Sergio Aragonés

I interviewed Sergio at the San Diego convention way back in 1988. We talked on ‘Artists’ Alley’, with Sergio sketching as he talked. At one point I noticed that it had taken him the same time (I guess 10 or 15minutes) to produce a sketch as the guy next to him. That guy had drawn Batman’s head adequately well. Sergio, while being immensely charming in our interview, drew Groo fighting a dragon. With a crowd of onlookers. With word balloons from them, cracking lots of jokes. And coloured it in. His English was heavily accented and occasionally slightly erratic, though nowhere near as clumsy as was frequently indicated in Groo.

Martin Skidmore: Do you come from Mexico?
Sergio Aragonés: Well, I was born in Spain, but I grew up in Mexico because my parents left during the Spanish Civil War. I grew up in Mexico and I came to the United States when I was 24 years old.
Martin: How did you get into comics?
Sergio: Oh, I was like every other cartoonist, I started when I was very young. I started at school, and suddenly I’m being paid to do what teachers were complaining I was always doing in class.
Martin: You were doing comics in Mexico before you got involved in things like Mad…
Sergio: Yes, when I started in Mad I was already a seven year old professional. I had been published for seven years in Mexican magazines. Mostly magazine cartooning, I was very influenced by French Spirou humour, an opposite of Punch… now they have changed a little, but Punch, through the years, if it did not have a good punchline it was not a good joke. To me humour without words was very important because I could understand it without understanding English.
Martin: Which French artists were you particularly keen on?
Sergio: There were Chaval, Tetsu, Moss, a whole generation that were very popular in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s. I’m more influenced by more modernistic cartoonists, I started with the French and then mixed it with work by Virgil Parch from the United States and Stan Berg and of course Mexican cartoonists like Osge, Osge was a great influence on my work.
Martin: Argentina is full of terrific artists…
Sergio: Yes, great talent. It is a total mixing, and the comic book itself I entered very late, I was mostly a magazine cartoonist. But I always loved to read comics and I had been drawing comics in my head for many years until I had the chance to do it professionally, which was in the late ‘60s. I did my first work for DC comics writing – not drawing – stories like Jerry Lewis, the Inferior Five, and I created a strip called Bat Lash.
Martin: Nick Cardy drew it…
Sergio: But if you were to read the credits you would see “written by Sergio Aragones”.
Martin: It’s not your typical work, is it? It’s not what we think of as your usual style.
Sergio: Well it’s impossible to tell your brain, “just think cartoons.” We think a lot of things and I think a lot of serious work. I wrote hundreds of stories for House of Mystery but in those times they didn’t give us any credits so many, many of those stories don’t have my byline on them. And I have always needed someone to correct my scripts because of my lack of English, I never learned English in school. I always wanted to do comics on my own, and for many years I didn’t do anything because we had to work on a salary, but now I own the rights to my characters. There was a company called Pacific Comics, they were one of the early ones to develop the rights. I started working on my own with the help of Mark Evanier, which helps me – you can listen to the way I talk, that’s the way I write. He adds incredible, beautiful poetry and adds a lot of spoken humour that has never been my forte. And I’ve been doing Groo ever since. Pacific folded, they had enormous troubles, and Marvel had to create a special line to develop properties that were owned by the artists. Groo became the first comic ever distributed by a large company to the direct sales market and regular distribution that is owned by the artist, so that is a big milestone in the comic book in the United States, because we know in Europe…
Martin: It’s common in Europe and Japan.
Sergio: No, in Japan the companies have a big hold on the property.
Martin: A lot of artists own their own work though.
Sergio: Yes, but their company is very much part of them. It is a very strange relationship with the company, like a family type of thing.
Martin: So basically you draw the story and you write it all, and then Mark rewrites the dialogue, adds the poems at the beginning, adds a few verbal gags…
Sergio: And edits the issue.
Martin: And he writes the letters pages as well, which are wonderful. Groo has changed a little since the first Pacific issue.
Sergio: Everything changes with time. When I started drawing with Pacific I was thirty pounds thinner, but the older you get the more you put weight on, and the more you practise drawing the more slender it gets, the more developed. It gets a different look and it gets a different style.
