Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Heathrow: Good afternoon, my name is Heathrow, and I'm a volunteer with the local Authors@Google
team. We have a speaker we have today called Travis
Millard, and he's done a lot of different stuff under the rubric of "Fudge Factory Comics."
Relatively recently a book which you have called "Hey Fudge," published by a local publisher
Narrow Books based in LA. Travis is based in Echo Park, and he has done
a lot of different media work. He has done mini-comics and zines. He's done fine art;
he is represented by the Richard Heller Gallery right here in Santa Monica. He's done illustrations
for Chronicle Books, like "How to Speak Zombie," which just came out yesterday, and another
book called "Farts," which I just wanted to say so I could say the title.
[laughter]
And we're here today, it's an interesting mix of stuff, when you have a chance, and
he'll talk about his work and show a lot of samples, a lot of raw and rough stuff, but
also really polished stuff, and so he is going to talk about his work; he's going to talk
about his work across the different media and forums.
I hope you like it. Travis.
[audience clapping]
Travis Millard: Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me here. I appreciate the
chance to come speak here. I looked your website up last night, and you
seem pretty successful. So it's an honor. [laughter]
So, I guess I'm going to start out by assuming that you don't know what I do. So I'm going
to show you a few of these drawings and talk a little about my process.
Primarily, I kind of tend to work with just the basics. I like pen and ink. Or I like
an inkwell and brush. And keep it really simple. I also tend to work kind of small. I've worked
large before. I've worked really large, or painted on a variety of different things,
but I tend to, I think it comes back to my workspace. I don't have a whole lot of room
in my house, so I can't afford the space to work large and store it really, because it
takes up a lot of room. So I just have drawers and boxes of tons of little drawings. I also,
I'm just kind of into the process of exploring with just a pen and paper. And just being
able to, like, see what I can pull out of that.
I'm way into sketchbooks. I kind of don't work in sketchbooks quite as much as I used
to. I eventually got to a point where I wanted to just start tearing the things out of there.
But the sketchbook was sort of too scared for me to rip it out, so I decided to just
abandon the sketchbook and sort of just draw. But I like the sketchbook because it allows
you to just generate ideas. There is a lot of exploring.
And I think that's probably the biggest theme that my work involves, is just exploring,
and experimenting and trial and error, and not realizing what failure is until you see
it later in print, and trying it different the next time around. Um, I also like humor,
I like jokes and I like, um, sort of like the rawness, I tend to do drawings of people
fighting a lot and people ask me why I do drawings of people fighting, and it's not
because I'm really agro or anything, but I've seen a few fights and I think that they're
sort of funny in the way that nobody seems to win or lose, they're just tugging at each
other and hurting each other both, but nobody really walks away a winner.
And, um, I also like to work with mirrors a lot. I think mirrors, there's something
really special that happens in the mirror. I think it was also, somewhere a long time
ago, somebody told me that if you looked into the mirror at night, then something weird
would happen. So that kind of like, that myth stayed with me.
I'm also into just really, like list making. I, like um, the things that you kind of, that
are out there, that you maybe don't see right offhand and you know just, there's a book
called "Zoom," where, you know, you zoom in really close and then you zoom out really
far. And so sort of the idea of that, and um, tigress chugging beer, that's an element
that happens too. Anyway, I'll just go back to some background. I grew up in Kansas City
and my mom was a self-taught artist. She did a lot of painting when she was pregnant with
me and my brother. And, um, so she didn't really paint otherwise, she would mostly was
just, ah, kind of do it for fun or relaxation, and so their basement is just littered with
these old paintings that she did and they are really sweet. But this was around me all
the time and she really encouraged me and my brother to draw a lot. And so, ah, these
are some drawings from a sketchbook that I found from maybe '85, maybe 1985. And I was
drawing influences from pretty similar things to what I am today, I you know, into skateboarding,
graphics and horror movies. And ah, this is a girl I had a crush on and it's drawn from
her school picture. I was also into, like, slapstick comedies with, you know, anything
with cussing or cheap nudity or something like that that I could get away with outside
of my parents house at a slumber party or something, you know. You can kind of see the
little Led Zeppelin logo back there. I was into comics and, you know, rock 'n' roll and
rap and heavy metal and punk rock, and sort of what I cut my teeth on. That should have
come out actually but, I left the comfort of my parents home when I went to, decided
to study art in KU. And so, um, I included this slide because it's my first art show
in maybe my freshman year at college. I studied illustration in printmaking and ah, I also,
well one of the professors there, she was in book arts and she showed a few students
on, these little tips on how to make these handmade books and I also discovered the zine
rack at the local record store and was like "ah, that's how you do that" and so I decided
to try and make my own. This is probably from maybe '96 or so. And, I just made a handful
of these and passed them around to some friends of mine and it got some laughs and so it kind
of encouraged me to try another one and, ah, so I did another one and tried another one
after that, and you know, mostly it was just to entertain myself and my friends. And it
seemed to, you know, it was like a life for a lot of the drawings I was doing in my sketchbook
to, you know, I dunno, just kind of spread it around a little further. And, I was also
really interested in just trying to get published. I wanted to, you know, see if I could get
paid to do an illustration job, I thought that was kind of the wildest thing I could
think of possibly doing. So I, well I didn't know what the hell I was doing at all so I,
I put together, I knew that you had to have a portfolio when I got out of school and I
saw all these people had these black portfolio cases, so I thought I don't want to do that.
