by Mike Rhode
Since I first saw his cartoons about books and reading on the
next-to-last page of the New York Times Book Review, Grant Snider has been one of my
favorite cartoonists. His new book, The Art of Living: Reflections onMindfulness and the Overexamined Life (Abrams Comic Arts, $19) is full of his
delightful single-page multi-panel cartoons that can make a reader pay attention
and wonder about their lives and goals. I was very pleased to be offered the
opportunity to talk with Dr. Snider (for he’s an orthodontist by trade, and a
cartoonist by avocation.) Before getting into the interview, his new book is
described by his publisher as follows:
In The Art of Living,
cartoonist Grant Snider, author of The Shape of Ideas and I Will
Judge You by Your Bookshelf, has created an all-new collection of one- and
two-page comics that map his inner thoughts, poetic observations, and frequent
failures at living mindfully. With both humor and a touch of reality, The
Art of Living centers on mindfulness, but also empathy, relaxation,
gratitude, and awareness—evergreen subjects that are more important and
relevant now than ever. With a striking package, The Art of Living is an
extension of the themes of Snider’s first two books—which explored the creative
process and the love of reading—and is the perfect gift for those in a need of
reflection, commiseration, hope, and a little extra self-care. Above all,
Snider's cartoons will inspire and encourage a more thoughtful way of
experiencing the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can
make all the difference.
Mike Rhode: What type of comic work or cartooning do you
do?
Grant Snider: I do primarily web comics that get collected
in books, like The Art of Living, which
is coming out soon. Basically, I draw a weekly comic strip, find broader themes
in those, and gather them together in book form.
Mike Rhode: Why did you decide to start a web comic?
Grant Snider: That's an interesting question. I didn't
really know I was doing it, at first. As a very young cartoonist, just in
college and coming out of college, I thought that I would be submitting to
newspapers. And I still do publish work in newspapers occasionally, but I
realized a lot more people were seeing the stuff I was putting on my personal
blog, Incidental Comics, than could ever be seen in the traditional newspaper sense. So I
started updating that and putting it out in social media, and got a pretty nice
audience of online readers, and have continued to grow that over the years.
Mike Rhode: How do you actually do your cartoons? Is it
traditional pen and ink or a computer-aided combination? Some of your work
definitely looks like collage work to me.
Grant Snider: Yeah, it's a hybrid. All of the lines are
hand drawn and occasionally I'll use cut-up paper, or watercolor, or some other
medium, to give it a different personality or feel, but typically it's drawn in
ink and marker on tracing paper, which I'll then scan into Photoshop. Then I
use Photoshop to edit and compile and add digital color in most cases. But I
really like the traditional way of working. I'm a little bit too uptight to
make my finished pieces an amazing piece of gallery work that I could put up on
a wall. So it ends up in all these little scraps that then get thrown into the
digital world and compounded into the finished composition.
Mike Rhode: You are not alone in doing it that way. With
the lettering, do you do that by hand or is that on the computer?
Grant Snider: Yep. It's all hand lettering.
Mike Rhode: To go into a little bit of your background, I'm
wondering when and where you were born?
Grant Snider: 1985 in San Diego, California, but I moved
to Kansas when I was two and I grew up in the Wichita, Kansas area. And I've
basically been in here my whole life, except for a foray into Kansas City and
Denver as a young adult.
Mike Rhode: What is your training and education in
cartooning?Grant Snider: Studying lots and lots of other cartoonist
work and trying to do my best to imitate it. I don't have any formal art
training, but I think like most people, you kind of learn by doing. Seeing an
amazing comic strip, like Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes, wondering how the
creator made it, and then doing my own version of it, was probably how I got
started. And then eventually gathering enough influences together, I think I
developed a bit of my own style, which is hopefully still developing. It's all
been learning by publishing and by trying to make something new each week.
Mike Rhode: Who are your other influences? Is Mutts an influence on you? Reflecting
the subject of your current book, The Art
of Living, the inspirational thoughtfulness is something that Patrick
McDonnell is known for.
Grant Snider: It wasn't in my local newspaper growing up,
but I do remember seeing it when I'd go to the Denver area to visit family. But
later on I found a Mutts collection
of maybe a decade's worth of strips or more, and I just absolutely loved it. I
don't know if it was as much of an overt influence, because I think what I was
doing was fairly developed by the time I discovered it and really dove into it.
