BY JENNIFER M. CONTINO Lifelong comic book fan Chris Wisnia tells us how his own attempt to recreate the DC occult character Dr. 13 became the genesis for his own supernatural staple, Dr. Debunko.
THE PULSE: A lot of your stories seem to be of the black comedy or the "made you look" type of freak out ones ... what do you enjoy the most about creating in those mediums?
CHRIS WISNIA: In my formative years, the things I enjoyed most tended to have distinct senses of humor. I read Kurt Vonnegot and Ken Kesey and Charles Bukowski. I listened to the Smiths and Camper Van Beethoven. I liked Woody Allen and the Coen Brothers. Kurt Vonnegot wrote somewhere that you can be funny in a very serious, non-comedic way, and I like that idea of dealing with serious subject matter, or saying important, meaningful things.
I was raised with a real positive, "you're so talented, you can do anything if you put your mind to it" attitude and atmosphere. I felt like a superstar growing up, ripe for opportunity and success. But when I got to college, everyone there was just as talented, and it was sobering and disappointing. It gave me a much more cynical, satirical attitude. Sarcastically, caustically so. So that’s where the “black” comes into my humor, I guess. The humor of the realization of the sad, beautiful, bleak world.
As for the “made you look” type of freak out stories…I didn’t really realize I did this until you mentioned it. I’m not into the slasher style of “made you look” gross-out, or the cheap, quick shocker “made you look.” I guess I aspire to the David Lynch-style of “made you look,” that you just can’t shake, and you find it obsessing you for days afterwards. I just hope my imagery will stick with the viewer in some way, and hopefully make them look at things in ways they haven’t seen or thought about before, and get them excited or curious.
THE PULSE: Have you always been interested in making comic books or was it something that hit you later? Are you one of those comic lifers who's been in this industry in one form or another since your earliest days?
WISNIA: I was fascinated with all the strange, bright superheroes very early on. I wanted to learn about them. I wanted to know who they were. I watched the Bakshi Spider-Man cartoon. I had a Marvel activity book. And I bought those ugly seventies superhero dolls (it was before action figures, or I would have bought those instead). I didn't start reading comics until sixth grade, but I had been drawing them all this time. I assumed, through high school, that I would be either a writer, an artist, a musician, or a comic book artist.
I'm not a lifer, though, because I got out of comics in college. That was when I was busy studying "art." You know, high art. Snotty, haughty art. I painted non-representational, abstract oils. I couldn't bother myself with "kid's junk," and I completely missed the nineties boom.
Of course, I got back into the "kids junk" when I graduated, even more than ever, because I realized it was what I loved. Also, this was the mid-nineties, and the boom had just burst, and all the local comics shops were going out of business and dumping back-issues for fifty cents, or twenty-five cents, or ten cents, so I loaded up on everything.
That's when I started thinking about trying to get into the industry. I tried shopping scripts to editors, but they weren't interested, so I drew my stories. After that, editors looked at the stuff, but still weren't interested. After a few years of this, I had enough work to self-publish, so I did in 2004.
THE PULSE: How did you come up with Dr. Debunko and what made you want to explore that subject matter?
WISNIA: I was trying to get into comics, so I was putting together story proposals for DC Comics. At the time, DC had been revamping a bunch of their old characters, so I was scouring all my old comics, and the character I thought I could handle best, and relate to most, was Dr. 13, because he wasn’t a superhero at all. He was just some everyday schmuck who didn’t believe in the supernatural, and for some reason had this intense desire to go out and prove it. I liked that.
In the old comics, every time Dr. 13 found an alleged “supernatural” event, he would expose it, Scooby Doo-style, as a hoax by some uncle or other, trying to scare off his relatives so that he could inherit the mansion or whatever. My idea for a “revamp” of this character was to make the “supernatural oddities” less a conspiracy or scheme or plot, and instead just everyday misunderstandings. Because honestly, in the “real” world, it’s pretty regularly that supposedly supernatural events turn out to be people who had mistaken or limited understandings of the facts.