And I also didn't have, I mean I didn't send an email until I was like out of college almost,
and just had no clue about any kind of savvyness of getting my stuff around. So I built this
clunky box. I built two clunky boxes. And I had my stuff shot on, you know, 4x5 transparencies
and the box unfolds and you know there's this little light box in there. And ah, so I didn't
know what to do so I literally got the Kansas City yellow pages and I looked up "advertising"
and "design agencies" and just cold- called and, ah, said, "Hi, could you see a portfolio?"
and I'd just go show up at their door and show up with this weird box and nobody knew
what to do with me at all. This is, um, I'm taking some shots you know, just holding this
up to the sunlight but this will give you an example of some of the things that were
in there, and they didn't know what to do with me. But there was one, one company, one
ad agency that said, "Hey let's, can you be a designer at our company? Do you know Illustrator
and Photoshop?" And I was like "Yeah, Yeah, no problem." And didn't know that stuff at
all, so I, after about 3 months they politely fired me. And, ah, so I moved back to, I was
living in Lawrence, Kansas, and ah, I was also sending those zines out a lot and sending
'em to, I would go to like bookstores and look in the magazine rack and you know find
a magazine that I liked or there was a record that I really liked and I would just look
up the address and copy it down and find the, you know, find the person to send it to.
And so I floated one to, there was a magazine called "Bunny Hop," that started out as a,
it started out as a zine and it started to kind of get a little more steam, and they
eventually started printing it as a magazine and I got a call from this guy called Noel
Tolentino, cold- called, and I also like, my business cards and stuff I had my parents
phone number on there so it just didn't, you know, I was really low-tech. And so I just
got a call from this guy and he said, "Hey, I got your thing, you know, can you do a comic
for a magazine?" and I was, like, "Hell yeah! Definitely." And I was, like, I had no idea
how to do a comic for a magazine, I don't know how to, but I figured it out, you know
so, just as far as printing it and, you know, all those issues with Photoshop and, you know,
how to scan things right. So I got that done and I sent it to him and then, around this
time, this is like '90, 1999, some friends of mine were in the Get Up Kids and they were
some guys that I grew up with in Olathe, Kansas, and they asked me to do their record cover.
They asked me to do a 7 inch at first and then they invited me out to this bar and said,
"Hey, about that 7 inch, can you do our full length?" And I was like, "Yeah sure!" and
they were like, "Hey cool! It's due in a week!" So I hammered this out like really fast and
I was literally blowing it dry on the way to FedEx and I didn't know how to scan something
this big so I FedExed this big painting to Vagrant in Santa Monica and then three weeks
later it was released worldwide. And also around that time my friend, Brock, who was
a friend that I grew up with and he helped me, he said, "You need a website." He said,
you know, "Just come up with a name," and I'd done a few different comics around that
time, just weird little panels, you know, zine comics and stuff. And so he said, "Just
come up with a name." And I figured, well, Fudge Factory, I guess, and I looked into
"Fudge Factory" and it was all *** sites and candy stores. And then I just put "Comics"
on the end of it and it was free, so I thought, yeah, all right, you know it fits in there
somewhere. But, so I had an email on there and I started getting emails from kids in
other countries, and I was getting emails from different magazines or people, you know,
just meeting people through doing that and they said, "Hey, I know a friend over at this
magazine, you should call them up." And so these are some earlier illustrations I did
for "Mean Magazine" and Camille Rose Garcia who's a really successful artist and a friend
of mine was the art director of the magazine at this time, and, ah, it was really cool
to work with her and just talk to her about these kind of things. And, ah, I, this is
a cover of "Slap" magazine. Skateboarding has been an influence in my life since I was
a young kid. So it was a real honor to be able to do this and this was only the second
time that they had an art cover that wasn't a photograph of a skateboarder. Anyway, little
bits and things were kind of happening and I had, you know, I was working two part-time
jobs and, but, you know, I started to kind of get a little money trickling in from different
illustration work so, I got a random email from the editor from "Spin" magazine and she'd
seen the "Bunny Hop" spread and said, asked if I'd like to do a comic on their last page.