But I really see it as like a companion strip.
Patrick McDonnell's work, I feel, is of a similar mindset with a kind of
warm feeling, and obviously he has a hugely high level of technical quality
that I hope to get close to.
Mike Rhode: He's considerably older than you, so you have
plenty of time. Is there anybody else you want to list as influences besides Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts?
Grant Snider: The big three that I was basically studying
and riffing off of, and doing my versions of, when I decided I wanted to become
a cartoonist were Roz Chast, the great New
Yorker cartoonist; Matt Groening, the Simpsons
creator who also did Life in Hell, a
weekly alt comic strip in the eighties and nineties; and Tom Gauld, a British
cartoonist who draws some New Yorker
covers and some amazing graphic novels, and for a long time did a lot of
literary comics, which I really love.
Mike Rhode: Gauld still does those. I was going ask about Tom Gauld somewhere in this interview. That is
an interesting group of influences. I don't know that I would've picked up on
any of them but Gauld for you. Are you old enough to actually have seen
Groening’s Life in Hell in
newspapers?
Grant Snider: No. At least I never have seen it actually
in newsprint form. Like any good kid, I was looking at my parents' bookshelves
and I saw my dad had this comic book. I think it was The Big Book of Hell and I was like, “Oh, this is interesting.” I
read him, but I don't think I understood most of the jokes as a teen, or
pre-teen, when I got ahold of it. But I did see kind of what he was doing,
where he was going with things, and stole the book from my dad, and over the years,
I kind of studied it. I really took a lot of the humor and his visual style and
visual voice. I don't think you can see a ton of it in my work right now, but
for my early comics, I was trying to be as witty and ironic as those and maybe
failing. The same for Roz Chast. If you go back to some stuff I was doing for
my college newspaper, you can see, “Oh, there's Grant trying to imitate Roz
Chast.” I don't see them as overt influences
right now, but I still do love to read their work and get a lot of joy from it.
Mike Rhode: Were you just seeing Chast in The New Yorker, or were you picking up
collections?
Grant Snider: At first in The New Yorker. I didn’t live under a cultural rock, but certain
things I was just never exposed to as a kid, so I never saw a New Yorker magazine, or never was never
aware of it till midway through college. My brother brought home a stack of old
New Yorker magazines from his
architecture library. I looked through those and I was seeing the cartoons (while
I maybe had a vague recollection of what a New
Yorker cartoon could be.) I saw Roz Chast’s work and I was a little bit
turned off by it. Like it just made me feel weird. I wasn't responding to it. I
put it away, thinking “What's this strange drawing style and sense of humor?”
And then maybe a week or two later, I picked the same magazines up again, went
through them, and I was like, “Oh, she's a genius. I get it perfectly.” I love
that just very idiosyncratic voice, the personal line quality, and everything
she did.
Mike Rhode: I was the same way with The New Yorker and also never saw it until I was in college. Now
she's an icon, but years ago in 1978, when Lee Lorenz brought her on,
apparently there was quite a bit of a debate about her work.
Grant Snider: I love to see her old, very first comic
strip collections. I've gotten from the library and they're just so amazingly
weird. I love them.
Mike Rhode: Let's go back to your new book on mindfulness.
Are you doing these cartoons partly for your own mental health? Does the
mindfulness aspect of them help you in your own life? Are you coming from
experience here?
Grant Snider: Experience, but with a little bit of artistic
distance from it. I've always kind of seen my drawings as … somebody described them
as ‘self-help’ for myself, which I thought was a good phrase. I'm not
necessarily doing it to show somebody else, “Oh, this is how you should like
live your life.” More so, it's me exploring my own thoughts and feelings, and
maybe things I'm struggling with at a given time. One of those things I've
really (and I think the world has) struggled with in the last decade or two is
focus and attention, and keeping on task with all the digital distractions and
devices. So for me, writing and drawing is a way to get into a better frame of mind, to be very
intentional about what I'm focusing on, to be mindful of things around me, thoughts and
feelings inside of me and, hopefully to make some interesting art from it.
Mike Rhode: That's exactly what I was trying to get at,
because the feeling I got was that your cartoons were very personal. They
weren't meant to be a self-help book. They were, like you said, self-help for
yourself.
Grant Snider: There's also a bit of irony there, because I
know like whatever amazing idea I have one day of how to change my life, and
live differently, and improve myself, is probably going to fall flat or at
least come up a bit short in practice. And I hope hopefully I have enough of
that humor in it to make it something a little bit different than self-help.
