Pull up a chair, grab a snack, and join us as we ask Stephen Bissette about comic stores in Brattleboro, video rentals, Vermont films, and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, but not about Swamp Thing.

Name: Stephen R. Bissette.

Birthday: Every day is my birthday. Oh, OK -- March 14, 1955. I'm old now.

When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

An adult. And, if it worked out, a cartoonist, maybe a filmmaker. The cartoonist thing did work out.

If someone is unfamiliar with your work, where would you suggest they begin?

My baby is TYRANT -- that's the best I can do, or have done, working solo. For most folks, though, my work with writer Alan Moore and fellow artists John Totleben and Rick Veitch on DC Comics's SWAMP THING is the best entry point. We did some solid work there, and it's a great read.

Let's do some Brattleboro history. Can you tell us anything about the comic store that used to be in Harmony Lot?

Ya, MOONDANCE COMICS! That was run by my friend ALAN GOLDSTEIN, who I met through that shop via my friend STEVE PERRY, who worked for Alan for some years. Alan now owns and runs First Run Video on Putney Road. Moondance started as a mail-order business Alan ran out of his Wilmington, VT home when he was a teacher.

The first brick-and-mortar Moondance was that Harmony Parking Lot venue, right on the corner as you drive into the lot, kitty-corner across from the pizza joint. Moondance moved from there to Elliot Street, where Greg's second-hand curios shop is now, and while there Alan also opened stores in two malls in Massachusetts. It all went belly-up in the late 1980s for a variety of reasons, which is too bad. Brattleboro still needs a good comics shop, though there have been two since the Moondance days.

A little bit of Moondance trivia: Moondance full-page ads were a staple of all the Marvel Comics in the 1980s. When Sam Raimi's first SPIDER-MAN movie featured a diner called "Moondance," I was sure that was Raimi's nod to Alan's mail-order business -- after all, that was the era of Marvel Comics Raimi would have been steeped in!

You helped start First Run Video, right? Why is a locally-owned video store good for a community?

Well, I didn't launch First Run -- that was initially a collaborative effort between ALAN GOLDSTEIN, who still owns and runs First Run, and STEVE PERRY, who actually intiated the process and first owned the name "First Run Video." For a variety of reasons, they parted ways just before the store opened in November of 1991, and I've been an active shareholder and occasional manager/worker/buyer there in the ensuing years. I left First Run in March of 2005 to re-engage with my writing and creative freelance work, but we parted amicably.

Anyhoot, a locally-owned video store is great for the community because it emerges from and directly serves the community in ways cookie-cutter, corporate video stores (and, for that matter, music stores, book stores, etc.) never can. First Run tailors its library, its orders, its relations TO the community of Brattleboro in ways corporate or franchise stores cannot -- it also responds to, reflects, and interacts with Brattleboro in a multitude of ways that corporate franchises discourage or simply refuse to. In every way, having a locally-owned video superstore like First Run is a great asset to the community.

In many ways, I miss that job and that interaction with the community. But life is only so long, and it was definitely time to get back into the creative life for me.

How do you see the market for movie rentals in coming years?

Well, it's changing in some dramatic, generational ways. I loathe watching movies on monitors like a home computer screen, but that's a generational prejudice: many of my son Dan's friends seem to only watch films via online sources or streaming, and that's a change we're feeling even in rural communities like ours.

DVDs also changed rental patterns, in that it made home libraries more desirable -- more affordable, and less space-devouring than videocassettes -- so many folks (myself included) tend to buy what they want to watch instead of renting. We also have online and mail rental alternatives, like Netflix, which many folks avail themselves of -- if you live far away from a decent video store, it's a desirable thing, and very convenient.

Still, nothing beats the experience of "shopping" at a brick-and-mortar video store: you get to see the video/DVD packaging, hold it, choose based on impulse without pre-planning, ask for and receive help from knowledgable staff, and the library is extensive in stores like First Run. I think as rental models change, the brick-and-mortar "you are there" store will remain viable and vital, for all sorts of reasons. We still go to movie theaters, don't we?

Why did you publish a book on Vermont films, and can they all be rented at First Run?

