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One potato, two potato

J.T. Dockery and Nick Tosches team up for dizzying graphic novel

By Captain Comannokers

When pen hits paper, J.T. Dockery isn’t using any technologies that were developed since before the Great Depression when it comes to producing his illustrative art. “I’m analog forever,” Dockery states, confirming his old-school sensibilities. Steel tube technical pens like the rapidograph, which Dockery uses, hit the market in 1928. He must special order bristol board (illustration paper tough and absorbent enough to handle his intense pen and ink cross hatching), developed in 1893.  Even the nibs dipped into the ink were the invention of Joseph Gillott in 1859.

At the same time, though, Dockery’s not an anti-technology curmudgeon. If he were, he certainly would not be about to celebrate the release of Spud Crazy, his collaboration with author Nick Tosches. Email, that bastard offspring of the Pony Express, was the thing that first brought the two artists together. That, and the late, great Hubert Selby Jr., the son of a Kentucky coal miner who penned masterpieces like Last Exit to Brooklyn and Requiem for a Dream.

Sometime in the early 2000s, Selby’s 75th birthday was approaching and Tosches wanted to pull together a complete Selby bibliography—every article he’d ever written, and every article written about him, and so on—as something to bestow upon his friend as a present. Dockery had interviewed Selby for a piece that ran in X-Ray Magazine (the San Francisco-based publication that featured contributions from dudes named Hunter S., Ginsberg and Bukowski). The article led to Dockery receiving an email from Tosches, who was doing his homework and wanted to know a thing or two about this mysterious J.T. fellow who had interviewed one of his idols.

Tosches’ correspondence wasn’t just a run of the mill entry into Dockery’s inbox—it was an unsolicited email from a guy that Dockery nearly worshipped! Tosches was a contributor to Rolling Stone and Creem before he would go on to pen biographies on Jerry Lee Lewis, Hall and Oates, Dean Martin, boxer Sonny Liston, the oft-forgotten minstrel singer Emmett Miller, as well as works of fiction and poetry. The film rights to his 2002 novel, In the Hand of Dante, have been purchased by Johnny Depp for development.

When Dockery was 18 or 19, he got a book handed to him, Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock and Roll, written by Tosches. Dockery absorbed the book. Country left an indelible mark on his musical mind; he became an instant Tosches fan.

Does Tosches like comics?

That Selby connection left Dockery and Tosches with the occasional correspondence. In 2007, as MySpace was having its last hurrah as the place to hang out, Tosches asked the Smacks! (the obliterative rock and roll duo of Dockery and collaborator Brian Manley) to be friends.

Dockery wanted to investigate to make sure it was actually Tosches on the other end of the internet and not a fan page. In confirming his identity, Dockery noticed a blog on Tosches’ MySpace page about trying to find a particular work by underground comix artist Kim Deitch. Dockery, cyber-maven of the internet that he had become by the year 2007, jumped on The Comics Journal, and within hours had all the info that Tosches was searching for and more.

All this led up to the BIG question that Dockery would ask of Tosches: Have you ever thought of having any of your own work worked into a graphic novel?

Tosches had. As it turns out, the celebrated author was a fan of Dockery’s art. It was game on.

Spud Crazy gets planted

Dockery remembered a bizarre little screenplay in the Nick Tosches Reader (a collection of record reviews, articles, short fiction and other efforts). Titled “Spud Crazy,the screenplay is a meditation on potatoes, women’s legs/hosiery, and the burden of consciousness. While quite possibly not understanding a word of the damn thing, it all made just about perfect sense to Dockery.

“Nick is a confirmed leg man, as am I,” Dockery says. “Specifically, leg men that are into fully fashioned nylon stockings. I don’t consider it a fetish, I consider it a preference. “

Spud Crazy is “a film noir filled with poetic prose and flashbacks,” Dockery adds.  It is a vibe, a David Lynch-like experience where you don’t have to fully grasp it to understand the general tone and feel. “To me, Spud becomes an over-arching metaphor for being worn out, or down-and-out…rendered potato like?”

Dockery quickly went to work illustrating Tosches’ screenplay, tackling the first 15 pages. “I thought it was geared well toward illustrating it for a comic. In effect, I became the film director and visualized it.”