Mike Rhode: Absolutely. You mentioned you were a student newspaper
cartoonist. Can you talk a little bit about that?
 |
His first online strip from March 2009
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Grant Snider: Oh, it's a little embarrassing to go back
and look at them, which I think most people feel about their old work, but for
five days a week, I was drawing single panel cartoons for the University of
Kansas student newspaper called The
Daily Kansan. These would be in print, which was pretty cool. I could see
somebody look over somebody's shoulder in lecture hall and see them reading my
strip, which was a huge ego boost for me as a young cartoonist. And
occasionally I'd hit the nail on the head and have some something actually
pretty funny or, or interesting, but that was more by accident. Just getting
that regular rhythm and routine of drawing, I think, let me try a lot of new
things. They hardly ever rejected anything, so I could kind of do whatever I
wanted, for better or worse. Once I got out of college I realized, “Man, I
really, I love doing this. I have to keep it going.” I'm not drawing a daily
strip. I don't have any aspiration to do that, but I can take some of those
things I learned about creating on the fly and bring them to my weekly work.
Mike Rhode: That was a big circulation newspaper at the
time…
Grant Snider: I would imagine. The student body was
probably 20 to 30,000. I don't know how many copies they printed every day, but
you certainly saw them strewn all across campus in every corner.
Mike Rhode: How did you go from that to dental school and
orthodontics?
Grant Snider: [laughs] It all happened together. I was
actually an engineering student and I always had an artistic leaning, but never
had a specific idea of how I wanted to incorporate it into my work life or my avocation.
When I got to dental school, I started drawing for their student newspaper in
Kansas City and started submitting to some local newspapers - the alt weekly
and then the bigger paper, The Kansas City
Star. I eventually got interest and did some strips there, and that's when
I really started to realize, “Oh, this is maybe something I could do as a side
career or, a fun hobby that pays 50 bucks a month,” with no expectations that
would grow into anything bigger than that.
Mike Rhode: So you're in Kansas City and so is Andrews
McMeel, the biggest comic strip syndicator. Did you ever approach them?
Grant Snider: I think maybe right before I was about to graduate
and leave Kansas City, I did meet with John Glynn of Andrews McMeel. We just
talked and had a nice lunch and it was more a ‘getting to know you’ type thing.
But yeah, I never quite made the connection until it was about time to pack up
and do something different. But I think that's a cool connection and I had a
fun time meeting John.
Mike Rhode: And how about the Hallmark greeting card
people that are based out there? You didn't talk to them either, I take it?
Grant Snider: No, I was so involved in working on teeth
and trying to keep a comic strip going that I never approached them. I was
probably half a block from the Hallmark offices at dental school, but so I'd
always walked by there. Yeah, greeting cards I think would've been an
interesting challenge, but never something I had huge aspirations to do.
Mike Rhode: I can understand that. This is not an insult,
because I think greeting card cartooning is a very important part of the field
(although underrated), but I think you could have been an excellent greeting
card cartoonist.
Grant Snider: I've talked to some children's book authors
and illustrators and other people who've worked in that industry, and I think
you would learn a ton of stuff and have a potential to get a lot of creative
juices going that you could take into your personal work as well.
Mike Rhode: A lot of Mad
Magazine illustrators were greeting card cartoonists like Peter Paul Porges
and Jack Davis, but it's just something scholars of the history of the field are
not paying attention to at the moment.
Grant Snider: That’s true. Yeah.
Mike Rhode: If you could, what in your career would you do
over or change?
Grant Snider: I think early on, I just wanted everything
to happen right away. I had my first comic strip published in the New York Times Book Review and I was
like, “Okay, I've made it, this is it. I'm gonna get a big book deal. I'm going
to get this huge audience.” And I think five to seven years later, I was still
waiting for that to happen. Instead of more just kind of having fun with the
creative aspect of it, and focusing less on where I'm getting my work published
and who's reading it. I think a lot of those things happen naturally just by
consistently working. If I could have told my old creative self, “Hey, don't
worry about that stuff. It'll come naturally - just focus on making great work.”
It would've saved me a lot of anxiety.
Mike Rhode: That type of self-knowledge is tough.