Well, many Vermont-produced, and set-in-Vermont (there is a difference), films CAN be found and rented (and purchased) at First Run, but many cannot -- there are a lot of fascinating VT films that aren't commercially available as yet, for all sorts of reasons. I won't go into particulars, but I will note that First Run has one of the best collections of regional films in the entire state, due in part to my influence when I was a manager/buyer there. Current manager/buyer Steve Twiss has carried on in that tradition, and he's brought a number of regional films into the store since my departure, including the work of truly local filmmakers. Steve's doing a great job at First Run, period.

That said, I published a book series (it's ongoing) on Vermont films -- GREEN MOUNTAIN CINEMA -- in order to archive and chronicle the fascinating film history and current renaissance unique to our home state. With so many new filmmakers emerging now that digital technology has made filmmaking so viable, it seemed important to lay some common bedrock; let this new generation know they are part of something bigger than they are, that is rooted in the creative history of VT.

It also seemed I was in an unusual position to chronicle some of this history, thanks in part to my ongoing work as a writer (I write primarily about film for publications like THE VIDEO WATCHDOG and such), and thanks in part to my getting to know some of the filmmakers who were real pioneers. I realized by 1998 that if I didn't tell the story of some of these creative folks, no one would, and a major portion of Vermont's filmmaking legacy might be forever lost. Artists like Walter Ungerer, who was making underground short films in the 1960s and made five features in VT in the 1970s, were being completely ignored and their work was beginning to drift out-of-reach; in fact, one of Walter's features, THE ANIMAL, is already almost a 'lost' film, with only two 16mm prints and digital transfers remaining -- the negative is gone. So, it seemed vital to pursue this, while the time is ripe.

Vermont has a long history in cinema, and its by-and-large beneath everyone's radar. By my research, the first films shot in Vermont pre-dated 1900 by a couple of years, and we had feature films being made here throughout the silent era, since 1915. Among those, D.W. Griffith's famous Lillian-Gish-on-ice melodrama WAY DOWN EAST (1921) is best known, but about that same time others were shooting original features about the state, too (including two features made in Randolph, VT in 1921).

Regional theaters like the Latchis were shooting their own newsreels as early as 1920, and newsreel photographers were all over the state filming the 1927 flood and its wake -- I've seen all the extant film I know of. There was a remarkable wave of documentary filmmakers that emerged in the wake of the Flaherty family's move to Dummerston in the late 1940s. The Flahertys and the Flaherty Foundation, directly and indirectly, played a tremendous role in the rise of filmmaking in state in the 1960s, from "visiting artists" like Adolfas Mekas (who shot the feature HALLELUJAH THE HILLS in and around Westminster West) to Walter Ungerer's move from NYC to northern VT in the late '60s to documentarians like John Douglas, who co-founded a commune in Putney and shot FREE FARM there before the '60s wound down. John was part of the national network of the Newsreel Group, a radical-activist documentary coalition based in part in VT; he now lives and works in Charlotte, VT, making documentaries still and amazing computer-animation short films.

There are many animators working throughout Vermont, and I know of at least one animated feature in production. On the other end of the spectrum, you have Rutland-native David Giancola, who has since 1991 been making two to three internationally-distributed narrative feature films a year at Edgewood Studios in Rutland -- action thrillers, suspense films, horror/sf films, you name it. For some reason, it's beneath everyone's radar, and I don't get that.

There's so much I could tell you; most recently, Michel and Linda Moyse and their Center for Digital Art have made Brattleboro a real key in the current movement of young filmmakers, having produced their first student-made feature, COLLIE ROTWEILER AND THE HANGAROUND KID -- it's amazing, really. So much has happened in our home state, so many films are being made here now -- it seemed timely to launch GREEN MT CINEMA now. BTW, I am working on the second and third volumes, but book one is still available at Black Coat Press.

Describe the Center for Cartoon Studies... who is it designed for and what will students get out of it?

The CCS is a modest institution located in downtown White River Junction, in the old Colodny Department Store. The first class numbers 20 students, and James Sturm and Michelle Ollie have pulled together a pretty remarkable faculty for this first year. I consider myself quite fortunate to be part of all this, particularly on its maiden voyage, so to speak.