Martin: Was Groo something you took to Pacific as something you’d been wanting to do for a while?
Sergio: As a cartoonist I have so many ideas and Groo was one of them. He wasn’t as developed as he became of course, but I had that among other characters. I had one very close to Tarzan, I had a few other different things, all of them would have become as popular or as developed as Groo with the years of working on it. What happens is, once you know a project is going to go, you start thinking that particular character more and more, you go to bed with him until you really know him by heart.
Martin: So are you happy to continue doing Groo indefinitely?
Sergio: Sure. It’s like family, you never choose your children, your birth, if your son is not what you expect there is nothing you can do, you try to get him to become what you want.
Martin: I’m trying to imagine how I would feel if I had a son like Groo…
Sergio: You don’t abandon them, you try. I was very fortunate that the audience responded very well to him, he had a very mixed type of reaction, because the character is a barbarian, an illiterate beast, a mercenary without any redeeming qualities, but you love the character, and anybody who’s loved must have something going for them.
Martin: Well, you might love him as a character, but you wouldn’t think “This is the sort of person I want to be friends with.”
Sergio: That’s right.
Martin: He makes a great comic character.
Sergio: That’s what it is. I have many letters from people who love the character so much that they want him to win, and they say “How come he never wins?” and it is very hard to explain to them that he can never win until he changes his ways and goes to learn, leaves the sword and stops being a mercenary, have some morals.
Martin: It’s become a running joke in the letter columns about every story being the same. You were saying in the humour panel I went along to yesterday about always needing a good ending for the story, and well, Groo always gets chased by lots of people who are mad at him.
Sergio: Yes, but the story always finishes with a gag, they run after him after that.
Martin: Yes, it’s why they are doing it that’s the end of the story.
Sergio: I have found a way to work. After being a professional for so many years that it seems like one issue is drawn a month, but I work on three or four issues at the same time, so I have a whole month or two months to write it, and two months to pencil it and two months to ink it. I’m writing one, pencilling one and inking another one.
Martin: How fast do you work? You look pretty quick here but obviously it takes longer when you’re drawing a comic script and writing it and so on. Is it taking up all your time doing Groo?
Sergio: No, I also do Mad, and that takes a long time, but I have learned how to divide my day, with the thinking part in the morning when I’m fresh and I think jokes for Mad and I think about the state of affairs of the world and how to solve them, and all kinds of ideas for Groo, and then in the afternoon when I’m ready I sit at my desk and start inking and drawing the pencils for whatever deadline is approaching. I divide my time between both, but I would say the larger part of it is dedicated to Groo because of the complexity of the drawing against the simplicity of drawing for the panel gag.
Martin: There’s an immense amount of detail in Groo. There aren’t many humour comics, as discussed in that panel, there aren’t that many markets for selling them, whereas if you went with newspaper strips, most of them are humour these days, the adventure strip is not nearly as popular…
Sergio: That’s changed because of the influence of TV on the readers. As TV became the main line for Americans to get their news, newspapers stopped being a daily ritual. Nobody was following the adventure every day, so now they are looking for humour, not because they care about humour, but because it’s the only thing they can put on and put off and suspend and change places without losing continuity. You reduce the size, so it’s easier to have humour talking heads, not adventure talking heads.
Martin: Have you ever been interested in going into newspaper strip work?
Sergio: No, I wouldn’t. It doesn’t appeal to me.
Martin: A lot of it doesn’t seem to be immensely far removed from what you are doing in Mad, the short gags.
Sergio: When I first started there was no way you could sell a humour panel to a newspaper without a lot of words, and I don’t use the word as my main sense of humour, and for a comic strip I don’t think pantomime humour goes that well. There have been a few silent cartoonists, like Henry, Ferdinand, a few, but to it would just be another job, instead of doing what I enjoy doing. I’m not interested in it.
Martin: So you and Mark haven’t thought of trying to develop Groo for a newspaper?