So I did one, and it went well, and she asked me to do another one, and then that went well,
and she asked me to do another one, and that eventually it started to develop into, you
know, I was never like a solid thing but I would kind of have, you know, maybe a couple
of weeks of silence, and not know what I was doing, and then I'd get another email and
say, "Hey, you wanna do another one?" And this was, it paid enough money, it paid
more money than I'd seen in Kansas for a while, so I, and a friend of mine expressed some
interest in moving to New York and I just figured like, what the hell, let's do it.
And so I packed up and moved and moved to South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and just continued
doing these comics for "Spin." And that kind of continued on for a little while and I did
a few writing things for them, but I worked out to get my website on the bottom there,
which they don't normally do, but I was sort of persuasive enough to slide it in there
and that started to get a lot more activity and, you know, so that was a cool thing that
it brought in other things. But I lived in this piece of *** apartment
and the kitchen was just roach-infested and I, ah, I couldn't really eat there, or cook
there so I started going over to this cafe, this little cafe like on the corner, and drawing
at the counter. And this guy Andreas, who was the cook, he was like, "I want you to
draw my menus" and I was like "I'll trade you for lunch," and he was, like, "Alright,
deal." So I did his menus and he didn't charge me for like six months. Like just kept breakfast,
lunch and dinner. And I eventually got to the point where I had to put a halt to it
and pay the guy. He's a really sweet guy and he was like my best friend actually, a 55-year-old
Mexican dude. But I was also doing a lot of stuff for the "New York Press." That was kind
of a regular client at the time, and various other things. But then I'd been there for
maybe six months when 9/11 happened. Everything stopped. I mean literally like, there was,
obviously there was no work at all and I didn't know what would happen after that. And so
everything was uncertain and it forced me to just kind of spend more time at the desk,
and I started, you know, I wasn't like looking for work and, you know, job-wise, and I just
focused on drawing more, and I dunno, just exploring what I actually do when I'm just
sitting around my house with no work coming in. So these are some shots of my work space
around that time. And I was also walking around the city a lot and riding the subway and just
looking around a lot, and you know graffiti is something that, there's obviously a culture
of graffiti all over the country, but New York, there's a whole different energy about
it, so I was really inspired by just walking around and just participating along with that
and just drawing no big, you know I didn't really work with spray paint or anything,
I was more into just like pens and drawing on subway posters and pasting up. I was in,
you know, I liked to paste things up every once in a while. Max Fish was a bar that I
hung around at a lot and there are a lot of artists and graffiti writers and skateboarders
and just, and there's a really good energy and it has a rich tradition of art and drunks.