I think this is a fascinating subject matter, that so many people believe so many different things, and once they believe it, it’s almost impossible to sway their views, even with facts. To each person, their “reality” is how they view their world based on their beliefs. Whether it’s their belief in science, their particular religion, UFOs and aliens, government conspiracies, miracle diets, Santa Claus, or whatever.
So when I couldn’t get DC to look at my proposals, I decided my character wasn’t really Dr. 13 anyways, so I changed his name and appearance, and that became Dr. DeBunko.
THE PULSE: Who, if anyone else, did you base Dr. Debunko on? Is he an amalgam of other people and characters you know or was he just this unique sort?
WISNIA: I told my wife about the character, and she came up with the name, “Dr. DeBunko.” It made me laugh because it’s such a dumb name, you know? I thought it was perfect.
After creating the character and writing and drawing three of his stories, my wife called me and told me I’d better turn on the radio. There was a talk show with Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society, and what he was saying made me feel like I’d found my home at last. I wasn’t aware of the Skeptics Society, but here was an organization that was actually doing what my Dr. DeBunko character aspired to do. They looked at alleged paranormal events, and tried to use science and reason and facts to determine the merit of the beliefs in these events.
I found their website, www.skeptic.com, and signed up for a magazine subscription, and bought a bunch of their books, and it all just fueled the Dr. DeBunko fire. Michael Shermer’s contact info was at their site, so I wrote to him about my character, and he was really pleased. He said he thought it was the coolest thing for skepticism since Lisa Simpson read Jr. Skeptic Magazine when Homer had his alien abduction experience.
In an “origin explanation” in the first story, I made Dr. DeBunko’s real-life identity a combination Dr. Shermer and James Randi. Randi is a debunker who has a one million dollar challenge to anyone who can prove the existence of a supernatural event in a lab setting, and no one has been able to claim the prize.
THE PULSE: Just because you have that character in your head, how do you come up with the things for him to "debunk"?
WISNIA: Reading a lot. Doing a lot of research. Every now and then there’s a skeptical television special on. The book that probably gave me the initial idea for all this was “The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology,” by Rossell Hope Robbins, which was packed with interesting, horrifying, sickly hilarious stories about people’s historical delusions about witches, werewolves, demons, and nightmares, which they used to justify burning, drowning or torturing innocent people. Then I found a great resource on folk beliefs in vampires, called “Vampires, Burial, and Death,” by Paul Barber. And then, once I found the Skeptic Society, it kicked the door down for subject matter.
THE PULSE: How do you think a comic like this stands out from the pack?
WISNIA: Let me know if you can come up with any examples to the contrary, but I think it’s basically the absolute opposite of what anyone else is doing in fiction. And I’m talking, not just comics, but film and television and novels and everything. For whatever reason, the only fictional stories we see that discuss supernatural events are the ones that assume supernatural events exist, and take that as their basis. No one takes the angle of, “Well, what if supernatural events don’t exist? And what does that mean, if our society still chooses to believe so wholeheartedly in them?” That story basically doesn’t ever get told. Maybe because no one wants to hear it. Maybe people just don’t think taking that view could make an interesting story. But I disagree.
So I’m offering one differing viewpoint amongst our culture’s endless barrage of supernatural vampires and ghosts and werewolves and weird zoological creatures and devils and demons.
THE PULSE: How many stories are in the recent Dr. Debunko collection?
WISNIA: “Dr. DeBunko: The Short Stories” collects eight stories originally published in my “Tabloia Weekly Magazine” comic, and another three that I had printed as convention-only mini-comics. Those stories are…
1. ATTACK OF THE CORPSE-EATING WEREWOLVES! which is about a chewed-up arm found sticking out of the grave. Dr. Debunko suggested it might mean it was buried shallow and wolves tried to dig it out, and not necessarily that the corpse came back to life, tried to dig itself out but couldn’t, and got so hungry it began eating its own arm.
2. FEAR THE SEX-CRAVED SUCCUBI! Succubi are demons who enter men’s beds at night and try to seduce them in the guise of women. Or, maybe they’re just wet-dreams of guiltily lusty men.
3. WHEN DEVILS WALTZ AT MIDNIGHT! This is a story about townspeople who see cloven footprints out in their pasture, and decide it must be devils out performing a witch’s sabbat.
