[And in the final part of this interview, Alex talks about the Kids' Comic Con.]

RW: So let’s move on to the Kids’ Comic Con. At your website you said you’ve worked with kids for over 30 years. What has been the appeal in working with kids for so long?

AS: I’m bigger than them and I can take ‘em! [laughs] I guess [there are] two absolute truths: I can be kid-like – childish, playful, whatever. That’s in my nature, and I enjoy that. They see the world differently than we jaded adults, and it reminds me of how you can see the world. It refreshes my belief in change and possibilities. It makes things new again. You go through a period of worrying about “the Reds pressing the button” – I grew up during a time when the air raid drills had you under your desk with the head tucked between your knees and your butt up into the sky and I’m thinking, yeah, that’ll sure stop a nuclear attack! Are we all supposed to fart at the same time and blow it in the opposite direction? But you grow up with that hanging over you, and then you find yourself [saying] “Okay, I got through that,” and suddenly there’s Vietnam. And the likelihood of my going to war and not coming back, or not coming back with all my parts, whether physical or mental.

My mother was a very physically ill person, and by Christmas 1970, when I was 18, she had to go into a nursing home for her help, so I was on my own. Suddenly, completely on my own. And a lot of things were off-balance. And you can get pretty bleak and dismal about that. And again, the 60’s, 70’s, [had] a lot of drugs. There are evil, mean drugs now… but in the 60’s and 70’s, people looked at acid and marijuana and they think, “Cool, it’s gonna open me up and I’m gonna be loving,” and I didn’t want to have anything to do with it at all. So at this bleak time, to not succumb to that was amazing to me. Maybe Mama done her job well and she raised me right. Either way, I was pretty down. I was pretty depressed. I didn’t know what was gonna happen to me next.

Working with kids – I was doing children’s theater then. So those days of rehearsal for those evening and afternoon performances – it was fun. Things were reduced to simple: good and bad. Happy endings, possibilities. You can make it, you can do this. Now if you’re teaching a child that you can grow up to accomplish this, that to be a good person reaps you this reward, I feel that you better believe it. You better be clear that you’re not setting this kid up, because that was happening with a lot of the actors I was working with. They didn’t buy into it; they didn’t believe it, but they did the show for the money, and so it would come out in their performances. And kids will cut you down in an instant. If you have 300 children sitting in a performance and you’re half-stepping, you’ll lose them. And they will start talking, and acting up, and I had actors coming off the stage going, “I can’t believe they were talking during my soliloquy” and I said, “Yeah, but you were half-assing your soliloquy. You said it yourself – oh, this is just kids.” So if you don’t raise your level you need to give them, they will let you know. They demand your best. They give back a lot.

A child’s trust is not only a remarkable thing, it’s sacred. You don’t set a child up to screw them over. You just don’t do that. If you believe that, if you learn that lesson, it keeps you more honorable as an adult. You may deal with adults differently than you do with kids, but some part of you says, “I dunno. This is probably not a good idea. That’s probably not a person I really need to be hanging with. I’m gonna be working with kids, I don’t need to be doing this kinda stupidity.” It kinda keeps you a little more balanced. They give as they get, and I enjoy working with kids, making them laugh, teaching them things, and watching them blossom and grow, and that’s kept me healthier, mentally and emotionally, through some very dismal times.

RW: Regarding the whole question of education – since the stuff you do for children is designed to educate as well as entertain – education in this country has been devalued in recent years. What do you suppose can be done to change that?

AS: [pause] That’s a big question. I have little-bitty answers. I have little-bitty bricks that would build the wall – and they’re not all my ideas. I think, first and foremost, as you said, education has been devalued. We’ve condensed three generations to “You’re entitled to everything. Whatever you want, you’re entitled to it. You don’t have to earn it, you don’t have to get anybody’s respect, you just demand it and you’ll get it.” And I think that’s wrong, because that’s setting them up to fail. The real world is absolutely clear: “I will mess with you twenty-four-seven. I will set you up to fall flat on your face. You can believe whatever you want to believe about yourself, but somebody’s gonna come along and shoot it down if you’re not prepared.” So you take two or three generations of kids and condense them [to the point that] that they don’t need an education? Oh, they are set up to be jammed. Their children will be set up to be jammed, immediately.