The CCS is the second comics-intensive college I know of in the US -- the first being my alma mater, The Joe Kubert School of Cartoon & Graphic Art, Inc. in Dover, NJ. The differences between the two institutions are are striking as their similarities. The Joe Kubert School was exactly what was needed in 1976, when I was a member of its first-ever class, and it remains a top-notch trade school for all aspects of the comics industry, including animation, production, design, etc.

The CCS, however, has some fundamental differences that set it apart, and that make it unique to the new generation of cartoonists and creators who've grown up with graphic novels, "alternative comics," and everything that has elevated the comics medium beyond the rather narrow parameters of the comics I grew up with: DC and Marvel comics, the undergrounds of the '60s and '70s, and the few alternatives that were in nascent form then. The CCS is specifically designed for those creative individuals who are awake to the full potential of the medium: thus, CCS offers more of a liberal arts background, including writing, history (specifically, my class "Survey of the Drawn Story"), poetry, and so on.

It's less of a trade school, less industry-oriented, and offers a breadth and depth of studies we didn't get at the Kubert School in terms of storytelling in all its facets, philosophical, social, and personal. CCS faculty includes poets, novelists, color designers, graphic artist and others, along with comics professionals per se like James Sturm, James Kochalka (a fellow Vermonter, BTW), and myself. It's an experiment at this point in how expansive an education we can offer while keeping comics at its core: as James described it once to me, a wheel with comics at its hub, but reaching into many relevent disciplines usually ignored in prior and existing academic and trade school orientations to the medium of comics, and the creation of comics.

Thus, it is designed for creative artists who wish to apply themselves to the comics medium as something other than artists working in the industry -- that is, CCS seems to me oriented more toward those with a passion for comics as a means of self-expression, rather than those who ache to draw SPIDERMAN, X-MEN, SUPERMAN and BATMAN, for instance. CCS is more art/medium-oriented than work/industry-oriented, if you will, though I do not mean to in any way belittle anyone who does wish to work in the industry of comics, who does aspire to draw the comics characters they grew up with. That's important, too, but CCS is digging deeper, in many ways.

As for what students will get out of it -- well, it's like all educational experiences. You get out of it what you put into it. This first class, who began their studies in September as the first-ever CCS class, are putting their hearts and souls into it, as far as I can see. I think they'll get a great deal out of it. I know I am.

It's quite an astounding list of advisors and supporters. How did White River get so lucky?

The community "lucked" into James Sturm and his wife Rachel Cooks, and CCS partner Michelle Ollie. I'll leave it to them to tell the whole story, but as I experienced it over about three or four visits with James since we discussed CCS face-to-face at a Bennington College comics symposium in May of 2004, James settled on White River as THE place to launch CCS sometime in 2004, and he and Michelle pulled it all together with the considerable help of some great folks from the White River TV/Hanover NH area. I've met many of the CCS supporters, and they are fantastic people. James and Michelle understood how a creative community could revive WRJ, much as it has kept Brattleboro vital and alive, and has played such a key role in resurrecting Bellows Falls. They were able to convince enough folks in and about White River Junction that it could happen there, too, and the rest is already history.

Who do you consider your mentors/teachers? What are some of the lessons they've taught you?

Oh, that'll be difficult to be succinct about. My father, Richard Bissette, and my mother Anita, of course -- I mean, we don't realize what we've learned from our parents until we're adults pretty far along, parents ourselves. It's amazing to me what I learned from them, and how those lessons come to bear day-to-day. From my father in particular I think I learned the tenacity and focus necessary to being self-employed: though he worked for Green Mt Power when I was very young, throughout my formative, teen, and young adult life Dad ran a number of his own businesses, primary among those a heating oil company in Duxbury/Waterbury, and three general stores (one at a time), the last and longest-open in Colbyville, VT, where I worked a great deal into my college years. Though it would seem to be night-and-day, the managing of stores and such from the life of a freelance artist/writer/educator, there are many lessons I absorbed from my parents regarding working for oneself that I wasn't conscious of, and they've served me well.