So their bathrooms were something that I would just go in there and paste something up in
the bathroom, and then eventually I kind of got to be friends with the owners and they
would let me in, in the daytime and I would just like put just bigger things up and then
at night they would just get crushed you know with all the writers and stuff. But they offered
me, they eventually, you know, I did maybe three or four installations in there and just
pasting up around, and they offered me a show. Because they do great shows there. And they
offered me a solo show, or I could do a split show or I could curate it and so I kind of
wondered, well, who would I want to do a show with? And one of the art directors at "Spin"
was a mutual friend of Shepard Fairey and she said that he liked my thing. So I just
dropped him an email and asked if he would be interested in showing and he accepted and
we did this show together. He designed this card, and it was a great show. He was a really
good guy and it sort of put me on the map a little bit I think as far as shows went
after that, because I started to exhibit a lot more and I just wasn't used to like having
people show up at an art show, you know? So that was a big thing. I was like "Wow, there's
people in the room, this is pretty good" But I started really just focusing on just making
art and putting things into shows. I was really excited to just have things on the wall and
be an artist in New York. But at the same time I just completely neglected any kind
of work that I was getting, that I had coming in. So I was getting pretty assed out and
I knew that I needed to make a change. 'Cuz my rent was just bleeding me and work wasn't
really happening all that much and so I just felt like I needed to make a jump. And I got
a call from my friend in LA and he said he lived in these two big houses on a 2-acre
hillside in East LA and he said the rent is super cheap and "You should come out here,
it'll be really fun. There's 11 roommates." And I went, "All right!" But anyway, but while
everything was kind of like, I mean my account was draining and everything, but then I would
go, my friend Rich worked at this record store Sound and Fury. I went in there and he was
like "Hey, did you see this magazine, this Japanese magazine cover?" and I'm like, "No,
I didn't, that's pretty cool." And Nat Owens, another friend of mine, owns this gallery,
he got this, he's like "Hey, I got this Taschen's '1000 Favorite Websites' book and that crappy
website you had up has somehow made it into the pages of that." So I was like, "Hey, thanks
for the note Taschen!" [laughter from audience] But anyway, so I knew something was going
alright. So I bought a minivan from a soccer mom in Kansas and I pasted a couple of skulls
on it and painted it black and drove it to LA, where it died as soon as I pulled into
this compound. And these are the houses that I moved into. And there was 11 roommates and
sometimes there were as many as 14 people living there, you know, there was a guy in
a tent on the hill. But there were a lot of people from Savannah College of Art and Design
who had moved out and they were involved in film and photography. I was kind of the only
visual painter, or, yeah you know visual painter. But it was a good group of people. And, you
know, there's a pool back there. It was just a whole new weird thing. I didn't do a lot
of swimming because there were some suicides in the pool. [laughter]
But I had this outdoor studio that I was working with and was totally foreign to me. I mean
I grew up in Kansas and winters in New York and stuff and so palm trees are, you know,
still kind of foreign to me. But I had this outdoor studio that I worked in and I was
pretty broke. But my friend took me to this bar called Little Joy the first night that,
or first week that I was in town. And I met this guy called Joe who was the manager there
and he was also from Kansas and he's a good guy and he mentioned that he needed somebody
to wash glasses and I was, like, "I'll wash glasses right now." And so he gave me a job
there, and I pretty quickly got promoted to bartender. I'd never bartended, I faked my
way to that, too, so people would come up and say, "Hey, can I get a Kamikaze?" and
I'd say I can give you a rum and Coke, or I can give you a beer or a shot.
And anyway after hours I would just go in and just paste my stuff around the bathrooms
and eventually just kind of started covering the hallways and the bathrooms of this bar.
And that kind of like got me, it just got me planted socially. I started making some
friends around the bar, it was kind of a place that I could go. You know, it was just sort
of a home, it felt like, you know there was also a bar in Kansas called the Eighth Street
Taproom that I started out by pasting stuff on in their bathrooms and then I went to New
York and started pasting stuff up in the Max Fish bathrooms and then I got to LA and then
I sort of felt like Little Joy was like, all right, this is where I'm going to paste my
stuff up. But at the time, also at that time I was really exploding in my sketchbooks;
I was drawing all the time and just, it felt like I was drawing in a different way. I sort
of feel like I can look back at sketchbooks, I have them since I was in second grade, you
know, all the way up until last week. And I can say that even like a year ago it seems
like I don't even draw the same, you know, and it seems that I'll figure something out
along the way with each drawing and kind of get a little better and I'm just pretty hypercritical
of my own stuff. So I feel like I'm always sort of running from doing something kind
of the same way I did it before. Around this time I also kind of discovered this gray-wash
technique that I've since kind of really held onto. And so these are some images from the
sketchbooks around this time. I also started to, I was doing, you know, little mini comics
and you know, just little bursts of humor and things like that. And I kind of wanted
to, I really wanted to try to do a longer form story. And so around this time the allegations
of Michael Jackson, you know, doing what he did kind of came out and there were rumors
of it going to trial. And I was just talking to a friend of mine and we were talking about
celebrity justice and sort of like, what do you do? So a celebrity can commit a crime
and kind of get off, or whatever, so I went, "So what do you do when the most famous person
in the world commits like maybe the most heinous crime in the world?" and then I said, "Michael
Jackson in exile," and he was, like, "Ha Ha!" So I just did a drawing, this first drawing
of him sitting there at the table and I showed that to him and he was, like, "Do another!"