I used to work with Creative Arts Team, which is out of NYU, and we would do “conflict/resolution theater.” We’d go around to middle schools and high schools, usually very troubled areas in the city. And we would get a report before we ever showed up about the kids there: they’re all this, and they don’t respect that, and they’re foul, and someone put a teacher in the hospital. Okay. We’re still going in. [laughs] And I would get into a class, and it was a situation where I was with one of my partners, and I was in a room with about 15 –20 young teenage boys. Every other word out of their mouths was an expletive, a curse. There were almost no nouns or pronouns, and usually the phrases were, “You know what I’m talking about.” “As near as I can tell, you’re talking about fornicating with a calf while it’s going to the bathroom.” So the teacher for that class was sitting at his desk, and I guess he fixed his mind in such a way that he could deal with this white noise and not go to pieces. So the words were flying, the statements were being made, it was really unclear, and my partner gets up and he starts to talk to them. And I guess in order to be instantly accepted, he starts using some of those words, talking like he’s down with them and everything. I’m not gonna be able to do that. One, I don’t normally talk like that. I do curse, like any other adult, those words slip out of my mouth now and then, but this is not how I want to communicate. I don’t know why it bothers me, but no, I can’t do this.

So my turn came. I stepped up, and again, the testosterone’s flying through the room. And I said, “I’m just curious, guys – how many of you, when you grow up, you’d like to be able to drive an 18-wheeler cross country and make money out of it?” Almost all the hands went up. 18-wheelers were the big thing back then. “Okay. Question number two: how many of you want to own the rig you’re driving?” Maybe half the hands went up. Some looked confused. “Number three: how many of you want to own the company that owns a fleet of those trucks?” About three hands went up, sort of hesitantly. “Fine. When you walk into the bank to get the loan to help you buy these trucks – and they’re about over $100,000 per – ” “What?” “So you’re gonna get about four or five of these things, maybe you’ve saved some money, but you’re gonna go into a bank and work out a loan with the bank so that your company will have the number of trucks you need, right? So you walk in and you sit down and talk to this guy and you say, ‘Yo, blankety-blank-blank,” and everybody went, “Oh, you can’t talk to them like that!” “Okay, how would you talk to them?” And there was this like, “Okay, where’s he going?”

I said, “I’m gonna tell you how you need to be. You’re gonna need to be – ” and I used the term for the first time then – “You’re gonna need to be, in a way, bi-lingual. You’re gonna need to be able to go into that business, sit down and convince yourself I can handle this, as ready to handle all that money that’s supposed to be turned over to you, speak your mind with this man, get your loan, walk out of there, and hang. Take care of business, be able to hang with your boys when you’re ready. In order to do that, you need to practice not having every other word be a curse. So for the rest of the time that I’m talking with you, let’s just see how many of us can accomplish that. Let’s just see what happens.”

So I went into my presentation about the show and things, which is what we were there to talk about. And every now and then, someone would say, “I don’t give a fu – I don’t care about this!” And it became a game. And when I was leaving, I said, “I know when I leave here, it’s all gonna be whatever, but I’m gonna ask you, every now and then, to just try and remember what I said. Just hold on to that. Be a little bit more bi-lingual. When you’re with your boys, you’re with your boys, but every now and then, just try and build up some more words, so that one day you can get what you need from the rest of the world.” And I don’t know how many of those kids held on to that, but somebody needed to say that to them. Someone needed to say, you’re being set up, right now, for failure – unless you start formulating the tools you need to make it. And that’s where we are right now with education.