Secondly, there are my artistic heroes, the mentors (most of whom I never met) but whose work so shaped my creative life: cartoonists like Sam Glanzman, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and Greg Irons, filmmakers like Mario Bava, Sergio Leone, Don Siegel and Nicolas Roeg. From all of them, and many beloved writers (Ray Bradbury, Edgar Allan Poe, etc.), I learned how to tell a story, as well as how to visualize it, how to dramatize, how to illustrate and bring what was in my imagination to life for others to see, read, and enjoy.

Most of all, silly as it may sound, I learned a great deal from my love for and study of stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen and his work (films like THE 7th VOYAGE OF SINBAD, JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS, etc.), both creatively -- as an artist -- and professionally -- as a businessman, an artist gaining and retaining control of his own career. Harryhausen worked hard to master his art, and then worked equally hard to achieve a level of control over his own profession and projects that is rare in his field: he shaped his films from their conception, forged a long-standing alliance with a business partner (producer Charles H. Schneer) that allowed him to cultivate and maintain some measure of creative control over those films, and co-scripted, co-produced, and in many ways co-directed many of those films. Thus, Harryhausen removed himself from the "gun-for-hire" limbo too many artists in his field -- the special effects industry -- are relegated to, and creatively shaped his distinctive body of work, his career, and his life, and continues to do so long after his retirement in 1981. I was lucky enough to meet Mr. Harryhausen and visit his London studio and home in the early 1990s; it was an incredible treat to meet one of my creative heroes, and even more important to me was the opportunity later to introduce my children, Maia and Daniel, to him when they were young.

Finally, there are the mentors who guided me as an adult, and there are two: Joe Kubert and Dave Sim. Joe was one of my childhood cartoonist heroes, for his art in comics like SGT. ROCK and ENEMY ACE and TARZAN; attending his school in 1976, I came to know Joe the man as well as Joe the artist, and he became a sort of 'second father' to me, quite literally. I owe my entering comics professionally to Joe and his school, and that's a debt I will never be able to repay. Dave Sim is, age-wise, more of a peer, but he was so far along as one of the precious few truly autonomous, self-made creators in comics when I met him in the early 1980s that he completely revolutionized my understanding of what I was doing, the nature of the business I was working within, and the necessity of seizing the reins of my own work and life -- I cannot adequatly summarize all the ways Dave changed my life and work for the better. He was more generous to me than anyone in comics, save my closest friends and of course Joe Kubert, and my debt to Dave is another I'll never, ever be able to repay. I know; I've tried!

Are movies teachers? For example, is "Star Wars" just a fun romp in space?

Well, yes, they are, in many ways. But I won't engage with that concerning STAR WARS -- it's my belief STAR WARS inadvertantly "taught us," culturally, to either forget or blissfully block out the hard lessons of the Korean and Vietnam wars, and make war as a concept palatable and even desirable again to the current generation. Besides, I find all but the first two STAR WARS films (meaning the 1977 STAR WARS and THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK) to be quite bad AS films -- the last (in Lucas-land, the "first") three were truly abysmal, though they are handsomely mounted visually. Anyhoot, that's not what you wanted to know. I learned a vast amount from cinema -- but I think it's vital to emphasize that cinema for me is ALL cinema, not just the studio-manufactured assembly-line product 98% of my fellow Americans seem to be satisfied with and/or addicted to. Cinema is an incredible artform, and I love and learn from it all, from the most personal of experimental, avant-garde, underground films to films from around the world, from other cultures, to the most extreme and (to most people) reprehensible of exploitation, 'trash' and/or genre films. I love 'em all, and they've all taught me something; many I revisit, time and time again.

When you look at your own artwork, what do you see?

Jeez, Chris, what a question -- when it's cooking, I see life. The line, for me, is alive; black ink is alive. When it's not cooking, I see scratchings and scribbles, some of which cohere into something.

Movies and comics...have you ever done any animation?

