In conjunction with Dark Horse Comics, Jesse Reklaw — the cartoonist behind the web comic strip “Slow Wave” — is hitting up seven states on the east coast starting September 30th on his largest book tour to date in order to present his five-year collection, The Night of Your Life. Jesse agreed to talk with me about his comic, inspirations, and his new book.

Jesse will be stopping at nine states (Conneticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York—plus California and Washington) for book signings, readings, and lectures—a total of fifteen different events. Information about the tour dates and locations can be found here.

WITA: Tell us about yourself, Jesse. How did you get started as a cartoonist—was that something you’ve always wanted to be, or did you stumble into it and just liked it?

Jesse Reklaw: This is kind of embarrassing, but my first career goal was to be a role-playing game designer—this was back in the 80s when I was in high school. But I’d always read comics, and I started to see that the kinds of stories and ideas that I wanted to work with were best told through comics. It’s been a long road, though! I think if someone told me how much work it would take back in 1989, I probably would have been an architect, like Mom wanted.

WITA: I love that each strip is so unique, genuine, fun, and honest. How did you even come up with the basic idea for “Slow Wave”?

Jesse: At the time (in 1995), I was trying to focus on improving my drawing, and I thought it would be easy to get stories from friends to draw. It just happened that the ones I liked best were dreams. After I graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 1995, the internet was starting to blossom. I decided to draw one dream per week as a comic strip, to get people to come to my website. I think “Slow Wave” was one of the first ten web comics to appear.

WITA: How do you get all these wonderful ideas for your comic? What kinds of people do you talk to, and how do you come by them? Do you sort of “collect” life experiences from them, or … talk a little about your creative process in general, and how you manage to stay equipped with fresh stories for your comic.

Jesse: Well, my comic strip has been online since 1995. There’s an online form and that provides most of my input. Anyone can send me a dream submission that way. The strip also runs in ten newsweeklies currently, so I get snail mail submissions too. But most of the material comes from the website—about twenty to thirty dreams a week.

WITA: Have there been other artists in particular that have had a strong influence on you, or whose work you admire?

Jesse: Julie Doucet was a big influence early on. Her diary comics and dream comics were so personal, funny, and real. It was a fresh change from the kind of genre fiction and melodrama I’d been reading in comics for years. Chester Brown, Peter Bagge, Jim Wooding, and Daniel Clowes were all inspirational back in the early 90s, too.

WITA: You’ve got a big tour coming up for your new collection, The Night of Your Life! That’s got to be pretty exciting. Do you meet a lot of interesting fans during these kinds of things—and do their words contribute in any way to your comic strip?

Jesse: I really like meeting new people and improvising new humor in conversations. I try out stories and ideas, and things that get a laugh often make it into my comics. I’ll also be drawing a daily comics blog for the tour (if I can keep up with it!). I’ll be posting it to my Flickr site.

WITA: So what is The Night of Your Life, exactly—and why that particular title?

Jesse: Well, the book is a collection of over 200 dreams by different people—so there’s the pun that this is their “night life.” But to give the book some narrative coherence, I organized the material mostly by the age of the person whose dream it was. So hopefully it conveys that feeling of growing up and life getting more complicated. Then things get metaphysical, with theories about death and the afterlife. It’s all pretty surreal and funny though, with talking dogs, Smurf communists, and evil plans gone awry.

WITA: Thanks so much for your time, Jesse! I really appreciate the chance to talk with you.

Jesse: Thank you, Steph!

Jesse’s comic strip “Slow Wave” has been running for ten years, appearing in newsweeklies nationwide. You can order a copy of The Night of Your Life through Amazon; signed copies will be available for order by mail starting October 15. Visit the “Slow Wave” website for more info.

Related Posts:

• DoubleDCoverage #34
• DoubleDCoverage #33
• DoubleDCoverage #32
• Comic Book Review: Days Missing #3
• DoubleDCoverage #31