I remember when Garry Shandling was on the Charlie
Rose Show. Instead of the normal interview they
just turned on the cameras as soon as he walked in and
let them roll for the hour. Charlie did chime in with
a question just to keep Garry from going too off
topic. I found a similar situation with Evan Dorkin.
Once we got talking we just didn’t stop until it was
over then we talked some more. He is an extremely
funny and interesting guy who can talk. Mainly we
talked about his new show on Cartoon Network called Welcome
to Eltingville.
Evan has done humor comics for about 12 years now
and has created some major mainstays in comics such as
Mike & Cheese and Hectic Planet.
More recently he turned his collection of various
strips, which included the original Welcome to
Eltingville strips, into Dork. His writing
partner and a cartoonist in her own right is Sarah
Dyer. Please enjoy my interview.
And anyone who knows Evan Dorkin’s middle name,
please email me with it.
Dan Epstein: When was the pilot for Welcome to
Eltingville finished?
Evan Dorkin: We got the final print in November
[2001].
DE: You’ve been developing it for so long. Why
did it take so long to hit the air?
ED: It takes a while for even a comic book to
come out. When you’re dealing with a large company
it’s not just one person saying I feel like making a
comic book. Let me solicit it and see if I could get
it out on time like I used to do when I was younger.
It took a year for the negotiations and the contracts
because the lawyers put in things that help them out
then we want to take things out that don’t benefit
us and things like that. Just the fact that we didn’t
want to move to Los Angeles took extra time.
Then you work up a pitch bible then a script then
that gets edited then approved. Then you do all the
designs. I’ve never worked on a pilot for anything
before plus Sarah [Dyer] and I did pretty much
everything so I could not be designing the characters
while I was writing them and vice versa. But
apparently this is how it goes; you work on something
for a while. And since it hasn’t been ordered as a
show Cartoon Network hasn’t been throwing a ton of
people to work on multiple episodes.
DE: How many episodes do you have done?
ED: Just one, the pilot.
DE: Then Cartoon Network will just milk it on Adult
Swim for a while.
ED: I have no idea what they’re going to do.
Honestly I’m not being fastidious. We only found out
a few weeks ago that they were airing it and we don’t
know if there will be any repeat airings. That’s not
a complaint, we just don’t know. We’ve had a very
good working relationship with the network. It’s a
lot easier to work with them than a lot of comic book
companies actually.
DE: A friend of mine writes for Sealab 2021
so he tells me all about them and how laid back they
are.
ED: They write that show? Oh ha ha. That’s
what people say about Space Ghost [Coast to
Coast] too. Things are really loose with the
Williams Street shows. We were pretty heavily involved
with Space Ghost but we weren’t there for the
day to day. The show was never canceled it just
disappeared for a while. It was on hiatus. The
fifteen-minute shows are almost like mini-comics for
cable. I liked working on Space Ghost because
they let us do whatever we wanted. They let us do
whatever we wanted to on Eltingville as well
but with Space Ghost there was a bigger budget
and other things like that its not as slapdash.
DE: Will Eltingville become any less dirty
once it hits television?
ED: Oh definitely, you can’t curse on the
Cartoon Network. Eltingville is kind of a pay
cable HBO/Showtime kind of strip. But as far as the
show goes we cleaned it up. But if the sum of the
strip is the cursing then it’s not a very good
comic. I can’t complain too much if it fails. I
concentrated more on the characters and the sitcom
aspect of the strip, which were always there. They
were little geek tragedies with three acts and
character flaws taking them down.
I think it’s an aggressive show. Its not a show
filled with innuendo, I wasn’t trying to be the Powerpuff
Girls or South Park. That’s been done
already. If I can’t go completely R rated with the
cursing then there’s no part in being coy and using
bleeps and trying to push the network and tweak the
viewers. I’m just not really interested in that
because curse words are everywhere and I still have
the strips if I want to use the words fuck and cunt. I’m
not going to revolutionize animation. I’m not going
get into huge fights to show characters asses; I don’t
find that to be a big creative triumph or to get to say the
word shit. I just wanted this to a mean Honeymooners
kind of show about moron geeks who are utter
bastards.
Some readers are probably going to pissed off that
there is no cursing and if that’s what they wanted
to see on TV then they could watch The Sopranos
or South Park.
DE: But you’re also not going after only your
comic book audience.
ED: Anybody who’s ever read the strip will
realize that we did work really hard to adapt the
strip and keep the characters the same, its
recognizable. When I was a kid I was really pissed off
at that Captain America’s costume stunk and none of
the supporting cast was there. The villains weren’t
any good; I think Christopher Lee with a cane pointed
it dangerously. His shield looked like crap. Some
people get really worked up over that stuff when they’re
kids and still get really worked up over it when they’re
adults.
I’m not going to say I don’t care about the
people who read the book. But if I only did the show
for them that’s about 20,000 people tops, not
counting readers in Hollywood who buy every comic book
to read for their bosses. If I got every reader of
mine and no one else, it would bomb. We played down
some of the more obscure comic book references. It’s
less about comic books and more about pop culture. The
strip is kind of like that as well.