So I started trying to, like, I had no idea what was going on, or what I was aiming for.
But I just tried to like, what's gonna come next, what's gonna come next? So the whole
thing was written just visually and completely with no plan. Around this time I met Christopher Lepkowski,
the publisher of Narrow Books, while I was a bartender at Little Joy and we got to be
friends talking about zines and publishing and things like that. And so these are some
examples of zines that I have done over the years. And I started talking to Christopher
about how to get this thing published. Like, what do the publishers want? Like how do they...?
You know, I'm used to doing this myself but I don't really know what it means to get a
book really published in a professional forum. And so he was doing, they had released one
book called "Two Letters," and they were going to the, they went up to the Alternative Press
Expo in San Francisco and he offered to take my zines up and put them on their table. And
you know, we just continued to talk and I think he took even a little, a rough outline,
or rough examples of the book I'd been working on at the time, maybe to show it to somebody
or what. And so, then, I was also doing a lot of art shows, this is a solo show that
I did in Silverlake at the Jeff Electric Gallery and I put like all my time and effort, I'd
probably spent 10 solid days installing the show, just painting the walls out, putting
you know, the best work that I had in there, hanging these daggers, hanging like a hundred
daggers from the ceiling. The opening was really great and I didn't sell anything at
all and I was pretty bummed, you know, and just like, arggg, that's the way it goes.
But the next morning, I got a call from Christopher and he was, like, "Hey, let's publish that
book." So anyway, that's what brings me here today,
is this "Hey Fudge" book. And it's, so the book is kind of compiling
all these zines and, you know, drawings and some photographs of, you know, art shows,
and just experience that have just kind of been tossed in there that I feel like is relevant
to maybe the last five years or so before publishing this.
And, um, it was a really unique experience to be able to work with Christopher and Mark
Dischler on just you know, having meetings on, just looking through books that we liked.
And essentially what our goal was to just to set out to try to produce a book that we
would want to buy on the shelf, you know, something that would really like, jump out
at us. So we were going and looking at books and talking about what we liked about certain
books and didn't like about other books. And you know, those guys get really, really into
the minute details of, you know, the stitching and binding and all these different things,
and paper stocks which I never considered at Kinko's when I was, you know, stapling
and stuff like that. So anyway, that book, it came out in 2007 and we decided to have
a, Christopher got, they got distribution through Last Gasp and Diamond Distribution,
and so it started to kind of hit some shelves and we decided, "Hey, let's throw a book release."
So we went back to the Jeff Electric Gallery where Chris saw that show and we hired a Mariachi
band and got some buckets of beer and signed some books. And it was a lot of fun.
I'd also like to mention, my partner Mel Kadel. She's an artist and my special lady, you know.
How do I say this without being too embarrassed? Anyway this is Mel, and she's also an artist
and we live together and draw together out of the same shack and this is an example of
a few of her drawings. And she's a consistent source of inspiration and humor and wildly
talented. And Mel and I are rep'd at the Richard Heller
Gallery in Santa Monica at Bergamot Station. And you know, a lot of people ask, like, "How
do you get rep'd at a gallery? You know, I gotta get a rep for my stuff." You know and
I'm like, yeah, we all do, but I don't know how that stuff happens. And I think with Richard,
you know, I never went and took a meeting and shared him anything and I've tried that
before with galleries. And I don't really think that galleries want to you to come up
and say, "Hey, here's my bag of stuff," you know. I think galleries seem to want to discover
you more, and not have you kind of walk in their door, but who knows, that's my experience
but it's different for everybody. But I think that stuff really does happen by just making
things and floating those zines out and just all these little things, the stuff in the
bathrooms, you know, a comic that I did for a magazine that maybe I forgot about years
ago. You just never know when somebody's gonna come across it and pick it up, so, I think
my plan of attack is just to litter the corners with my stuff for somebody to discover along
the way wherever they found it. So this is, we did a split solo show, Mel's "New Drawings"
and my "Nude Rawings." We live together in Echo Park in an old cabin. This was built
in the '20s and ah, yeah we have a little cat. We enjoy going on for long walks in the