4. AND IF THE CORPSE SHALL BLEED! This is about an actual odd belief that a murderer’s victim will bleed if touched after death by its murderer. Serious evidence in a court of law…
5. NO BRICK, BOARD, NOR BARS SHALL STOP THE INCUBUS’S ATTACK OF LUST! and
6. WHEN IMPREGNATING INCUBI SPAWN SATANIC SEX-BABIES! where lewd devil sex stories. After that, I went with a Hairy Creature theme:
7. HUNT THE ELUSIVE YETI! and
8. MY WIFE IS A WEREWOLF!
The mini-comics were:
9. WHO KILLED MY COW AND STOLE HER EYEBALLS, TONGUE, AND SEX ORGANS! about cattle mutilations, which have been explained to everyone’s satisfaction in the scientific community, but thanks to the press and people who believe in UFO’s, still make reports on the news all the time.
10. WHEN HUMAN FLESH BURSTS INTO FLAMES! This one is about the spontaneous combustion of people in their sleep. “Well, she was helping me try and fix a gasoline leak under the car…I accidentally spilled gas all over her flammable polyester jumpsuit. I reminded her to change into something before she got into bed, but she loved sleeping in that jumpsuit!”
11. THE DEVIL IS MY LOVER! I couldn’t resist including one last Satanic Sex story. My wife keeps asking me what it is about these, and why I have to keep going back to that foul subject matter. I keep telling her, Sex sells, doesn’t it?
So that’s the book. A nice, round, eleven stories.
THE PULSE: Hah! You should have gone for 13! So, along with the good Dr. Debunko, you also have a Doris Danger hitting stores in November? Who is Doris Danger? She sounds like some old ‘40s starlet.
WISNIA: Doris is a photo journalist who, in parody of the X-Files, was abducted by giant monsters, and can’t deny what she’s seen, and has made it a quest to prove their existence. She meets monster-hating army and CIA agents who have a clear agenda to hide this fact from the public, a monster-protecting society of Fez-Wearers, robots disguised as humans who try to collect giant monsters for their own mysterious uses, a renegade commando organization known as the Monster Liberation Army or MLA, double- and triple-agents, and lots of giant monsters. And it’s all drawn in the Jack Kirby style.
This story, like Dr. DeBunko, originally began in “Tabloia,” and Dick Ayers inked the first five adventures, which I collected in a humongous 9”x13” treasury-sized special called “Doris Danger Seeks Where Giant Monsters Creep and Stomp!” It had pin-ups by Mike Mignola, Sam Kieth, Ryan Sook, Mike Allred, Bill Sienkiewicz, John Severin, Gene Colan, All three of the Hernandez Brothers, Tony Millionaire, Steve Rude, Thomas Yeates, Irwin Hasen, and Ramona Fradon.
After reading the book, Stan Lee said, ”…Chris Wisnia performed the amazing feat of taking the minor masterpieces that Jack Kirby and I had done and looking at them through a carnival's distorting mirror,” and that “after getting caught up in its weird and wacky contents, no mere words of mine could truly do it the injustice it deserves.”
THE PULSE: Wow … that’s high praise! Congratulations. So I have to ask, after seeing the leads of your comics, what's your fascination with D names?
WISNIA: Wish I had an answer. It was all a freak accident.
THE PULSE: Maybe something Dr. D has to check into … You mentioned a lot of legends above who had worked on this character and told me the latest issue has pin ups by Russ Heath, Sam Glanzman, John Severin, and Dick Ayers. How'd you get those legends to draw a pic for your comic?
WISNIA: Since I started down the road to self-publishing, five or so years before I put any books out, I started going to conventions, and waiting in lines and doing everything I could to meet artists and ask them about contributing to my book. The ones I couldn’t find at conventions, I often found online.
At first no one was interested, but once I started doing the giant monster stories, and when Dick Ayers started inking them for me, the artists began coming around. Although the book hasn’t sold particularly high numbers, so many artists loved those Lee-Kirby-Ayers-Lieber monster stories, and they seem to really get a kick out of my homage to them. I also think they like having so much flexibility with drawing a giant monster pin-up. I encourage them to get creative and have fun, and see what they come up with.
