A happily married homeowner who cut his teeth at Disney, Tom Neely doesn’t seem like your textbook tortured artist. Yet his canvases and comics, full of wordless animalistic sex, frantic cluttered buildings, and huge fields of harshly splattered black ink, evoke not so much whimsy and wonder as a state of morbid loneliness. And yet there’s a catharsis, too, a sense that in his art, Neely is working past his own furry demons, and if he can do it, by golly, so can we. Famous on a fluke for the Henry & Glenn Forever book he threw together as a lark with his art collective, Igloo Tornado, Neely’s getting a lot more press recently, including as a publishing partner for the new Sparkplug Books. We thought we’d ‘rise above’ the competition and dig deep, looking into his past and exploring the delicate teeter-totter he plays on between publishing and the art world.
You’re clearly a fan of classic newspaper comics and comic books. You even have Popeye’s anchor tattoos on your forearms. What do you love about the artist who created him? Elzie Crisler Segar created Popeye… I don’t know! I just gravitated towards those ‘30s styles. Back in art school, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I’d always been interested in comics, but art school kind of told me to go away from comics. But then at some point I started studying Philip Guston and read a couple of books of him, and discovered that at some point in his career, he found his way back to being inspired by comics, and that inspired his later work, which was much more figurative, and had all these cartoony Klansmen. My interest in Philip Guston as a painter led me back to ‘30s comic strip artists like E.C. Segar and Billy DeBeck, stuff like that, which reminded me of when I was much younger. The earliest comics I ever read were the Floyd Gottfredson Mickey Mouse comics, and some of Carl Barks’ Duck comics, but mostly the Gottfredson. So when I was in art school studying Philip Guston, working my way back to find a similar realm of ‘30s comic strips, things started to click for me and I started to kind of pursue that.
Carl Barks invented such great characters, like Scrooge McDuck. Why do you prefer Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse comics? There’s something a lot more visceral about his art—more manic. There’s a little bit more mania in his comics. Carl Barks’ comics always seem more conservative to me. They’re very ‘perfect’ comics. You can’t really argue with anything in them. Floyd Gottfredson is a little bit dirtier and weirder. A little bit grittier. He always feels a little more underground.
The stakes were darker in the Mouse comics. If Clarabelle the Cow didn’t get her money in time, bad things were going to happen to her. Ha ha—yeah. And being interested in that stuff led me to the others. And E.C. Segar… I’d always loved Popeye through animation and stuff like that, and it brought me back to the comic strips at the point when I was deciding, kind of weighing between the art world and comics world, what do I feel closest to, which is when I got the Popeye tattoos…
But what have you decided? In some ways, you’re a comic artist who pulls heavily from the world of fine art. But at the same time, you also hang framed paintings in galleries, which is the world of fine art. Which is more you? Well, in 2007, I had my first graphic novel come out—The Blot. And about two months later I had my first big solo show at a gallery here in L.A., which was called Self-Indulgent Werewolf, at the Black Maria Gallery. Those two things happened almost simultaneously, and ever since then, I’ve been kind of looking at those two events and weighing them. ‘Which was the better experience for me as an artist?’ And I almost always fall back on comics as a better experience. You put almost as much effort and money into putting on an art show as you can into a book, but an art show lasts for a month. Maybe you get a couple reviews, maybe some people buy a couple of pieces. But four years later, I was at a convention last week, and I sold ten more copies of The Blot. That art show that happened at the same time that The Blot came out—it doesn’t exist anymore. I’ve got all those paintings in a closet. I can’t sell them to save my life! But I’ve still got this book that contains all my artwork and all my ideas. And I can still sell this book. Approaching my latest book, The Wolf, is almost the reverse. It’s a long, narrative series of paintings. It could be an art show, sure. It could be like an art show of 200 paintings, or the finished product could be a book. I could sell a painting for 2000 bucks, or I could sell a book for 20 bucks.