Sergio: No, Groo could never be a daily. First the lack of space, the bad quality of the paper, and I like to have five panels for Groo to change his expression. I still complain that American comics are very short compared to European comics, in which we have rows of four panels and we can develop the story and have more timing. American humour is concise and straight to the point. My comics are synopses, I can take each one already published and develop it to a 50-page story without it dragging, just adding more humour to it. But you can’t do that here because of the nature of the business.
Martin: Yes, you are fairly restricted to the traditional-size comic book.
Sergio: Yes, you have 22 pages. I don’t want to make it a continuity because there are so many comics around and the reader buys other comics as well as Groo and I would never assume that the reader is going to remember the plot of my comic to see what happens next month, I think it is very unfair.
Martin: You have done a couple of continued stories, haven’t you, two-parters?
Sergio: No, I have done ones with the same subject, but each one is independent by itself.
Martin: That’s true, they stand alone.
Sergio: It takes me a long time to think of a story that you can read in a different order and be able to understand. Each one you can read by itself.
Martin: Do you think that adversely affects the sales? I would imagine people would find it easier to miss a copy of Groo, whereas if they hadn’t visited the newsstand one month, they still have to get their back issue of the X-Men.
Sergio: No, sales have no relation whatsoever with people taking Groo. I would say that more than half the people that buy Groo don’t even read it, they put it in a plastic bag because they know a lot of people are reading it. I know a lot of people love Groo, they talk to me and they talk about the characters, but by the same token half of them don’t care about it but they buy it. All that you see here [indicating the San Diego con dealers’ room, at one end of which we were seated] is a totally false reality. These people are businessmen, they come and buy comics and speculate, and they collect and never read them – a lot of them do, which is my people, I talk to them and they know what I’m talking about. Some of them read it and some of them don’t, I don’t care. If they are buying it because they want to use it as toilet paper that’s okay, there’s no conflict with me.
A passerby: Just as long as they pay for it.
Sergio: That’s right, they help me do it for the people who read it.
Passerby: I do both, I speculate and I love the book.
Sergio: That’s great, I consider you one of the people who reads the book, and that’s what allows me to continue doing it, people are buying it for whatever reason, and through the mail I found out how much people love the comic.
Passerby: Every month it comes out you know you are going to laugh.
Sergio: That’s right, I’m very happy with it and I will do it for a long time, but sales and working on it are totally different subjects. If I wanted to make sales in comics I would have done a book on a superhero.
Martin: Make Groo a mutant or something.
Sergio: Well, in that vein I would have done a superhero limited edition, and I would sell more on that than all the Groos put together, but I do what I like to do best. I’m very fortunate that Mad has paid me very well through the years, and my Pocket Books for Warners, so I can still do whatever I want without having to worry.
Martin: That’s a great situation.
Sergio: It is a great situation to be in. Ah, you see! He buys two. He doesn’t have the chance to read two. He reads one, and will speculate with the other!
Another passerby: It might be for a friend.
Sergio: It might, but I don’t care, I don’t object to it.
Martin: We used to get the Sage as a regular character. Did you get tired of doing him?
Sergio: Well, the Sage became a character because, when I did number one for Pacific, they always had the last five pages to introduce a new artist, so going along with that I left my last five pages empty to introduce a new artist, and suddenly I get a frantic call saying “The date for the printer’s tomorrow and the guy didn’t show up with the pages!” Well, I went to my drawing table, and I created a joke, I thought a joke that could be developed in a few pages without having a character in mind, you just think of the humour itself. Then I realised that for the nature of the joke, about a catapult, a creative invention, that Groo would never do it because his thought process would never work that way, so I had to create a new character, so right there on the spot with the story almost all pencilled, I just created the Sage.
Martin: Sage hung around for a while, he appeared fairly frequently.
Sergio: Yes, all of them do on and off, they go in and they go out, they live in Groo’s world and if I need them because of their attitudes or whatever…
Martin: Have you got any particular favourite characters?
Sergio: One of the characters that I like a lot is Chakaal, and she appeared in the early six or seven issues at Pacific, and I wanted her to have a good introduction with Epic, but they never came with the contracts, so I decided to use it as a special introductory for number 50.
Another passerby: Finally! We have been waiting.
