Kurt Wolfgang became a star in the mini comics world with the 2000 release of LOWJINX #2, an anthology he edited and worked on that was more than just a satire of Scott McCloud's UNDERSTANDING COMICS, but a laugh out loud book about the comics world and its creators and fans. It was followed by LOWJINX #3: THE BIG RIP-OFF, a 100-page monster of a mini comic that parodied independent comics. Wolfgang's first full-length book was WHERE HATS GO, a wordless graphic novel that represents a marked departure from his humour work, and it's with this book that Wolfgang found his voice.

I sat down with Wolfgang at his place in the village of Collinsville, Connecticut.

"When I first started doing this, I didn't even know there was a thing like mini comics that you did," says Wolfgang. "I just wanted to make comics, so I just drew stuff and photocopied them, gave them to my friends. The first year I went to SPX, which I think was 1998, I realized all these other people were doing this. I mean even as a kid I did this, we just didn't call them mini comics. My mom would take them to work and photocopy them. So I was always drawing, but I really started around 95-96, so there was a big space between being a kid and doing it seriously when I just doodled on bar napkins."

Reared on newspaper strips and magazines like MAD and CRACKED, Wolfgang owes his passion for the form to those, rather than the usual litany of superhero titles. "It's not a snobbish thing, 'cause surely the entertainment I was absorbing as a kid was just as stupid as those comics were. It was just never really my thing, though I read a bunch of stuff recently. I wrote a story for the second BIZARRO book for DC. Joey Cavalieri wanted to know if I'd like to be involved and I thought he wanted me to draw a story for it, but he wanted me to write one. And it sounded like fun but I said, 'You realize I've never read any of this stuff?'

"He threw out some names and mentioned Brian Ralph, and I thought it would be fun to write a superhero story for Brian Ralph to do. I let him decide what we would do cause he'd be the one drawing it and I don't know anything from anything so it makes no difference to me. He picked Jack Kirby's THE DEMON, which is the stupidest comic anybody has ever written. Ever. I mean it was just so hard to do a parody of this thing because the actual comic itself is just so absurd and over the top, I could have just redone five pages of the actual comic."

LOWJINX is clearly much more Wolfgang's style, and though he may be the man behind the anthology, he credits the series' success to the talents that have contributed to it, rather than to himself. "You have to chalk it up to riding coattails, because nothing I'd done prior had garnered any attention whatsoever. It was definitely because I'd gotten Johnny Ryan and Sam Henderson and Jeff Czekaj and Tony Consiglio, who are always funny. I just handed it off to people who I knew would run with it and then I drew the cover.

"John Kirschbaum did one that's a combo of Seuss and Gorey and it's a great comic, I mean outside of it being a parody and a tribute. Jordan Crane did a Chris Ware one that he really put a lot of thought into and it's a really great comic, a funny comic, a nice balance of fusing himself with Chris Ware. They're just really funny comics that people would have had no cause to do otherwise. Because most of us, we're out there working on our thing and going for something, no one's saying, 'I should really go make fun of Dean Haspiel.' But you give someone that little germ of a thought and some guys just really ran with it."

LOWJINX's tendency towards parody has occasionally caused trouble, as Wolfgang admits. "Some of it makes me wince, and some people were a little upset. I'm not gonna name names. I will say that in the cases I heard where people were upset, I really don't understand because I think that almost all of them you can see the respect behind the parody. I would be honored if someone did a parody of my stuff, if someone did it well and intelligently and took the time to take apart certain things. But some people were upset and I find that unfortunate because I think the whole thing's a lot of fun."

Scott McCloud, who appeared on the cover to LOWJINX #2 being brutally attacked by a stapler, evidently isn't one of those who took offence.

"He was one of the biggest supporters of that book. I shamelessly tied the release to that of REINVENTING COMICS. I brought a stack up to Million Year Picnic [a comic store in Cambridge, Massachusetts] where he was doing a signing. I had never met him previously, though I sent him one prior to that and when I presented him with a copy to sign for me, he held it up to this huge crowd of people waiting to see him and he said, 'everyone here has to get one of these.' I sold 2-300 that day just from him doing that. He's been a great guy and plugged it to a lot of people."

WHERE HATS GO, Wolfgang's wordless tale of a young boy who loses his hat to a gust of wind in a mazelike city, appears to mark a radical departure from the sometimes wicked humour of LOWJINX. His next book, an adaptation of Carlo Collodi's novel PINOKIO, the famous story of a wooden boy, is expected to take a similar tone, and will also be wordless. Is Wolfgang taking his work in a new direction?

"I love humor comics and what I was doing with the mini comics. I grew up reading funny stuff and I like making funny comics, but I don't think I'm very good at it. I think I'm OK at it, but there are people who are just so goddamn funny every time. Pete Bagge, Sam Henderson, Johnny Ryan, Pete Sickman-Garner, Tony Consiglio, these guys just make me laugh my ass off. I just don't see me having that kind of sense of humor, and although I really enjoy making them, I find the wordless stuff I've been doing a lot more fulfilling. It's more of where I'm coming from. I don't know if I'm any good at those either, but I seem to give a shit less if I'm good at the funny stuff than stuff like PINOKIO. ... That's what I want to spend my time doing.

"I mean I love doing kids stuff. I just finished a bunch of stuff for Nickelodeon Magazine, which I love doing, and it's a great way to break up the work because if I was just going to work on PINOKIO every day without doing anything else, I'd go insane. The kind of story it is, it doesn't allow me to use everything I do with equal strength. I do have a lot of good ideas that are fart humor and whatnot, and there's not always a place for that in everything, so it's nice to do a variety. But for most part what I want to do are books and most of the books I have in mind are wordless."