We’ve excused too many things. We’ve excused bad behavior, lack of commitment to education, from both the adults in administration as well as the kids. And in the schools where they’ve found systems to make education and learning exciting and fun and stimulating, they’re turning out a ton of kids who are there. Not only do they know the information, they know how to think ahead. They know how to problem solve. They know how to do critical thinking, how to analyze and debate information. We’re in a world that would love to keep us as lemmings – we don’t ask too many questions, we don’t challenge so much. We just sort of run on sound bites and do what they need us to do so they make whatever money they want or get whatever position they want. And that’s not gonna work. We need to turn out critical thinkers, no matter what race. And so stimulating education is what’s necessary. Stimulating kids to be interested.

I go around doing workshops with comic books and journalism – two separate workshops, as well as theater, and [in] comics, I’ve worked out a number of curriculum-based ways to working comics into the academic curriculum, using comics to help teach mythology, science, and so forth… At least in comics, there’s something there that holds their interest, that they’re kinda curious about. Use that. Use that as a key to get inside. Use that as stimulation to get them to read more like this and that. And there are other art forms and other systems that engage students and make learning exciting and fun, and that needs to happen.

The rote system doesn’t work. It worked in a different aspect of society when maybe the home life was a little more rigid, or maybe they were a little bit more “Well, I gotta behave and I gotta do this and that.” But a lot of us aren’t into this “I gotta” mode anymore. So you have to find a way to make them want to, and then to keep them interested and excited, so it becomes a normal part of the growth process: “I need to be able to speak well, I need be able to read what I want to read, whether I’m militant or conservative, passive or aggressive, I need to be able to absorb information for myself so I can process it and know what I think and believe. So I gotta learn to read. I have to! I want that!” That needs to be in students – that hunger for knowledge and that joy of learning needs to be instilled. And I think those are the kinds of programs that are out there that need to be supported. Hopefully, a bit more of that will happen through government, but it’s definitely gotta happen through community action, and through involvement of the individuals.

RW: It’s interesting that you bring up using comics to help educating kids, since in recent years, we’re starting to see a lot more of comics in classrooms. So I think we’re finally starting to see a change in attitudes.

AS: We are. I was contacted by a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, and he actually used [Blackjack] as part of his curriculum, along with Maus and I forget the two other books. He had me come in and speak to them. And there was a little write-up in the Associated Press and it was really very nice. We’re out there, for those people who are beginning to realize because of books like Maus and Stuck Rubber Baby and some of the others. They’re beginning to realize the larger significance of these as literature, but librarians and teachers are starting to say, “Kids are really into this; kids are really reading all this manga stuff and – Whoa! They’re reading! Let’s get more of this stuff in there!” And then mainstream publishers are starting to say, “Oh, well if kids are reading comics and they’re buying more of those, we should be producing comics!” I think Scholastic has a division called Graphix and they’re now trying to create “graphic novels.” You have Hyperion and Harper-Collins, and they’re really starting to, in a way, catch up with the Far East and Europe in terms of how to use this material.

I don’t know how long this will last. I’m hoping this becomes a part of the norm. I was just saying to these teachers the other day that in my day, and I still see it among children, if they read something in comics that they’re really interested in – and they get into debates and dialogues with their peers and really intense discussions about characterizations, motivations, locales, culture, all that, based on this comic book story – even people who are having trouble reading are gonna bust their chops to grasp something from this story so they can be part of that discussion. And then from that discussion they’re gonna learn and understand aspects of the story they might have missed. And you’re not gonna get that from a lot of the other material that’s a little more drier, more academic in its approach. You’ve gotta get them engaged first. I’m not saying throw out all the other stuff, but you gotta get them engaged. You gotta give them something that they’re into so you can hopefully get them through some of the other material. Everything you learn is useful. As an artist, everything we absorb filters its way to our heart, whether we’re writing or drawing… It’s tools, another way of looking at how what we do in this industry can have a positive effect on a literary and academic level, as well as be entertaining.

RW: The guest list for the Con is pretty impressive. How’d you get so many people involved in it?

