The K Train: An interview with Keith Knight

K CHRONICLES cartoonist Keith Knight talks to Ninth Art about his long, strange trip from a very Brady beginning to smoking crack with God, clashing with editors and finding his voice along the way.
02 June 2003

Keith Knight comes across as a guy I could hang out with. In fact we spent the first twenty minutes of the interview talking about X2 and THE MATRIX RELOADED before we started on the interview. I had to edit my first draft because I kept referring to him as Keith. I think that's part of what makes him so good; that he comes across as an ordinary guy - your friend, your neighbour - and his work often lets you know what's on his mind, what he's been up to lately.

You may have read Keith Knight's work without realizing it. He writes and draws two weekly comic strips, THE K CHRONICLES and TH(INK), which appear in over twenty newspapers, and are prominently featured online. His work has been in LA Weekly, MH-18, Too Much Coffee Man Magazine and other publications. There are three collections of THE K CHRONICLES out now, the most recent, WHAT A LONG, STRANGE STRIP IT'S BEEN, from Top Shelf Productions.

He's best known for THE K CHRONICLES, a weekly strip that covers Knight's friends, roommates and family, and his obsessions with STAR WARS and pinball, when he's not tackling politics head on with more insight and biting humour than most political cartoonists could hope for, which makes for one of the best comic strips you'll find today. There's a reason he has fans like Maya Angelou, Garry Trudeau and Dave Eggers.

Knight grew up in the Boston area and between classes in eighth grade started penning autobiographical comics he called KIDS FROM WESTDALE HIGH. He didn't actually go to Westdale High, that's the school the Brady Bunch attended.

"I did a review in comics form when I was in high school and my teacher just raved about it. He encouraged me to keep at it, that what I needed to do what to make a daily strip and send it out to syndicates to get into the comics page, so I started doing strips for the high school paper. I kept calling it KIDS FROM WESTDALE HIGH.

"In college I did a strip and called it THE K CHRONICLES. I started sending it out to syndicates and at first I got form rejections, or no rejections sometimes, but I kept at it and eventually I started getting better rejection letters, which was encouraging.

"After college I knew what I wanted to do and I was trying to figure out where I could pursue it without distraction. I didn't want to stay in my college town cause then I'd end up being the freaky guy showing up at keg parties at 35, and I didn't want to go back to my hometown. I wanted to be near LA cause I wasn't just interested in comics, I wanted to pursue television and animation and film. I didn't think I'd like LA, from everything I'd heard, though.

"Well I was at Fanueil Hall drawing cartoons when I guy I knew from working there came back from San Francisco and was just raving about the place, and so at the end of the summer I just packed up my car and drove out. I found this underground culture out there, not just comics, but political groups and arts organisations. I really think that being in San Francisco was my graduate school in a lot of ways.

"It was out in San Francisco that I really discovered weekly comic strips. I knew they existed before, but I was reading people like Nina Paley and Jaime Crespo, people my age who were doing great stuff, and I knew that's the kind of thing I wanted to do. I was putting out zines and got reviewed in different places, sold them by mail. I was thinking about getting into comic books, but someone told me I should try for newspapers, just because you can get a bigger audience that way."

Newspaper strips certainly form a core of his personal influences, along with a number of alternative cartoonists. "DOONESBURY, BOONDOCKS, and ZITS. Those are my three dailies that I always read. Although I am fascinated by LUANN. I don't like it, but I can't help but read it. I mean, I must like it if it stirs me up that much. Every comic I see influences my work in some way, but the biggest ones are PEANUTS, CALVIN AND HOBBES, Robert Crumb, Harvey Kurtzman, DOONESBURY, Jules Feiffer, BLOOM COUNTY, Mary Fleener, Pete Bagge, Nina Paley, Jaime Crespo."

Jules Feiffer is a particularly interesting choice, because while the two have very different linework, both strips share a certain sensibility; they address politics, but unlike political cartoons you really get a feeling for a personality and sensibility behind the strip.

"It was really loose. He wouldn't bother with panels, sometimes it was just profiles or faces. He'd talk about politics or whatever else. When I was a kid I was fascinated cause you had to really seek it out. I always thought I was smart cause I would read it. But yeah, what really affected me most was that Feiffer was an alternative cartoonist but you could find him in mainstream outlets and that's what I aspire to be, to have that kind of influence.

"THE K CHRONICLES was in the SF Examiner for five or six years and it got read by a lot of people as a result of being there who wouldn't have picked up an alternative weekly or searched for the comic. But one of the biggest problems are the editors. I sent out a bunch of strips to the Portland Oregonian and I got a letter back from the editor which was really complementary about it, but then in like 72 point size, or something obscene like that, he writes 'In a family newspaper, are you crazy?' I mean the issue wasn't whether it was good or he liked it, but what he thought of the audience. I still have the letter."

My personal favourite strip, which appeared in late 2001, was Knight's response to much of the religious reaction to 9-11, and opens with the phrase "So I was smokin' crack with God the other day"

"I just felt really weirded out by all this religious/war rhetoric post-September 11th. It was like, 'God bless America - let's blow them fuckers to hell'. It was so freaking offensive so I thought to myself, What if I do a strip about the faith and goodness that God has in humanity to rise above all this war bullshit, but what if I begin it with the most offensive thing that I can get away with? I got a lot more positive feedback than I thought for that one. But more than a few folks were offended. But hell, it's God, he can smoke all the crack he wants."

More recently, Knight started writing and drawing TH(INK), a weekly one panel cartoon that appears on africana.com.

"Manic D Press, who published the first K CHRONICLES collections, got a request from africana.com, which is a black culture website, for a book to review, and the publisher threw one of my books in with it to send to them. They really liked it, but wanted something new, something that was for their site. I had this drawing in my sketchbook of a Denny's sign and underneath it read, 'serving black people since 1997'. They liked it and, well, I've been doing it since."

As far as creating a daily strip, "I keep thinking I should try and not just sit here and slam them. I mean it's possible to do good work there, look how much Aaron Macgruder stands out by being so good. What's frustrating is that so many creators died years ago and now the strips are kept alive with gag writers and other artists. I mean Charles Schulz was a great cartoonist right up to the end, and he's one of my great inspirations, but they're rerunning his old strips in the newspaper instead of putting something new in there, and that's just a shame.

"Now I've met Schulz's wife and she's just one of the nicest people you'll ever meet. I'm on the board of the Cartoon Arts Museum here in San Francisco and she's been a great donor and I think the museum actually started because of a donation that Charles Schulz gave. It's nothing against them or his work, it's just that even death won't keep a strip off the comics page."

As far as what the future holds, the first TH(INK) collection will be coming out by the end of the year from Manic D Press. Knight is still working with producer Mary Harrington on a project for television. His band Marginal Prophets has a new CD that will be coming out soon. And he'll be at the San Diego Comic-Con again this year at either the Small Press Section or Artists' Alley.

Or as Knight put, "just one step closer to taking over the country and then the world."

You can read THE K CHRONICLES every week at buzzle.com or salon.com. TH(INK) is available every week on africana.com. Keith Knight's homepage is www.kchronicles.com.

Alex Dueben is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.

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