street and decorating poles. So I'll move, I guess I also, just now, will move onto some
work projects because I do a lot of commercial work as well. So these are some examples of
that. There's just, I guess this just kind of goes to, like, you know when I first started
out thinking that I wanted to make a drawing and see if I could get paid to do an illustration,
there was just a lot that came along with that that I didn't expect to find myself in
this position, talking to Google, really for one, or being on the phone negotiating a contract
or, you know, having to answer a number of emails that are, you know, there are just
all kinds of things that come up that isn't just sitting around drawing pictures and making
jokes all day. Which is kind of a disappointment. [laughter from audience]
But anyway these are some examples of Vans. I did a series of shoes for Vans in 2003,
and I did a number of T-shirts and things for them. And that came about basically by
them coming and they saw my stuff at an art show years ago at the Blk/Mrkt Gallery, and
got in touch. Foundation is a skateboard company that I've done a lot of stuff for. I was actually introduced to Foundation through
Michael Sieben who's a good friend of mine in Austin, Texas. We made friends through
the mail, like old-fashioned mail. I was living in New York, we were in a show together. And
he said, we started kind of sending each other zines back and forth and he's a really funny
guy, so he says, "Hey, let's try to do a like a drawing zine back and forth." Initially,
you know, we just decided that we were gonna, you know, send these things back and forth,
drawing together, and maybe we'd have, one of us would have a stack of drawings for like
two months and then send it on to the other one and then the other one would hold it for
maybe a month or so and then send it on. We kept passing this back and forth, back and
forth for about two years and then decided that, all right well, initially we were just
going to make a run of 200 zines, split the run and sell them on our sites, but a friend
of Siebens from Austin, named Mike Aho, had gotten a job at Volcom and just saw one of
the drawings and was, like, "What are you doing with these?" He said, "Well I bet we
could get Volcom to, ah, I bet we could use their copy machines or something." And then,
you know, people at that company caught wind of it and eventually it became this book.
And, you know, it's like a 40-page book. They printed 65,000, I think, of these books and
they went out and in one month they went out in every issue of "Thrasher" magazine. And
like in the cover, it was glued into every issue of "Thrasher." They never sold them.
Actually our payment was, they were like here's a thousand books, you can sell them. And they're
not available for sale anywhere else, other than with me or Mikey. But to sort of justify
that, they produced these T-shirts and they had these T-shirts that went into the line,
and then they also sent us on these, a number of art shows to kind of promote the shirts
and book and everything. You go to the art show and you get a free shirt and a book.
And it was pretty wild, it was a pretty wild campaign and definitely way further than we
expected to ever take it. And it actually took us to Japan. We ended
up going and having a show in Tokyo. This is Michael in front of Kiddieland. That look
on his face is about the look that both of us walked around with the whole time. "What
the hell?" That's Mike Aho also in Japan. So I had not
done a lot of traveling, and we get there, and the first, just a little story here of
me geeking out, arriving there. But we arrive at the airport, take a train in to Shibuya,
get off the first train and this guy is standing there with the shoes that I did for Vans.
The first dude I see standing there, and I'm like "Oh My God!" and I'm taking pictures
of him and he just freaked out, doesn't, you know, I mean I don't know, how often does
a door opens up from a train and someone starts flashing photos of you? Anyway, he had no
idea. So these, so Michael Sieben also has a skateboard
company currently called Roger, but the one previous to that was called Bueno. This is
a deck and a T-shirt that I did for it. Burton Snowboards is a company that I also do a lot
of work for. And this is the first, I did a snowboard for them, it was a Jeremy Jones
signature series board, I think it came out in 2005. This is a picture of Jeremy hucking
himself off something. And then they came back and asked me to do
the, I did all the packaging and hang tags for all of their products for 2009. So it
was largely, it was like the biggest, it was my entire 2008 was building boxes and just
for every product that they had. They were a great company to work with. They were just
like, you know, constantly telling me to just juice my imagination. They were like, "Man,
make this box crazy, this box just really crazy." So I'm like "OK, I'm gonna make it
crazy." And then they were like "Alright, that's crazy, but for the next one, go off!