Grant Snider: You can't develop a cartooning voice and
following and a body of work overnight. Maybe some people can be instantly good
at cartooning or whatever art form they're trying, but it is really something
that takes quite a long time to develop.
Mike Rhode: Web comics is kind of changing the world a
little bit lately in that some people pop onto Webtoons, and they seem to come
out of nowhere, and all of a sudden they've got a million followers, but that
tends to be more for sequential type stories that are manga-influenced and
meant to be read on a phone. You mentioned the New York Times Book Review, which was where I first starting seeing
your book-based cartoons. How did how did you get into the Book Review? Did they approach you? Did you send submissions to
them?
Grant Snider: So I was sitting in a darkened lecture hall
in my orthodontic residency, probably on my laptop, just scrolling when I
should have been paying attention to the lecture or whatever. I saw a strip by Wendy McNaughton, who's an amazing illustrator from San Francisco. It had appeared
in the New York Times Book Review back
page. I think it was “Meals of the Great Writers” or something like that [“Snacks of the Great Scribblers” – ed.]. Pretty clever. And
I saw at the bottom of this webpage, there's a link of somebody to contact at
the Book Review. So I said, “Oh,
that's interesting. I usually don't see a place to submit, let me send them an
email.” I sent an email saying, “Hey, I really like this strip, and here's a
few things I've done in the past. I'd like to try to send you guys some work.”
Surprisingly, they emailed back pretty quick. I sent them a few ideas. They
liked a handful of them and that's how I got started. I do remember that
feeling of getting the email back and being almost shocked that they would take
the time to respond and I’m pretty sure I ran out of the classroom real quick
-- in a different class session, of course. It wasn't the same day, but I got
real excited about it.
Mike Rhode: The traditional “over the transom.” Let's continue in that
vein and ask how you got hooked up with The
New Yorker. Are you working with the cartoon editor, Emma Allen?
Grant Snider: I've submitted a few things to her and
they've published a couple things online. There was a time when I thought I
wanted to try to draw single panel New
Yorker cartoons like many of the amazing cartoonists have over the years. I
tried my hand at that and realized it wasn't quite working, so I've
occasionally submitted like a longer piece for their online version. But
they're not right now a place I'm submitting to regularly, although I might in
the future.
Mike Rhode: But it was the Emma Allen generation.
Grant Snider: No, I don't think I had any contact with
Robert Mankoff when he was cartoon editor.
Mike Rhode: Your latest book is published by Abrams,
right? Did they do the previous book?
Grant Snider: They did The
Shape of Ideas back in 2017. And then IWill Judge You by Your Bookshelf, which came out right around the time that
everyone was locked inside their houses, in 2020. This is my third book with
Charlie Kochman and Abrams Comic Arts, The
Art of Living.
Mike Rhode: How did you get hooked up with Abrams? Do you
propose a themed collection to Charlie or does he say to you, “What do you have
now that we could work on?”
Grant Snider: We first got in touch through my book agent,
Judy Hansen. I mentioned that time when I got my first Book Review strip published, and I thought I was going to take over
the world. I also reached out to try to find a book agent, because I thought it
was the right time. And Judy was kind enough to take me on, as you know, in the
very early stages. She knew Charlie - was good friends with him over the years
- and thought we would make a good fit. When I first talked to Charlie, I didn't
really have a clear idea of how I could organize the strips into a book, but he
helped shape them and was instrumental in making them feel and work in book
form. For the latest one I did, after a conversation with him where I basically
said, “Oh, I have no idea what the next book should be,” we talked a little bit.
I came back to it a couple of days later and realized, “Oh, I think mindfulness
is the broad theme for my next collection.”
Mike Rhode: I was quite amused by the index at the back of
the book, which sort the cartoons by a type of mindfulness: “I will pay attention
to what's in front of me;” “I will make a blank space for each day.” Was that
you, or was that somebody else who was suggesting indexing it that way?
Grant Snider: For all three of the book collections of
comics, they've taken one of my strips as their organizing principle. In the
creativity book, The Shape of Ideas, it
was a comic strip called “Genius Is” where it's broken into inspiration, perspiration,
desperation, et cetera, and those became the chapter headings. From a comic in
the bookshelf book, it was “Some Confessions of a Book Fiend,” which was a
working title before we changed it. So these various reader confessions showed
you're a true and desperate lover of books. In this latest one, it was a comic
I drawing called “The Attention Manifesto.” The whole book didn't really feel
itself like a manifesto per se, so it wasn't really working as a title for the
book, but it was a nice way to separate the comics among these various themes.
