Transcript:

BY JENNIFER M. CONTINO
What happens when you mix indy comics Dogwitch creator Dan Schaffer with indy rocker KatieJane Garside of Queenadreena? Hopefully beautiful comics music in the form of a graphic novel due out this month from Image, called Indigo Vertigo. Schaffer said these 48 pages, "don't follow any standard comic books rules. Indigo Vertigo wasn’t created with the usual method; it was approached from the inside out, from the bottom up. Each panel is a scramble for the next breath, for the next meaning. Each word is an intimate confession. The story, the concept, the context, these things all happen between the layers."

THE PULSE: What is Indigo Vertigo?

DAN SCHAFFER: A 48-page one-shot graphic novella from IMAGE COMICS, shipping in August. The official blurb from IMAGE is -  “…the comic explores the love/hate relationship between people and their demons in a disturbing nightmare journey through the cracks in the tiles.’

THE PULSE: How did you come up with the concept for Indigo Vertigo?

KATIEJANE GARSIDE: I live in the blind spot and Dan had an idea of framing spilt milk, its almost like turning something inside out, cutting fruit and pushing it back through itself, but it’s asking for trouble if you take on to 'explore' a concept. I find they are running rife, making a shrieking ten fold infinitum so I prefer not to explore concepts, rather try and keep them at bay and see what happens when all the conceptual stuff is sidelined

SCHAFFER: The book is designed to be a subjective experience, with the messages and secrets weaved in and out of both the words and the art, but we didn’t want that to be too contrived or calculated, so we worked off each other at the emotional, abstract level of the book. To sideline the conceptual stuff, you have to work intuitively, and what you'd call the concept comes from and through synchronicity.

THE PULSE: Why call it this title? When I hear that I think ... dizzy blue ....

SCHAFFER: It’s an ambiguous title, but very relevant to the subject matter in many different ways. Discovering this and how it relates to you is a big part of what this book is all about.

THE PULSE: How did you come to work with KatieJane Garside on this?

SCHAFFER: We’d both been experimenting with other forms of art between our day jobs (QUEENADREENA and DOGWITCH), and found affinity in a desire to work against the grain and away from what we were already doing. And we were tuned to same frequency, so we cracked our heads together without worrying about limitations or expectations to see if we could create something with a soul. Indigo Vertigo is the result.

THE PULSE: What interested the two of you in collaborating?

GARSIDE: Dan caught me by the hair as I was going under. I‘ve got salty eyelashes but decided to hang around a while longer

SCHAFFER: Katie reminded me that art is alive and breathing beneath the structuring and the technicalities. She stopped me forgetting what art feels like. Katie is a remarkable and generous writer, she aims at the heart and guts with hypnotic style and brutal honesty.

THE PULSE: How did the two of you come to know each other?

SCHAFFER: I spoke to Katie a few years ago about using some of her lyrics in an issue of DOGWITCH, and we formed a fervid subconscious link quite early on. Katie is a unique performer, and a unique person. I’ve never met anyone like her.

THE PULSE: KJ, How is working on a comic different than the creative outlet of working on your music?

GARSIDE: There is symbiosis with Dan, rather than the drowning man pushing his salvation under the water in his panic for breathing. I’ve dropped my knives and understood more in the last year than in the preceding fifteen.

THE PULSE: KJ, How are the two creative outlets similar?

GARSIDE: If I can catch a thread in dissolution then I'm having a good day, in that respect things are the same.

THE PULSE: How long did it take to get this comic written?

SCHAFFER: We’ve been working on it for the last year, in between issues of DOGWITCH and Katie’s recording and touring schedule with QUEENADREENA. Those long spaces between each work session have had a positive influence on the style and pace of the book.

THE PULSE: What are your goals for this story?

GARSIDE: Perhaps thread some kind of context and meaning (even if it is just assumed) toward the next breath. I think we are attempting to winch ourselves back in, or at least snap into a helix, the friction and the scrape of two makes for leverage, and to try to stop masturbating my life away and get out of the fucking 'shut in'.

SCHAFFER: To communicate by presenting a story and an idea on an emotional and intuitive level, allowing the reader to discover and interpret the secrets and messages woven into the book on their own terms. And, obviously, I’m interested in lending some weight to the idea that the comic book format is a platform that can and should be used imaginatively and without restriction.

THE PULSE: What are the themes you explore in this tale?

GARSIDE: Hanging by a thread, and the ticking of the inevitable fall, but in the smallprint we are reminded that death begets life. White noise between radio stations and a drill outside, hearing voices when the drills stop.

SCHAFFER: It’s about interpreting the white noise. There are layered themes throughout, twisted into the words and the art in many different ways, and they are there to be deciphered intellectually and emotionally. I wouldn’t want to direct anyone’s imagination in a specific direction. Like Katie said, the themes are in the smallprint, and how you translate them into your own bigger picture will be your own experience of them.

THE PULSE: Who's handling the art details? How did you come up with the art style and technique to illustrate Indigo Vertigo?

SCHAFFER: The art style is a combination of paint and digital that I developed for this book. I’d been experimenting with it on and off for a while but it only fell into place when I read Katie’s words. Katie’s art also appears in the book on some pages. She’s the writer and I’m the artist but we’ve overlapped our given duties here and there.

THE PULSE: What other projects - comics or otherwise - are you working on?

GARSIDE: Glasswilderness, sound of beating wings, a bird thrown off course during migration in my continued obsession with white noise, spun out on a thread of movie making.

SCHAFFER: While Katie’s making short movies and touring her new album, I’ll be finishing up with the last issue of DOGWITCH, and then I’ll be back onto the art detail for a new 48-page project that’s currently in the writing stage.

Katie’s third album with her band QUEENADREENA, entitled BUTCHER AND THE BUTTERFLY, was released on MAY 23 from One Little Indian records.

http://www.queenadreena.com
http://www.danielschaffer.com