We're gonna go crazy on this next one." I'm like "Yeah alright, turn up the juice", and
then they'd be like "Oh man, that is sick, but this next one is [animated sounds] crazy
freak out." "All right!" So I reached new levels of freak out. [laughter]
And produced, you know, several boxes and, you know, pretty much I got a, you know, if
you got anything from the 2009 season it's got my stamp on it somewhere. I also do a
lot of packaging for bands and avid, you know, fan of music. And Anton Newcombe is the singer
of Brian Jonestown Massacre and I met him at the Little Joy as a bartender and he was
into the vampires that were pasted onto the wall and asked if we could just photograph
those and design a package around that. This was around the time that the movie "Dig" came
out. And so I did that record for them and then, EL-P is a hip-hop artist that I've done
a lot of stuff for and continue to do work for. Um, Megapuss is ah, Devendra Banhart
and Greg Rogove moved in next door to us in the cabin and we just met at the mailbox and
they were recording this project and asked me and Mel to do the packaging for it. And
so Mel and I tag teamed. She did the waves on there, and we would kind of, like, swap
every page back and forth, and that came out on Neil Young's Vapor label last year. I also,
you know, got a random call from HP for, there's an ad agency in San Francisco called McCann
and they asked if I would do work for HP's Back to School campaign of 2009. So this is
a series of drawings that were like some kind of Facebook component. And there's some kind
of random like, major generator, like college major generator, so you'd be like, you know
punch these buttons and it would say, "This is stuff I like," and it'd say, "You might
be a cheese maker or a physics major or whatever." So they asked me if I would do do this, what
would be, you know an animated commercial, it never had, well I'd done video for the
Get Up Kids a few years back but as far as animation, like I'm not, in theory I know
how it works but certainly with cell animation I'm not, I don't have the patience or the
skill to do that. But key frames and concepting, and that kind of stuff I can do so I sort
of, I can get it to a point where it's in a good working order for an animator. So anyway
I ended up putting together a series of six key frames and those went to a company called
Brand New School and they were animated. And I don't have the link to the animation on
this, but if you go to my site you can see that, it's on YouTube. Here's a couple more
of those key frames, but this, that little head in the back, the little head with the
motor board is head banging gloriously blowing in the wind. So then I did this book, "Farts."
On a more serious note, and this book last year came out with Chronicle Books. Yeah,
I don't know, how do you say no to a book about farts? You know, and it's a sound book.
I didn't write it but Chronicle got in touch and said, "Hey, this Fudge Factory guy I think
is the guy for the job", and so they would basically just give me the title of these
farts and I would just have to come up with some kind of image about what the description
would look like, and then you can punch the button and hear what it sounds like. And it
did really well. Like in the first three weeks it sold out of its first run of 30,000 and
I think it's in, I mean, in under a year it reached over 100,000 copies. I'm not sure
where it's at now, but it's widely available. And then, so they asked me to do another kind
of sound book and this just came out yesterday called "How to Speak Zombie." And it's another
kind of goofy kid's book where you can punch the sounds. Like "Hey, how can I order a coffee?
I'm in Zombieland." And you punch the button and it's like "Arrrrggggg."
[laughter] So I'm just gonna wrap this up with a few
more drawings, 'cuz basically what it comes down to, I'll go home and just continue drawing
today, work or not. But, yeah. I think it just sort of comes to, comes down to just
doing, you know, and continuing to do things, and not really know, you know, what kind of
life it's gonna take on after it leaves the desk. But um, I'm just sort of curious to
see like, I'm basically just trying to keep myself entertained and avoid doing something
that I did last week and hopefully somewhere along the way like, communicate with somebody
and make a joke or make a point. And, yeah. So I guess I'll just, I really don't know
what else I want to say about it. If anybody has any questions or anything like that, I'm
happy to take them.
[pause]
audience#1: All right well, I really like your work first off. So thanks for coming
and sharing. Um, I see a lot of, maybe there not there, I do see a lot of graffiti elements
to your work. And, you know, with your work with EL-P and stuff. And I've discovered a
lot of artists like Jeremy Fish, and you've got the same flora as in run English on you
know some magazines like "High Fructose" and "Juxtapoz." Have you ever considered, you
know, working with some of those to kind of get the hip-hop culture emergency work as
Travis: Ah, well, "Juxtapoz" is a magazine that I've worked with before,
audience: Nice.
Travis: I had a feature in their magazine last year, and Jeremy is a great friend of
mine, I mean he's a rad dude and I've done some stuff with Aesop Rock and you know, like.