AS: I kidnapped their dogs. [laughs] I would say – and I don’t use this term lightly – I’ve been blessed. I tried for several years to get other people to do this. It was suggested here and there; we really need this, it would be a good idea, keep it small, blah blah blah. Couldn’t get it happening. And there were different reasons that people gave for why it wasn’t gonna happen. I was fortunate enough to meet Eugene Adams, who is the director of educational outreach at Bronx Community College. And Gene had learned about me through my Dark Angel website, about the comic book works I had done and other things I had written in children’s books. He contacted me and we were talking about giving my workshops to some of the schools that were affiliated with BCC. I said, that’s great; I’d love to do that. And then he said, “Well, what else would you like to do?” He never should’ve said that to me! [laughs] That was his wrong move! I went, “Well, if I’m doing comic book workshops with some of your schools, as well as here on campus, an organic extension of that would be to do some panels on comics, and the industry, and the educational aspects. And then, beyond that, to do a convention of kids comics. He said, “Okay, that sounds good.” I went, “For real?” He said yeah. I said okay, let’s take it a step at a time.

So we started with the workshops I was doing on campus, at the college, as well as with some of the high schools they were connected with. That worked out. We did a panel, that worked out. We launched a convention. Once the word got out that there was gonna be a kids comic-con – and I had only approached four or five of the ten professionals I had planned to contact – suddenly I’m getting e-mails. And then Calvin Reid [of Publishers Weekly] wrote this article and then I’m getting e-mails and phone calls, and I’m thinking whoa, wait a minute now! And it suddenly became clear, as someone else put it, that it was the right idea at the right time. My belief was, I know all the static I got trying to get somebody else to do it; I’m only gonna get a few people involved, and we’ll make it the best it can be, but it’ll be very small. And then when all these other people said, “Could we do this and we participate in that way and could we donate this and that,” I said okay! We got a large space, so size and space for the event is not a problem. What is real and what isn’t real? And in terms of setting up the workshops and panels and things we wanna do, well, it would be nice to have a variety so we can do this one and this one and this one, so it freed me to be more creative with the convention. The more possibilities there were, the more people wanted to get involved.

So the word on this sort of spread like wildfire, and suddenly there were all these people. And probably the most amazing thing is not only the number of people who wanted to get involved – I mean, genuinely wanted to get involved; this is not a money-making venture – but the extent to which they were willing to participate: to do panels, to meet with kids, to do portfolio reviews. TokyoPop is actually gonna fly in a couple of writers and artists for a couple of the books they’re doing and I’m saying, “Wait, I don’t know how many people are gonna be coming to this event. It’s not gonna be like the New York Comic-Con, where there’s gonna be hundreds of thousands of people. I don’t want you to reach into your budget to fly people in if you’re expecting this to be some huge gathering. I can’t promise you that.” And Marco, the one who I was talking with, he tells me, “Look, we believe in this. We believe in this convention. We’re doing all these books for kids. A couple of our artists would love to be there for this; they’ve already talked to us about it, so we’re gonna make it happen.” Alright, y’know what, let me get out of your way.

So this is the right idea at the right time. And I think the fact that DC and Archie immediately jumped on board didn’t hurt at all. The fact that many of the writers, artists and editors from these different companies wanted to be involved, the fact that by virtue of being comics, First Second Books jumped on board, and TokyoPop, once they were clear on what it was, they jumped on board – it’s just blossomed. And of course, the Harper-Collins, Scholastic, Hyperion, Disney, all of these [publishers] began to hear about what was going on, and they became involved. And so it’s really become this magnificent possibility. We’re reaching out to the schools and educators and letting them know, this is gonna be here! We got word from Westchester, the Scout Troops are coming – it’s just a thing where we’re gonna do our absolute best to make this a wonderful experience for the kids and come away from this feeling good about it. The same way I feel about Blackjack – you gotta do your best job. You do your absolute best to make it a successful experience for everybody concerned, and that’s all anybody can ask of you. So that’s where we’re going with this right now.