So yeah, the current index headings are all taken from my “Attention
Manifesto,” which links the book together.
Mike Rhode: Well, that's very clever. For this current
book, are you hoping that it'll make it into the self-help realm? I know we
talked about how you didn't intend it that way, but are you cross marketing it
as both a mindfulness and a cartooning book?
Grant Snider: That's an interesting question. I leave
those thoughts to the people putting them in bookstores and doing the specific
promotion. So I haven't thought about that. I would consider it more of personal
philosophy, but where it ends up in a bookstore is a little bit outside of my
care, if that makes sense. [laughs] I try not to think about it too much.Mike Rhode: I was just wondering if Abrams was trying to
help you break into an under-served market. There’s not a lot of self-help
cartoon books I think.
Grant Snider: To be honest, I wouldn't mind seeing it in
either place. I do think it maybe belongs a little bit more among graphic
novels, but it's not a traditional graphic novel in that sense. I don't know if
it's going to be more responded to by people who are used to reading comics and
graphic novels, or by somebody who has never picked one up before. I’d like it
to have an audience in both groups.
Mike Rhode: That's an interesting point. And I honestly do
not know what the answer to that is either. It would be interesting to know who
you're appealing to with this book.
Grant Snider: If people knew how to sell books, every book
would be a best seller, right?
Mike Rhode: Yes, exactly. So are you a great reader?
Grant Snider: I go through phases. Right now I'm in a
pretty good reading cycle. But I I'll also go through times where I read less
or feel like I don't have the attention or patience to read. So it really
depends, but I do try to read most nights whether it's picture books, comics,
poetry, novels, non-fiction, et cetera. I know my reading list or books I've
read, pales in comparison to some of my friends, but I would say I'm above
average.
Mike Rhode: A follow up question would be, are you a book
collector? Because many people end up with a lot of books that they put on
shelves…
Grant Snider: Inadvertently. Absolutely, yes. From the
hundreds of books, my family gets from the library, both for me, my wife and
our kids. We have a bunch that we don't technically own, but are strewn all
about the house. I tend to accumulate mainly books with more pictures, just
because I feel like I can return to those from visual reference or visual
inspiration. I'm not as quite attached to a really good novel; I don't have the
need to own it or keep it on my shelf, even though some, I just end up
accumulating, just because. I would say I love collecting books with drawings
and pictures of all kinds.
Mike Rhode: I think you mentioned in passing reading comic
books -- do you actually read comic books or comic strip collections?
Grant Snider: I've never, and not out of any distaste or
dislike, but I've never read like comic books in the superhero genre. I do have quite a few graphic novels on my
shelves, but it's not something I have to read every single one that I can. I do
think a lot of my favorite books are like old collections of Jules Feiffer’s comics
or old New Yorker cartoon anthologies,
which I don't think most people think of when they say the term comic books.
Mike Rhode: No, no. Certainly for many years, people made
the point of insisting that those were not
comic books.
Grant Snider: But it's all words and pictures and drawings
and panels. There's certainly different styles and genres of those, but it's
all comics. [laughs] I don't, I don't discriminate against any type of comics.
Mike Rhode: Yeah. Jules Feiffer did graphic novels in the
sixties, and now Roz Chast, possibly towards the tail end of her career
presumably, is doing them. It's all comics, but I think Will Eisner liked the
term ‘sequential art.’
Grant Snider: Sequential art? Yeah. It would've been
interesting. I've really gotten into the Peanuts
collections of the decades of strips from Fantagraphics, because I never
read Peanuts that much as a kid. It
just seemed boring. Now, I think it's amazing. I would be curious if Charles
Schulz were alive today, would he have been coerced into doing a graphic novel
and what might that have looked like? That's an interesting question.
Mike Rhode: Yeah, it is. There were Peanuts comic books back at the very beginning of the strip and he
did not draw them. He really disliked that. I guess once he started in
animation, he had to give up drawing everything himself. But yeah, that's an
interesting question. The world does move on. Let's go to your children's books.
I have your There Is a Rainbow right
here in front of me. This one is all colored pencil, right?
Grant Snider: Yes.
Mike Rhode: It says on the press release that Abrams sent
me that you've done several other children's books, which somehow I missed. Can
you talk a little bit about why you do children's books, how you do children's
books, and who you do children's books with?