Creating comics with no dialogue of any kind is certainly a challenging undertaking, but for Wolfgang it allows him a greater opportunity for stretching his abilities as a storyteller.

'When it comes down to it, I'm doing this first and foremost for myself.' "I started out doing wordless stuff as an exercise, because I looked at what I was doing and it was like watching a bad puppet show, talking heads, and it felt set up and predictable and wasn't using all the language of comics, all the tools available. It seemed more like Punch and Judy or Abbott and Costello, which are both great things, but there are other things I wanted to explore that I didn't have the tools for and I figured one way to work on such things like visual narrative, visual pacing, was to do things wordless as an exercise.

"And I really enjoyed it, really dug it. There's a lot of stories that can only be told literally, without words. You look at Brian Ralph's CAVE-IN, which I think in 20-30 years - and to some degree now - but later, its gonna be a real pivotal book in the history of alternative comics. I think a lot of people looked at that book and there was a certain tone you could never pull off with words. So there's a certain kind of story, a certain kind of tone that works best wordless and maybe that's the tone I'm most interested in exploring.

"The story of Pinocchio could be told with words, but not the way I want to tell it. Stuff I do with words is usually humor or kids' stuff, so it seems like a 180-degree change, and maybe someday I'll meet in the middle, but right now I seem to be concentrating on polar opposites. I really don't have any plans of a supposed serious book with words any time soon."

While WHERE HATS GO is certainly filled with a childlike sense of wonder, it isn't aimed at children, and though PINOKIO comes from the same source as the Disney movie PINOCCHIO, it too is not a children's book.

"Some people who enjoy my work would like me to censor myself a little bit. People say WHERE HATS GO is a great book and they'd like to give it to their kids, but there are all these things in there, and some of them are peripheral in the background, but they can't give it to an eight year old. And maybe this is artsy fartsy, but I don't want to be considering my readers at all.

"There's so many things in life that we can't do or have to do or whatever. These comics are the one area in my life where I can do whatever the hell I want. I don't have to worry about who's gonna buy it. I don't have to care. We in alternative comics have this wonderful luxury. It's almost a gift, this luxury. And yeah, it's great when our things sell and people like them, but it's not going to buy you a mansion. So why the hell pander in any way, shape or form?

"I mean who gives a rat's ass, because when it comes down to it, I'm doing this first and foremost for myself. I'm not saying that other things aren't important and it's not fulfilling when someone identifies with something that we've done, whether its by laughing at it and enjoying it or by touching them at some emotional level. I like it when people like my stuff. It's always better to make more money than less money. I'm not saying I'm immune to all these things, but they are just a far, far second place to me and whatever it is I want to do."

Some of the most distinctive aspects of Wolfgang's work are his attention to detail and his apparent reluctance to leave any space on the page blank. But at the same time he will use blank space to his advantage, sharply altering the pace of the story by drawing a single small panel surrounded by two blank pages, for example.

"It's not a matter of not wanting to leave a lot of blank space in a panel, it's almost an inability to. Most of the work I really enjoy visually as far as contemporary people go is the exact opposite of what I do. I look at the way Ivan Brunetti works now and it just blows me away. I don't know if it's a certain amount of confidence I don't have, but I'll look at a page and it won't look finished to me. I don't know. It's really hard for me to do that and leave things alone and it's something I've tried to work on. I don't possess a certain amount of confidence maybe.

'I find the wordless stuff more fulfilling. It's more of where I'm coming from.' "There are times in the story where yes, to change pacing or any number of things I use the single panel. Maybe that's a cheat. I want all your attention here. I just work in the way that seems to visually work best for me. There's some pages I've done in PINOKIO where there will be blank pages, and in a way it's a cheat, cause if I was a really good cartoonist, I'd find a way. But in another way, I'm working in a visual medium and I wanted to use the book in the best way I can. I like the book as a delivery system; I like the book as a format. Online comics are great and there are tools you can use there, but I like books. I like the turning of the page. There's something when the image after the present one works best being on the same side."

Wolfgang admits to having a "weakness" for good presentation. "There are certain things I've done in PINOKIO where there's more of an illustration with inset panels, and the balance of the page is actually important to the telling of a certain sequence of events. It's nice to have things balanced and have things counterbalance other parts of it. And yeah it's very satisfying to look at a page and go, 'Wow this is a nice looking page'. I mean, you pick up a page of GOOD-BYE, CHUNKY RICE by Craig Thompson and whether or not this is a comic, it's just a neat looking thing, a great piece of craft. But I think if you get caught up in that you just end up with a lot of pretty pictures."

While Wolfgang insists that his enjoyment of a comic isn't exclusively tied to the quality of the art, comics art is clearly something he's very passionate about, and he says he's still working to find the right balance between detail and space.

"I like simple art and I like intricate art, as long as its not lazy, and I see a lot of people that are leaning on the fact that they're a minimalist. They say look at Sam Henderson, he's a minimalist. Yeah, but Sam Henderson is a great cartoonist.

"I'm very envious of how Tom Hart draws, and looking at it, I think that couldn't have taken more than an hour. I'm not saying that in a bad way, or that Tom Hart's lazy. No, he took maybe an hour, but it's perfect. Ivan Brunetti. I mean how did he get that much expression in that one line? That one squiggly line? [Whereas] I would dissect it and kill all the magic in it.

"Charles Schulz is the perfect example of that. It makes me envious and I look at something I spent a month on and if there was magic in it, I probably killed it with incessant cross-hatching or drawing the label on a product. I mean, I'll figure it out, and when I do I'll probably drop dead, which is probably for the best."

Alex Dueben is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.

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