The one good sign is that Sarah’s dad has a copy
of the tape and he started showing it around to people
who don’t understand most of the jokes. But they
still liked it because they understood most of the
characters. They understood what they goals were. When
I was kid and watched Monty Python or SCTV, I
wouldn’t get all the references. You’re watching a
British comedy and there is a culture difference. When
you’re watching Mystery Science Theatre you
don’t get every reference. I wanted to throw some
jokes in there where you don’t have know science
fiction or comics movies or pop culture to get them. I
found that over the years that people who don’t even
like comic books that much like Eltingville
still respond to the mania and obsessiveness of the
characters.
At this point I don’t even know who will watch
this thing. I told my mother to not even watch it. She would find it utterly boring because she
won’t care about trivia contests over Boba Fett
figures or four kids beating the hell out of each
other over Dungeons and Dragons. She’s sick
of that.
DE: She didn’t like it when you did it.
ED: Right, how the mother screams into the
basement on the show is how my mom and everyone else’s
mom was in my geek circle. This thing was commissioned
by adults who aren’t as big geeks as I am. So they
know what they got on their hands. I just hope that
people don’t expect that full R-rated comic book
stuff. I love when people write and ask me why I didn’t
go to HBO with this. Like I could. I’m not selling
any of this stuff I don’t have an agent and I don’t
have a manager. Sarah and I don’t use
representation, because we’re not chasing anything.
I’m happy doing comics. If someone calls and asks me
to work on Space Ghost or Superman or a
pilot. I’ll do it, but I’m not hustling for
animation work or licensing my characters. I’m
shocked as shit that Eltingville is going on the air.
DE: The money must be nice.
ED: To be quite honest, the amount of work we’ve
done on this thing and the amount of money we were
paid, I could have done a monthly book for Marvel or
DC and probably made more. But that’s not the point.
I did this because ever since I was a kid, I’ve
loved animation and I always wanted to make a cartoon
and never got to. When I went to New York University
for animation I set up too large a project and never
got to finish. When I was a teenager I got out of
comics and really got into animation. I went to film
school and that got beat out of me. I didn’t like
most people in film school, their goals and especially
the fact that I would have to work with some of these
people if I ever got a career going didn’t appeal to
me. I like the idea of working at home and I got
interested in comic books again especially since
interesting stuff like Love & Rockets and Neat
Stuff was coming out. But I ended up falling back into
animation like Space Ghost and Superman
all because of my small press work.
DE: So you got into comics to do comics.
ED: Yeah. Definitely.
DE: That doesn’t always seem to be the mentality
nowadays.
ED: Well there are plenty of people in comics
to do comics. Its just that people aren’t talking
about them in Wizard or the Buyer’s Guide
or on the big websites. A guy like Dan Clowes hits big
with a movie that does really pretty well and now he’s
got an Oscar nomination but he still gets an issue of Eightball
out and the last issue was really good. There have
always been people who use comics as stepping-stones,
one way or another. There have always been people who
are have been pretty bald-faced about wanting comics
to be their stepping stones to film and TV some of
them come with tail between their legs backs to comics
and the realistic ones keep their mouths shut and
still their books because they love them and they
realize that Hollywood could chew you up and spit you
out.
We haven’t had a call to do any animation work in
a long time and we may never get that call ever again.
That sucks but that’s fine because I’m working on
four or five comic projects right now. I’m keeping
busy. I like doing the animation because it pays
really really well and I like having an audience for
my work, but the funny thing is you don’t get any
response from doing the animation. Except for people
who already know your work from comics. You don’t
know whether people like anything or didn’t. I’ve
gotten 200+ letters on an issue of Dork and I
get maybe three letters from any animation I’ve done
because you’re a cog in somebody else machine.
Eltingville was a good situation because one of
the reasons we agreed to do it was because we had a
really good working relationship with the people at
the Cartoon Network. They have a really good
sensibility. They like the kinds of comics, the kind
that doesn’t sell very well. They told us that they
don’t have a ton of money but they could give us a
lot of control. Working on the show was a lot like
working on the strip, any limitations that I had I put
on myself, if I was to go back and do it again I would
ramp up some of the material. I think I was a little
too aware of the PG rating which became a PG-14 rating
anyway, which I wish I knew at the time. I would
definitely rewrite this thing. I would make it even
crazier and more aggressive. But you don’t know
until you do it.
DE: How much did you pay for your Boba Fett action
figure?
ED: I didn’t pay anything for mine. I didn’t
even really want one until after I did the show. Then
I wanted it as a stupid totem. At San Diego one year a
guy offered to trade it to me for a quick drawing. It’s
in a closet somewhere right now under a bunch of junk.
I had it out while I was doing the pilot but put it
back when I was done. I used to be a big Star Wars fan
when I was a kid; I actually really hate it now.
DE: It sucks now.
ED: I’ve hated it since the third movie. I
still haven’t seen the prequel. I’m still into a
lot of garbage culture but Star Wars and Star
Trek is something I can’t stand.
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