Grant Snider: Let's
see, the start of it was being just a lifelong reader of picture books. I was
always the guy, before I had kids, before I had a family, who would still be in
that section of the library, looking for amazing illustrations and stories, and
just getting excited about the ideas in there. So it's something I've followed
throughout my life. And I still have a lot of picture books that I had as a kid
that really still inspire me, like the book Tuesday by David Wiesner with frogs flying through
the air and just great drawings. Once I was a little bit more established with
my cartooning style and felt like I had figured a few things out with that, I
was like, “Okay, what's a new creative challenge? I'd like to make a picture
book.”
It was a lot more frustrating than my ascent into comics,
in that I thought I had had all these skills from making comics and it turns
out it's a completely different art form. Some of the things that I was used to
falling back on just didn't translate or didn't help me and almost hindered me
in making picture books. So I tried a bunch of drafts using my same book agent,
sent them to some editors, but nothing was working until finally it was. The
first book I had published was called WhatColor Is Night? and it came out with Chronicle Books. I've worked with them
for five or six books now. It's been a very interesting challenge. I still
don't feel like I have mastered the formula, but maybe that's not the point. It
gives me another way to tell stories and try new things in my art.
Mike Rhode: Your first three children's books were done
solo and the past two have been with other writers?
Grant Snider: I did What
Color Is Night? (2019), What Sound Is
Morning? (2020), My Words (2020),
all of which I wrote and illustrated. About the time I was finishing up the
last couple of those, I got to collaborate with Travis Jonker, who I had corresponded
with online a little bit. He had an idea for a story I liked, so I came up with
the art for Blue Floats Away. And
then the same editor I worked with at Chronicle had a proposal from Theresa
Trinder for There Is A Rainbow. I
thought it was a nice story and would be a cool challenge, so I did that. I
don't consider myself primarily an illustrator. I'm used to having both my
words and my drawings to obsess over, but those were both fun because they got
me out of my normal routine.
Grant Snider: Actually the collaboration with Travis on
the book, Blue Floats Away, we had approached
our mutual book agents who approached the editors together. That one was more
collaborative, I think, than the traditional picture book process.
Mike Rhode: In children's books, will you be returning to
being the solo author of them again?
Grant Snider: Yeah. I still keep my door open to
illustration projects, but it's not something I'm actively pursuing. I think if
the right thing comes across my desk, I'd love to try that again. But I do have
another children's book called One Boy
Watching that's out this summer and it's in colored pencil again. It's my
autobiographical experiences riding a bus through the Kansas countryside as a
kid. And then another one called Nothing
Ever Happens on a Grey Day that I'm finishing up the art for now.
Mike Rhode: Is there anybody else you want to recommend in
the children's book field as people you look up to or as influences?
Grant Snider: There's a bunch. [laughs] I'd be saying some
to the exclusion of others… Another
person I list is a cartooning influence who has one or two fantastic picture
books is J.J. Sempé, who does covers for The New Yorker in his eighties. He's
somebody whose work I just completely admire and try to imitate at times.
Mike Rhode: I can see some of his influences, especially
his multi-panel stuff that was done in France and then moved over here. In your
list of books, it looks like Quiet Power,
the first book you did, was illustrating for somebody else.
Grant Snider: Yep. Susan Cain, the author, had a bestseller
for adults called Quiet, and this was the version of that for
young readers. I got to sneak in some comics. I got to do some spot illustrations
as well as the cover. That was exciting because that was the first book that
was widely published that had my work in it.
Mike Rhode: Were those new pieces for that book?
Grant Snider: Yeah, they were all inspired by the text. I
got to read the manuscript and do a bunch of sketches, and drink a lot of
coffee, and take it in a bunch of different ways.
Mike Rhode: How do you work this stuff in around a family
of five and an orthodontic practice?
Grant Snider: I work on Tuesdays and Thursdays at home in
a little corner of my kindergartner's room. It has a door that locks, it has
nice windows, and it has a good workspace. I really protect my drawing time. I
try to be at the drawing table from eight to two or nine to three on Tuesdays
and Thursdays. I'm always doing kind of some of the ancillary tasks throughout
the week, but those are my two big chunks of creative time. You really just
need to string together some consistent chunks of creativity to get a lot done.
You don't need 24 hours, seven days a week. That's a recipe for insanity.