Sergio: I’ve been waiting, it’s been very frustrating because I wanted to show her in, like, an Annual, and I never got the contracts from Marvel, because they are very slow in the process.
Martin: Tom Luth [colourist on Groo] has lasted for a long time, hasn’t he?
Sergio: Yes, we keep bribing him and feeding him and all kinds of things.
Martin: I always expected you to have a new colourist every other issue.
Sergio: They don’t want to do it. Once Tom had to go to London for a couple of months, and when we asked other colourists they said no, they didn’t want to do it. They didn’t want to tackle it, they refused, they said it was very hard.
Martin: You can hardly blame them, looking at that, can you? [indicating a particularly detailed splash page]
Sergio: No, it takes quite a bit.
Martin: I think my favourite character has been the dog.
Sergio: Oh, the dog, that’s been great, that’s my dog.
Martin: Your dog!
Sergio: Yes, I’ll show you the real Ruferto. [gets out photo]
Passerby: I remember once that you said he was just going to be a throwaway character for a couple of issues.
Sergio: He was.
Passerby: Everybody kept saying keep the dog, keep the dog.
Martin: He’s great, someone who’s dumber than Groo.
Sergio: That’s what happened. It’s impossible to give Groo a companion, first if it’s a human…
Passerby: He’s going to end up dead within three issues.
Sergio: Yes, or be the hero, because if he’s brighter than Groo, Groo would become the second banana automatically, by the nature of stupidity. So no way could I give him a human companion, so it had to be an animal. So I decided to give him a dog, because a dog could be stupid. I thought it had to be a mastiff, a big dog, a barbarian dog, and it was too similar so for a long time I didn’t do anything. I kept going back and forth. One day I thought of my dog – well, look at it. He’s so stupid, but the only way it was going to work was if Groo thought he was going to eat it. That’s the joke, the dog likes Groo, and Groo likes the dog, but to eat. But I thought that by the second or third issue the dog would be so fed up with him, and the dog would go back to his palace, so the story really started that this was a dog who brings adventure, lives in a palace and goes “If this is adventure, who needs it?” and goes back to the palace. But the mail was enormous and we were comfortable with it, and everybody liked it, so it stayed and stayed and stayed.
Martin: I think it’s very effective. You have got Groo’s stupidity, and then you have got this extra level of it.
Sergio: Yes, what happens is that the dog misinterprets everything like an animal will do.
Martin: The wedding issue was particularly good, where the princess has decided to marry him despite what her father says and the dog thinks “Ah, you have finally realised what a great catch my master is.”
Sergio: Yes, it has been very comfortable. I have even tried giving Ruferto a couple of adventures of his own, because the mail was so enormous asking for the dog to have a more participatory part in the plot. So I did a couple, but from now on he’s just a dog and there’s only things he thinks.
Martin: Do you think you might get bored doing Groo and start doing a different character in time to come?
Sergio: I don’t think so, because I still have Mad that I do regularly.
Martin: Yes, that’s different every time.
Sergio: That’s different, so I’m not locked into a Groo situation, the thought process would be the same for Groo as it would for anybody else, it would be a humour situation, the only things I would have to draw is different backgrounds and different characters.
Martin: That’s true, most of the jokes would work if it was Groo or a Tarzan parody, like you mentioned earlier.
Sergio: So now I’m in times that change every two or three weeks, why should I change? Why shouldn’t we have a sense of permanency in things that we do?
Martin: Why do you think that humour comics aren’t so successful now?
Sergio: Many of the humorists don’t get paid very well, not in comics. They get so much better pay in comic strips, why should they bother? Everything is always economics, comics are bought by the people that collect them, they collect superheroes, they are going to publish superheroes because people are buying them. Slowly people will realise that humour is better than having the same guys fight the same people on the same roofs forever, the only thing that changes is the costume. They have nothing different, and they have to realise that, once they realise that we will be there. But we have to show them an alternative.
Martin: There are a few more around now than there were a couple of years ago.
Sergio: Yes, Usagi Yojimbo is a good adventure, humour, animals and stuff. But look at that guy, he has a store, what the kids want is superheroes, so he stocks superheroes.