The two then began to shop the collaborative work around to different publishers. They got some polite interest down a few avenues; down others, they dishearteningly heard the sound of crickets. Dockery soldiered on and added the next 15 pages to form the 30-page book it is now. If the entire Spud Crazy story were to be finished at some point down the line, it would likely reach 60 or 70 pages.

Cross-hatch influences

Of those existing 30 pages, “It’s not like reading issue #73 of the new Hulk comic. It’s going to take you awhile to read,” Dockery says of the density of information packed inside, highlighted most of all by his detail-oriented, cross-hatch style of illustration.

“It calms me,” he explains of his style. “It’s an act like knitting and I get very obsessive about it. I’ll try to restrain myself, but even as I try I can’t stop. Although, I don’t think that’s a bad place for an artist. If there is something you are compelled to do and can’t stop, that’s not a bad direction to go in—unless you want to make a commercial living.” To better illustrate his point, Dockery mentions the time involved in creating each strip: if all the pistons are popping, the artist notes, he could finish one page of Spud Crazy in somewhere between eight and 16 hours.

Dockery tries to give a quick road map of his influences. He starts with post expressionist and other detail-oriented artists like Otto Dix and George Grosz. From there he says that the contemporary painter Joe Coleman was a game-changer. Coleman started off doing comics and did a particularly dense, intense piece called “Mystery of Woolverine Woo-Bait.” (“Sometimes in my head,” Dockery muses, “I want to go into comics where Joe Coleman left off.”) Marvel and DC comic artist Bernie Wrightson, who illustrated the original Swamp Thing, is also mentioned as an important figure in Dockery’s formative years. So, too is Robert Crumb and Mad Magazine’s master of the grotesque, Basil Wolverton.

The common thread they all share? Detail, painstaking detail.

Potato harvests: Institute 193, Hell, Levin and the Spud Imperials

As 2010 arrived, Dockery and Tosches were still digging for someone to cultivate this potato of theirs. They found that local gardener, Phillip March Jones at Institute 193, who expressed interest in helping the project. Jones also contributed to the book by doing a note on Dockery’s art and his collaboration with Institute 193.

Local ties firmly in place, Dockery turned to his trusty medium of email to round out the luminaries involved with Spud Crazy.

“Sending flattering emails is not a bad way to go,” Dockery says about his relationships with the additional contributors.

First up, native Lexingtonian Richard Hell, the frontman of the early punk rock band Richard Hell & The Voidoids, and an accomplished novelist himself, wrote the introduction. Dockery had made an email connection with him a number of years back, and he knew of their shared affinity for Tosches’ work. In fact, Hell used to run a small press of his own in the 90s and published a book of Tosches’. Without any prodding, Hell was in.  (His introduction focuses on Tosches’ words and deconstructing the madness of the text. )

Bob Levin, a highly-respected, authoritative figure on comics agreed to do an essay born out of a friendship formed after Dockery simply told him he enjoyed one of his pieces in The Comics Journal from a few years back. Levin’s essay balances the entire work, discussing both Dockery’s art and Tosches’ words.

At that rate, Dockery should have just emailed Ennio Morricone and the composer would have gladly scored the music for the screenplay turned graphic novel. Alas, he didn’t need to be that bold as the Spud Imperials (Dockery, Manley, Robert Beatty and Justin Eslinger) put together the music that completes the package (see the NoC music section for some related info).

Dockery and Manley had pondered the idea of writing music to a couple of their collaborative projects (like North of Center’s “Creekwater” comic) outside of the ruckus they make as the Smacks!, because, as Dockery wonders, “How long can we keep doing that? Making fools out of ourselves—well, maybe forever? But the soundtracks are a jumping off point for us to explore new ideas,” he says.

“At first I thought it might be a cutesy thing to have,” Dockery observes of his Spud Imperials music. “But listening back to it I think it sounds like an album. Something I would be proud of independent from the book.”

After numerous health setbacks over a number of years, Dockery was happy that he was able to simply get behind the drum kit and help create the sounds of potatoes being stuffed into stockings, or whatever other frazzled clamor tubers and hosiery make when the two intertwine. Some may think it sounds like a free jazz version of The Doors’ “L.A. Woman,” but that’s a story for another time. What it does sound like is, well, crazy—spud crazy to say the least.

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