[laughs] The times I've had that freedom makes me think the constraint of
having a day job and having a big family is maybe in some ways helpful to my
creative process.
Mike Rhode: They may make you seek the mindfulness a
little more than most people do too.
Grant Snider: Oh yeah. It's spaces of quiet solitude are
hard to come by, but even more valued.
Mike Rhode: I wanted to ask you a little bit more about
your dental practice.
Grant Snider: I work at a satellite office of a larger
group practice.
Mike Rhode: Do the people in the practice and your
patients have any awareness that you have this second career?
Grant Snider: I know the people I work with do; as far as
the patients, maybe a handful of them do, but it's not something I advertise. I
keep try to keep those parts of my life somewhat separate. But I always think
it's nice when someone says, “Oh, hey, I read your book,” or “I like your
comics.” That's always a, a cool connection to make.
Mike Rhode: So the office is not decorated in posters from
your website? [laughs]
Grant Snider: Well, there's a few that they put up, not
that I asked them to do it, but I don't think they have my name or there'd be
any obvious connection unless you already knew.
Mike Rhode: Also from the medical point of view, graphic
medicine is obviously a hot thing these days. Have you had any thoughts about
doing any type of graphic medicine, explanatory text, or autobiographical, or
just a series of PSAs, or anything like that?
Grant Snider: No, but I've read some that are really good.
I know the book Smile by Raina
Telgemeier was a mega huge hit and for good reason. I think she's covered the
orthodontic basis pretty well. [both laugh] I don't want to try to match that.
I do love reading some physician authors, like Atul Gawande and the late Oliver
Sacks. Some of that's fascinating to me, but I've never had the spark or the
creative necessity to tackle that. I did do a lot of sketching of teeth and
different things when I was in dental school, just as ways to aid my studying,
but never for a wider audience. I think it's interesting; it's just the right
spark of inspiration has not yet arrived.
Mike Rhode: What work are you most proud of is one of my
standard questions.
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Nature of Ambition part 1
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Grant Snider: One strip I did that still resonates with me
when I reread it is one called “The Nature of Ambition,” which is in my book, The Shape of Ideas. My character, my
cartoon-self avatar in a way, is walking a crocodile as a metaphor for the
creative process and eventually gaining all these other exotic animals that
pull him away. He loses control of them and then goes back to his initial joy,
which was walking the crocodile. It works better if you read the strip, I
think.
Mike Rhode: What would you like to do or work on in the
future? You said you have a couple more children's books in hand now.
Grant Snider: I'm always interested to try and learn new
things in the children's picture book world. And every book is quite a bit
different in that. I do want to continue my regular comics strip Incidental Comics, and just keep being
excited about new ideas there. One other project I'm tackling in the coming
year is going to be a book of poetry comics for kids. I grew up reading Shel
Silverstein and thought, and still think, those poems are amazing as are his
illustrations. And he was a great cartoonist for grownups in his own. As well
as every other art form possible, he was a Renaissance man. But I want to make
a version of poetry comics that could rival a Shel Silverstein book. I’m not going
to try to make direct references there, but, but I always think of how valuable
those books were to me as a kid, and now as a grownup. I'd love to do a form of
comics that are poems that could be that special.
Mike Rhode: Are you thinking about running them through Incidental Comics first?
Grant Snider: I think some of them will appear there, but I
do think a lot of them will be published without having appeared on my blog.
Which is kind of a little bit, not harrowing, but makes me a little nervous
because I'm used to that instant feedback and knowing right away, “Okay. Does
my audience respond to it? Is it a dud? Is it good?” And having to trust my own
instinct plus that of my editor and my first readers will be kind of a new
thing.
Mike Rhode: How do you get feedback? Do people post on your
various social media sites?
Grant Snider: Yeah, mainly people commenting on like
Twitter or Instagram or Facebook. You can see this is something people respond
to, or maybe they didn't get it, or maybe there's something that made people
mad that I didn't anticipate. That doesn't happen too often. I try not to take
a whole bunch of stock into comments, but I do appreciate when something resonates
and sometimes I'll get emails from readers. The people whose opinions I value
the most probably are my first readers, my wife, Kayla, and my brother, Gavin.
They're the ones I show my strips to before I publish them. I know if both of
them thinks something's pretty good or working well, then chances are other
people outside the family will think so too.