Now, I’ve gotten so many great pin-ups from so many of my favorite artists. I can’t believe my luck. I think artists not only feel the pressure to contribute since so many other have, they also feel they have to aspire to come up with something really great and unique when they do. So it’s gotten easier and easier to get great pin-ups as I go. Upcoming issues will include pin-ups by Simon Bisley, Esad Ribic, Peter Kuper, Sal Buscema, Herb Trimpe, Nick Cardy, Sergio Aragones, George Tuska, Guy Davis, and Luis Dominguez. Also, Shag is going to let me use one of his gorgeous giant monster images as a cover!
THE PULSE: Wow! So we know what artists you have working on some of Doris Danger’s upcoming issue, but what is she facing in that November adventure?
WISNIA: It’s called “Doris Danger’s Greatest All-Out Army Battles,” featuring more Kirby-style giant monster action and intrigue. That issue looks at the history of the US Army’s “G” division, which is dedicated to exterminating monsters before the public learns about them. It’s got a giant monster masquerading as a robot, a growing tension between Hippy picketers and Christian picketers on their incompatible beliefs in giant monsters, an abnormal number of peculiar mannequins appearing in New York City’s store windows, a general with a penchant for burning musical instruments who was believed dead until now, more Fez-wearing monster-protectors, and a Mexican standoff between the army and the MLA. It’s all purposely very whacky and kitschy, with lots of exclamation points and melodrama!
It will be followed in December with “Doris Danger in Outer Space,” with outer space pin-ups by JH Williams III, Peter Bagge, Al Feldstein, and Dave Gibbons.
THE PULSE: Sounds fun! So what other projects are you working on?
WISNIA: Other than the books we already discussed, I’m planning for the next humongous Doris Danger treasury with Shag’s cover to be on shelves early in 2007.
I’m thirty pages into a project called “Limbo Café,” about an atheist who dies and finds himself in a Fundamentalist Christian afterlife. He spends seven issues going through Heaven and Hell, examining the issues of a literal interpretation of Scripture. That will be the next big project, and since I’ve still got about a hundred forty pages to go, I’ll be lucky to get that out next year.
I spoke with Sam Kieth recently, and he once again said he’d like to collaborate with me on another project, after our success with his book, “Ojo,” for Oni Press. He said he’s got something “noir” in mind, and he wants me to draw everything this time around, rather than drawing a third of it himself and then adding texture to my pages. He’s so busy, though, I don’t know realistically when that will happen.
I’m getting ready to begin an online comic of my character, Dick Hammer, a private detective spoofing the great hard-boiled mysteries of Mickey Spillane. I plan call it “The Dailies,” and give it a look like the old Dick Tracy comic strip.
And lastly, I’m really close to posting my comic-publishing diary as a blog. I’ve just been going over some last details. I think some people might find it interesting. It discusses all the things I’ve tried to do to get my work out and in people’s hands. All the disappointments and set-backs and mistakes and embarrassments, but also the (occasional) good fortune or (really minor and slowly building) successes I’ve had. I’ve met a lot of great people, and it’s been a lot of fun, and I’d like to share some of those stories.
These are some of Wisnia's projects available or in stores soon:
Dr. DeBunko: The Short Stories Salt Peter Press AUG06 3525 Mature audiences/32 pages/b&w/comic-sized/$3.95
Doris Danger: Greatest All-Out Army Battles Salt Peter Press SEP063539 All audiences/16 pages/b&w/comic-sized/$2.50
Doris Danger in Outer Space Salt Peter Press October Previews for December release All audiences/16 pages/b&w/comic-sized/$2.50
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I don't know if it's intentional or a coincidence, but Dr. Demento bears more than a passing resemblance to Horror movie icon Vincent Price.
Posts: 13 | From: DeLand, FL | Registered: May 2002
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If so, then, given Tabloia's delirious capacity for wedding noir to kitsch to horror to sleaze to satire... I'd say there's a good chance the resemblance is intentional!
Matthew
Posts: 4993 | From: Seattle, WA USA | Registered: Jun 2000
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