RW: I wanted to talk to you about someone in particular who’s gonna be at the show – Jimmy Gownley, who has the Kids Love Comics website. I was at the Kids Love Comics Day in Harrisburg and that went really well –

AS: Great. I’m glad to hear it.

RW: Have you had discussions with him?

AS: I talked with Jimmy at the New York Comic-Con face to face. It’s funny, because I knew him through Jane Fisher, who does WJHC –

RW: And you’re a consultant on that book.

AS: Yes, I am. I met Jane when I was doing Blackjack: Race Against Time. She came to some of my signings and we got to talking. She told me she wanted to this comic book. She had already done, I think, the first issue, and she asked me if I could consult her and help her. It was the first time she was independently publishing and she read some of my essays. So this was several years ago. We became friends, and I consult on the book. And I introduced her to Joe Staton, who did the artwork for her second graphic novel, and Jimmy she met at a con. I had seen him before. I had met him at a MOCCA con, but we hadn’t had enough time to talk. She got involved with him and his Kids Love Comics thing, and when I started to do [the con] I thought Amelia Rules is a perfect connection. So she got the word out, and I spoke with Jim, and he’s totally on board. He’s excited about it; I’m happy he’s gonna be part of this. So he’s coming – I didn’t know if he was going to. He and his wife just had a wee one not that long ago, so I said, “Jim, I understand if you don’t wanna travel.” He said, “No, no, we’re coming out now. It’s like spring, y’know; we’re coming out of the cage!” [laughs]

The idea here is, what you have with Jimmy, with John Gallagher [of Buzzboy], who’s involved with that as well, Jane Fisher, Kyle Baker, you have people genuinely doing this kind of work, the kind of books they do, because they love it. They’re really about this. That sincerity is key to making something like this work. Yes, you can do this if all you wanna do is make money, but it smells. You can smell that. If this is gonna blossom it’ll have to, in some way, shape or form pay for itself. That’s a reality. But you have to want to do this kind of thing. You have to remember that the comic book industry started with children. It started with comic strips that were pretty much read by kids, and through the 50’s and 60’s it was still young people reading comics. And at the point where the industry said, well we wanna have adults reading comics, that wasn’t a bad thought, but unfortunately it became an either/or. And instead of like what they have in Japan, or like our different age groups in our mainstream books – something for pre-schoolers, early readers, middle grade, high school, young adult – comics didn’t do that. They said, “Okay, we’re now gonna take all these stories and make them extreme. And that was a problem. So we lost fifteen years worth of children.

RW: And I think also, from some fans’ point of view, and from some retailers as well, there has been a resistance to having kids’ material.

AS: I could be wrong, but I’m gonna say this: in the mid-90’s… one of the things I noticed was, comic books, like disco, was a great arena for independents. You didn’t have to be MCI, you didn’t have to be a major record label to create a disco single. And in the comic book industry, if you wanted to create your own comic – most of the people I was meeting at those conventions in those days weren’t trying to do Daffy Duck or Donald Duck or Archie. The stories in their heads reflected something older, or something gorier, something sexier. So as the independents began to do more material, it was that over-the-top, extreme this-and-that. And as the independents started to sell, the mainstream started to respond. And so this wedge began to divide, and really, on the side of the kids predominantly was Archie. There was still some Disney stuff, but everybody else started to move towards mature [material]. Batman became more intense, all of this stuff became so heavy duty. I enjoyed Watchmen. I’m glad Alan wrote that book. I don’t feel that that’s the only outlook we should have…

So it kept pushing in that direction, and I think where we’re at now, is that the sales – or lack thereof – the shrinking sales affected the industry. People got crazy, wondering, “Wait a minute, we used to be able to sell 100,000 units; now we’re only selling 30,000, 40,000? What’s happened?” Well, you cut off your fingers! You cut off all those young people who were going to grow up reading comics… You didn’t say, “Okay, let’s create a line just for mature readers and let’s have a middle ground.” I’m not even saying have little kiddie stuff, just a middle ground and the other stuff. They went over here. So you have… your disemboweling, bullet-ridden, knife-wielding, psycho “heroes.” I have a problem with those two words being together, y’know. So I think where the industry is taking a hit now, they brought it on themselves. That and that whole multiple-cover thing. A lot of the independent comic book stores went down the tubes because they bought all this merchandise that was supposed to be worth something and then it didn’t and they didn’t make any money and down they went.