Shop owner: We have to have what they want, but I also push what I like.
Martin: What are the comics you like at the moment, the humorous ones?
Sergio: I like the ones that have very good art, that are different, I like all the undergrounds enormously. Of the new things, everything that Kitchen Sink puts out is very good.
Martin: Do you like things like Omaha?
Sergio: Not that one in particular. I like things more like Tales of the Xenozoic, everything that Robert Crumb puts out I adore, the Freak Brothers I love, that kind of comic I like, I read a lot. I don’t read superheroes at all. I like Ms Tree a lot, I get confused because of the continuity, I have to put together a lot before I can read them, so I don’t read them until I have a whole series finished. Sometimes I have to wait a year to read a comic.
Martin: Do you read very much adventure material?
Sergio: I read the Europeans, everything that’s put out in France. I go to Europe quite a lot.
Martin: Who are your favourites there?
Sergio: Hugo Pratt. I always love Hugo Pratt.
Martin: A genius.
Sergio: A genius. I love Manara’s work, a new thing that this Italian fellow is doing – Sapieri, it’s this beautiful woman that lives in the future on this fantastic world. Sensational artwork. I love the Belgian guys, Francois Walthery, who does Natacha… I’m so much in contact with them, I get all the material from them.
Martin: Do you get your stuff reprinted in Europe?
Sergio: Yes, it’s being reprinted in Spain as Gronan, because in “Groo”, the ‘o’ and ‘o’ together is ‘grow’ and that doesn’t sound too good in Spanish.
Martin: And Gronan sounds like Conan.
Sergio: Yes, and it rhymes with the poetry in Spanish. And it’s printed in Sweden, in Norway, in Denmark and Germany, and in Finnish it’s called Aarhus.
Martin: How about French?
Sergio: At this convention I have got some people interested in it. It’s still under talks.
Martin: I think it ought to go well. Are you familiar with Binet, who does stories about Kador the dog?
Sergio: Oh yes.
Martin: I was trying to think of an artist whose style I think comes closest to yours, but he’s not very close.
Sergio: There’s a lot of the European magazines that I get, like Echo des Savanes, very funny, Metal Hurlant, or Heavy Metal now, everything that Catalan is doing here, the reprints.
Martin: What’s your audience? I would imagine that on Groo you have quite a mixed audience, a lot of younger readers, and a lot of old comics fans who love comics but don’t want to keep reading superheroes.
Sergio: I realise that anybody with a sense of humour and anybody who likes adventure stories reads Groo, I get a lot of people who read Mad, they read Groo, anybody with a little humour will read it.
Martin: What part do Marvel play in it? I know Mark is the editor, but he doesn’t belong to Marvel, he came with the book. Do Marvel have any input or influence at all?
Sergio: No, none whatsoever. They get the comic finished, it’s mine, they don’t have anything to do.
Martin: I know you own it…
Sergio: I own it completely, and in the contract the only thing that I have to do is deliver it on time. I won’t abuse that right. I won’t do anything just to test the patience of anybody, it’s just not in my character.
Martin: It would seem odd if you started putting in lots of obscenity, lots of sex scenes.
Sergio: Just to push them. I’m not in a fight with anybody.
Martin: It would look out of place anyway.
Sergio: That’s right, I don’t even use scatological humour or anything, it’s just clean humour. I don’t have any frustrations about drawing sex, like the majority of young artists, once they get into comics they have this enormous need to draw sex.
Martin: You mentioned Milo Manara…
Sergio: Yes, I like to look at it and practice it, but I don’t have to draw it also.

Which ended our available time. Sadly we didn’t get to talk about his work for Mad.

Sergio has continued to contribute his marginals to Mad on an astoundingly consistent basis – he has missed out on just one issue since 1963, because his work was lost in the post. He has continued doing Groo, and a bunch of other things, including a few comedy superhero comics, some Simpsons comics and a collaboration with Walthery, mentioned in the interview, on Natacha. He’s also won a long list of awards.

Reprinted in conjunction with a review of Mad’s Greatest Artists: Sergio Aragones.