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part 1 of the comic
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Mike Rhode: What do you do if you're in a rut, or you have
writer's block? You said you have two
set times a week to draw. What happens if nothing's flowing in one of those two
set times?Grant Snider: You know, invariably that happens at least
once a week. [laughs] I always have my old sketchbooks on hand, so I don't
necessarily have the pressure to create something fully formed from nothing. I
have a bunch of strips I've kind of jotted down or have the ideas for. It's
more just a matter of settling on which one to pursue. So I don't get writer's
block in the sense that like “I'm not going to make anything ever again,” it's
more like, “Hey, this, this comic's not coming as easy as I thought it would; let
me change course and find something different that's working and maybe come
back to it a little bit later.” I posted a strip today “Still Life” (March 11, 2022) that I had almost thrown away and
luckily just saved the scraps of it. Reworked a month or so later, it turned
out just fine.
Mike Rhode: You work in traditional sketchbooks then?
Grant Snider: Yep.
I find the cheapest spiral-bound, portable sketchbook that I'll have no qualms
about drawing badly in. I try to carry it most places. I am pretty unpretentious
about it because I feel like if I got a sketchbook that was really nice or
designer-y, I would never put a line down.
Mike Rhode: Yes, be paralyzed. Have you ever visited DC?
This is my local question.
Grant Snider: Yes,
but not since dental school. I went there when I won the college cartoonist award.
I got to go to the National Press Club and give a little five minute speech and
I got to meet Snoopy. Mine was a Charles M. Schulz award. None of the other serious
journalists there got to meet Snoopy, but it was a really cool experience. And
I think that was the last time I visited DC.
Mike Rhode: Was there anything else that struck you about
the city that you would like to come back and revisit?
Grant Snider: Just the huge amount of visual inspiration,
the architecture, the museums, all the history. It's a great place. It would be
a great place to go and spend a week with a sketchbook. And my mom’s family's
from there originally, but I rarely ever get out of the state.
Mike Rhode: Wrapping up, how has the COVID-19 outbreak
affected you personally and professionally?
Grant Snider: Personally, like most parents, there was a
lot of time with the kids. With their school routine disrupted, we home-schooled
for a year. They were obviously home the times where schools were not open, so
that was challenging, and fun in some ways. Creatively, it was interesting to
try to find the time and space to work when everybody's at home all the time, but
we got to go to parks and sketch and draw outdoors. That was pretty rewarding.
I think it's definitely my focus. I've been a little bit lucky in that I've
been able to go into my day job almost the entire time of the pandemic and my
work hasn't really changed there. But cartooning-wise, it's caused me to step
back a little bit and think about, “Okay, why am I doing this? What subjects do
I want to tackle? What's meaningful to me?” Because it just seems like a little
bit darker of a time to be alive. I don't know. And to just make some dumb joke
and put it on the Internet? I'm mean there's probably some value to that, but
that's not been my primary focus of the work I'm doing.
Mike Rhode: Would you say that the fact that you were able
to have enough material to do a mindfulness book now is an outgrowth of part of
the pandemic's cartoon?
Grant Snider: Yes, I think that definitely informed it. Now,
when I had pitched the book and had the book signed up, I believe it was pre-pandemic.
So it was more inspired by an experience of going on a writer's retreat and
then giving up a lot of things for Lent one year. But the pandemic did really
make about half the book into what it is today.
Mike Rhode: Were all the cartoons in it published already,
or is there new material just for the book?
Grant Snider: Some
of the spot illustrations that cover the organization were new, but all of the
cartoons have previously appeared elsewhere.
Mike Rhode: I much prefer the permanence of a book.
Grant Snider: I initially had hang-ups about it, but then
I realized, “Okay, there's maybe four or five readers out there who have every
single strip I post online memorized and, and taken to heart,” but most people
have either not encountered my work online before, or saw I quickly on their
phone, liked it and forgot about it. If you can get it in a more permanent form
in a book, that's an amazing thing.
Mike Rhode: Any closing thoughts? Is there anything I
missed that you'd like to get on the record?
Grant Snider: I think that the biggest joy of any
cartoonist is when somebody sees their drawings or their art and says, “Oh,
man, I want to put pen to paper and draw, or write something on my own.” If my
drawings can inspire younger readers, or even older readers, to pick up a pen
and start cartooning, I think that'd be the biggest compliment of all.
What do you do when you're in a rut or have writer's block?
