Craig has a lot of book-smarts and likes comics. He’s an all-around rad guy, especially for indulging me in this little interview project. A scholar of note, Chris Schweizer told me about his 'zine project to tie into the fundraising project known as Team Cul De Sac, and lo & behold, here we are. 

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Tell us a little bit about yourself.

I’m 48 years old, and a professor in the English Department of Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. My wife Kathy runs a cool non-profit art space/children’s museum here in Boone; we have two great kids, Nate (14) and Mercer (10). I love comics, and I’ve been reading them since I was four years old, though my tastes have decisively shifted from superheroes to alt-comix in the last two decades.

How did your academic interest in comics start?

By accident. My first scholarly specialty is cinema, and to this day most of the classes I teach are in film history and theory. But back in 2001, the Foreign Languages department at Appalachian hired Ana Merino, a poet and comics scholar, and we became good friends. It was Ana who first convinced me to give papers at conferences like ICAF (the International Comic Arts Forum) and the University of Florida annual meeting. Ana teaches at the University of Iowa now, so I don’t see her as much as I’d like to, but I owe her a lot for introducing me to the academic study of comics. 

When you first started teaching and publishing, did you envision that you’d be able to apply a love for comics to that side of yourself?

Not at all—my “career” has been one fortuitous stumble after another. In 1985, about eight months before I was set to graduate with a BA in English from the University of Buffalo, a professor took me aside and asked if I’d thought about applying to graduate school. I distinctly remember saying, “What’s graduate school?” And I was about to quit the PhD program at the University of Illinois when I took a class on the films of Fellini and Antonioni, and realized that film studies could be an academic option for me. And then Ana (and other friends, including my frequent collaborator Charles Hatfield) came along and dragged me into comics scholarship.

I’m insanely lucky. My dad, who quit college to work a job on the docks, once asked me, “You mean, you sit around all day and talk about movies and comics and get paid for it?” Uh, yeah. Can’t complain too much about a job like that!

Do you find there to be a level of difficulty in applying academia to cartooning? Despite Scott McCloud, The Comics Journal, and schools like the Center for Cartoon Studies, comics still occupy a place in media and literature that’s more “pop” and less “serious canon.”

I’m not sure I agree. It seems like the cultural prestige of comics has increased exponentially in the last ten years. Comics are now habitually reviewed in The New York Times Book Review, and thirty years ago I never thought I’d see that.

It probably helps that I come from film studies, where historically there’s been a much less strict notion of canonicity and the high/low division than in literary scholarship. It you write a terrific article on “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), you can place it in a top-flight venue like “Cinema Journal” without worrying about editorial prejudice against exploitation and horror films. Ditto for work on comics: there’s several academic journals that specialize in comics, and established lit-crit journals are eager to publish articles and sponsor special issues on comics. (One example: the 40-year-old “Substance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism,” which earlier this year published a special issue on “Graphic Narratives and Narrative Theory” that included an article by Charles Hatfield and me.) Professors are crazy for cartoons!

You’re the brains and Henry Fonda-looks behind “Favorites: Critics, Artists, and Bloggers on the Comics They Love,” which is a ‘zine tied into the Parkinson’s research fundraising effort Team Cul De Sac. How did you end up with the idea for it?  And what exactly made you think of a ‘zine as a companion fundraising project for TCDS?

First, let’s correct a misconception: I don’t look like Henry Fonda. Think Buddy Hackett instead (sigh).

The idea for the “Favorites” zine came directly from Chris Sparks’ work on a benefit book for Team Cul de Sac. For those who don’t know, Chris is in the midst of assembling an art book that features various cartoonists’ takes on the “Cul de Sac” characters, most famously an oil painting of Peter Otterloop done by a briefly-emerged-from-retirement Bill Watterson. All the proceeds from Chris’ project will go towards Parkinson’s research.

I wanted to participate too, but I had one limitation: I can’t draw. But I can write, and as I started musing about how my writing ability might help the cause, I came up with the zine idea, and began to contact the 30+ contributors to “Favorites.”  

What was it like putting the “Favorites” together? Were you a big zinester back in the day?

I’ve never been any sort of a “zinester,” now or even back in the golden days of “Factsheet Five.” In the mid-‘80s, my friend Tim Madigan and I put out two issues of a zine called “Work in Progress,” and we corralled Harvey Pekar to write an essay (on Russian author Andrey Bely) for the second issue, but we never promoted and disseminated WiP enough and it died quickly.

Putting “Favorites” together was a blast. One lovely side effect of asking everyone to submit essays is that I became Internet friends with critics and bloggers whose writing I value but who I hadn’t known personally. (That includes you, Costa!) I’m going to SPX this year for the first time in half a decade, and I’m looking forward to shaking hands with my new pals in meatspace.

What’s the response been so far to the ‘zine? It debuted at HeroesCon this year but has since become available to buy online.

We sold about $100 worth of zines at Heroes, but we’ve sold three times as much through PayPal. I paid for the first Xeroxing of “Favorite”s—that was my personal contribution to Team Cul de Sac—and we’ve made back the amount I spent and still have lots more copies to sell. (I’ll be at SPX, ICAF and other locations this fall, peddling the zine.) Contributors and other online folk have been generous in their promotion of “Favorites,” for which I’m very grateful.

Do you think there’s any possibility for a “Favorites” issue 2 to keep up with TCDS? Or was it just a one-time thing?

My goal is to make $1000 for the Team on the first “Favorites” zine. As soon as we hit that number, I’ll start to assemble “Favorites 2”--or maybe a zine where folks talk about their guilty pleasures or complain about rotten comics instead. Several people not in “Favorites” (including Brigid Alverson, Andrei Molotiu and Tim O’Shea) have already volunteered to write for the next project.

So what are you working on nowadays besides teaching and the ‘zine?

This fall, I’ll be chairing a panel at SPX (“Stories of the Body,” with Robyn Chapman, Jennifer Hayden, Gabby Schulz and Jen Vaughn), co-presenting a paper on “From Hell” with Charles Hatfield at ICAF at the Center for Cartoon Studies, and giving a talk about comic books at the University of Iowa. Charles and I continue to collaborate on a book on Eddie Campbell (hence the “From Hell” presentation). And then there’s my online writing: frequent posts at my home blog The Panelists, and a new monthly column at the “Comics Journal” website, titled “Monsters Eat Critics” to reflect the column’s emphasis on genre comics rather than alt-comix.