So I think right now we’re at a good place. We’re at a place where people are waking up, and if they make the right moves, everybody will benefit. Kids will benefit, first and foremost. They’re not gonna lose their adult audience if they continue to make material for them, but they’re gonna gain the other end. People are having babies every day. So the next wave of new readers can be picking up WITCH and Leave it to Chance and Archie and any of these other books. Keep something for them so they can have that fun and that adventure, and the hero can be a hero. And as they get older, they can discover that okay, some heroes have feet of clay. And as they get older still, maybe they’ll only want anti-heroes, but they’re gonna have the choices. And that’s key – having those options, having those choices…

RW: If this is successful, will there be a second con?

AS: Oh yeah. Oooooh yeah. Yeah yeah yeah yeah. Whether or not I do it is in question. I would want to. I would need more help, ‘cause I know what this one is doing to me [laughs]. I think if this is successful, there will be more help, there will be more people instantly ready to go. I’ve actually heard from people who are already talking about, “Can we do this one in each borough? Can we do this every six months?” My concern is not to make this something that becomes so redundant and occurs so often that it loses its excitement, it loses that feeling of the circus coming to town… If we do this once a year, it gives us time to really put it together and plan it out and make it as successful as we want it to be and can be. If we do it every six months, I’m not quite sure what the gain would be out of that… and also you start looking at a conflict of other conventions that are going on at that time, and there are quite a few throughout the country. And you wanna be able to still get good talent so the parents and kids and everybody will have a good time.

I feel that the best possible scenario is that we do the Kids’ Comic Con once a year, and maybe a small satellite experience halfway through the year, and that smaller version is really more for teachers who are using comics in the classroom, or community centers, or whatever. They want to go meet some of the talent, or with people who could discuss how to take advantage of this more, what’s coming out that they’re gonna want to get their hands on – that sort of thing. Something small like that would work. But I think in terms of the larger event that we’re putting together, that to me should still be a once-a-year event, at least here in New York.

RW: What if someone wanted to start a branch on, say, the West Coast?

AS: I would say that again, if it’s the Kids’ Comic Con, if it’s the creation that we’ve come up with here that I’ve helped spearhead and create, then I would want to make sure my finger was on the pulse of that, to make sure that that event would reflect the philosophy of this one, which is very clear: it’s about not only entertaining kids but it’s also about education, and showing the benefits and gains of comic books, either just as reading material for kids, just so they have the fantasy and they have the desire to read and gain from that, but also how to use it to help as a support to academic subjects. We’ve really worked out workshops and panels and exhibits and exercises to keep all of that happening at this event. I wouldn’t want someone else to start a convention and call it a Kids’ Comic Con and then have inappropriate material there and take it in a totally different direction, but yet it reflects us? No.

If they wanna do their own thing, fine. People can do this anywhere they want and that’s great. But if they want to do what we’re doing and they want us involved, me involved, then… there would have to be some sort of budget involved that would involve me putting it together, being out there, checking who’s gonna be involved, who they want to fly in for the event, and now it starts to look more like a regular convention in terms of both logistics and what kind of budget and all that.

I think there’s nothing wrong with people wanting to do conventions that cater to children, to get them back into the fold, to get them back into this playground that was originally theirs to begin with, and say yes, you have a place here too. It’s like a park: here’s your play area, and there’s a baseball field where the adults are gonna play softball, and here’s a basketball court where the older teens are gonna play. There’s room for everybody, we’re just gonna make sure you know where that play area is for you. And that’s what I’d like to see, whether I’m involved with it or not. But that’s what I’m hoping, that this really begins to start a movement, if you will, that will benefit all of us in the long run.