Only in high school, experimenting with cheezy Kodak 8mm and Super 8mm (silent) cameras and stop-motion line-drawn or clay animation. Very crude, silly stuff, by and large: nothing was content-driven, it was all experiments with the craft, the tools, the toys. It culminated in an ambitious attempt to film Edgar Allan Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" in 1971 or '72, when I was a sophomore or Junior in high school; two of my friends and I constructed a clay face over a Renwall plastic model skull and 'dressed it up' and then mounted a stop-motion animation set in my bedroom, where we painstakingly removed the clay, frame by frame, and at critical junctures did some crude makeup effects (like replacing glass eyes with egg yolks at a key moment in Valdemar's rapid decay). We labored over this for at least three days and nights, then sent the roll of film off to Kodak and screened it when it came back. We were crushed: all our work passed in seconds, and looked laughable. I experimented more with filmmaking after that, but my passion for animation was gone with Valdemar's presto-rot sequence.

About three years ago, my son Dan and I took Michael Hanish's Adobe AfterEffects animation night-course at the Center for Digital Art; that awakened some excitement in me, I saw some great potential and possibilities, but alas, I had none of the necessary fundamental computer skills, much less computer equipment. The technology necessary to it all bores and stymies me completely. Give me pencil, ink and paper, or a keyboard, and leave me alone. I love animated films dearly, but the technology forever keeps me satisfied to be a viewer, not an animator.

When I taught animation, I found that comic book artists often had a hard time. They could draw beautifully, but when asked to do the next frame in a cycle they'd groan. Maybe there is so much action in each drawing that actual animation is irrelevant to comic artists? Thoughts?

Comics and animation are completely separate mediums, and what drives most cartoonists to one medium or the other are VERY different impulses. I am drawn (pun intended) to comics as a storyteller -- animating the image, per se, interests me not in the least. I ache to tell STORIES, and comics is an ideal medium to tell many of those stories (literature suffices for some, hence the pleasure I also derive from writing).

Too many people, cartoonists included, confuse the light-years-apart medium of comics and animation -- they are NOT at all similar, nor do the same needs inform those artist who work in either medium (though a precious few cartoonists do work in both -- prominent among them Jeff Smith of BONE here in the US, and in Japan Hayao Miyazaki of NAUSICAA fame, which he both wrote and drew as a multi-volume manga and produced/directed as an anime feature). The juxtaposition of panels, pages, and most of all the magic of the 'gutter' between panels, creates illusory "movement" in the reader's imagination in a way quite unlike animation -- thus, too, the time necessary to creating a story in comics form is quite different from that necessary to animating a figure, much less telling a story in animation. They are very different mediums with very different disciplines and demands, and I'm not surprised your experience has demonstrated that so fully.

What did you think of the 24 pages in 24 hours challenge at BMAC? There was quite a turnout...

Man, it was phenomenal! I've written at length about that experience, both on my blog (www.srbissette.com/theblog.html) and in the lengthy introduction for the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center book collection of the 24 Hour comics created there in August, so I'll direct your online readers there, if that's OK. But really, it was amazing. To think, what started in Scott McCloud's Amherst, MA apartment and my little studio-trailer on Lower Dover Road in Marlboro, VT has grown in a mere 15 years into what I witnessed at the Museum here in Brattleboro -- it just blows my mind. I'm so glad I lived to see it, to share in it a bit. And it is sooooooo cool that it happened here, in Brattleboro!

I'm sure everyone asks you about Swamp Thing, Taboo, etc. What's the question you would ask about these works? How would you answer?

Hey, Chris -- do your job! Ask your questions, I'll give you answers...

That was a question. Do you ever hide things/messages in your art?

Does the Pope shit in the woods? Is the bear Catholic? You bet, mon frere! Sometimes it's just infantile nonsense, sometimes its the secret of life. Good luck divining which is which.

Have you ever seen a place that rivals North Port, Florida? (No fair saying Charlotte Harbor).

Uh, what do you mean? For strip malls?? Ravenous, stranded dog-eating gators? God bless Florida, 'cuz my parents moved there from our northern VT home back in '76, but I haven't much love for the place. It's the elephant's graveyard, in a perverse way... I love seeing my parents, but can't wait to get home every time!

Is there anything you'd like to answer that never gets asked?

Well, maybe. But after answering (almost) 19 questions, you'll forgive my deferring this one to you, a'la (Swamp Thing) question #17. You got a question, I'll provide an answer, if I can.