an electric drill, originally just so I could drill holes in the skull fragments of a shotgun suicide and wire his head back together. The drill's been getting a fair amount of use lately in putting the broken skulls of car accident victims back in one piece. I don't know how we ever did without it.
Okay, enjoy, and thanks for the questions!
http://www.myspace.com/satanicracoon
interview by joseangeles AT muchomail.com