I guess, you know, like Def Jux is a, I've been a fan of those guys, I was a fan of Company
Flow, I used to have a college radio show when I was in Kansas and I used to play the
Fun Crusher Plush album and like, you know, I
I don't really know how you insert yourself into, how do you do a hip-hop record? I don't
know. I mean I don't know how this stuff happens, but I just eventually along the way I met
Jeremy and Jeremy was like "I really like your stuff and hey this is Aesop, you know"
and I was like "Hey, good to meet you" and then he's like "Yeah I like your stuff" and
then totally out of the blue I got a random call and they said, and I answered the phone
from a 917 number, and he said, "Is this Travis?" and I said, "Yeah." And he said, "This is
El-Producto," and I was like, what? You know. And he's like, "Hey, I got your number from
Aesop." So that's kind of how that happened. I wanted to do stuff for him years ago but
I just didn't know how to make it work, you know I mean it's a lot of times, it's the
same with skateboards, you know, I mean honestly anything I've ever, I've ever been involved
with that I'm really proud of, I haven't gone out and tried to scrape my way into it, it
sort of like, it seems to come back around and more naturally work, you know? But yeah.
audience: Cool. Thank you.
Travis: Sure.
audience #2: So I saw your work, you know there's the whole skulls that you've been
doing for a long time and I kind of was thinking, I mean this is just an association, but I
was thinking like Self-Help Graphics, do you do Dia de los Muertos kind of stuff? Have
you ever checked that stuff out?
Travis: Um, no. But I, well I have, I'm not that familiar with it but, maybe a line of
self-help books is exactly what I need to be doing. [laughter] Yeah, good idea. Well,
I'm not sure. I mean I'm kind of into, I think skulls just comes from like, for me it comes
from like, Pusshead, you know like early skateboard graphics, you know like Zorlac Boards and
stuff. That's why I started drawing skulls, you know, it was just kind of seeing it in
skateboard magazines or like heavy metal records that I was into and then, yeah. There's a
rich tradition with the Dia de los Muertos but I think I like the, I dunno. I think I
was captured by the rawness of just metal and skateboarding and stuff like that. Maybe
if there's a self-help book for me out there on that kind of stuff I'd be open to reading
it but...
audience#3: You mentioned how you went through a bunch of books to find things you liked
about other books to go into the production of "Hey Fudge." Could you talk about some
of the things that you ended up either putting in the book or ways you put it into the book,
based on that?
Travis: Um, well, yeah. I think, well, I think a lot of, you know there's certain things
about books that was just really fun to go to the bookstore. I'm a collector of books
and so are Mark and Christopher, and so we all just kind of, and it also gave me an excuse
to go to the bookstore and just like spend a bunch of money on stuff and just justify
it that way. But, you know there's just things, certain things about some books that we really
liked you know, and other things that we didn't. And so we tried to kind of take the best of,
you know, little bits and try to rip off like parts of books that we thought were working
really well. And then when it came to designing the book, I think I have a, I think, just
you know, I've laid out a lot of zines and I've done a lot of you know illustration layout,
or whatever I'm doing. But my tendency is to just full bleed everything, just to throw
it in there and really kind of, when I make zines I like to kind of think of them as mixed
tapes. So if I'm, you know, it's like, this is what I've currently been listening to over
the last couple of months. So I'll pull out the best songs of, you know, what I've been
listening to and toss them onto this tape, in the way that the zine comes together. And
so the editing process was a little different, whereas with the zine I could make a hundred
of those things and if it ah, you know, if there's a piece of crap in there that I'm
embarrassed about later, I don't really think about it, you know, I kind of let it float
because I'm gonna make another one like in a month or two. With this book, um, it you
know, I've looked at, there's some drawings in there that I'm just like, "pfff, I had
a better drawings than that. How did that make it in there?" Or you know. But that's
where Chris and Mark kind of helped come in and helped editing it. And Mel, also sitting
with me and going through it, and saying like "You've got a better drawing than that, that
can go." Or one thing with the "Michael Jackson in Exile" book, that thing has a, you know,
my first instinct was just to have that go full bleed off the pages, and Mark and also
Brock advised me on just shrinking those things and adding a big white border. So when it
does go full bleed on a couple of the pages it becomes a lot more dramatic. And ah, you
know, there's just a lot of different production things that go into it. And when I make a
zine I think the kind of the flash of the copier and it's, I dunno, it's kind of part
of the magic of it, is just the kind of crude nature of how it comes out in the end. But
things are different with this kind of production, you know? I mean the crappiness of it isn't
really as endearing as it is with a handmade staple thing. So, just adjusting levels, you
know, and I had some help with that but, yeah it was a really good learning experience.
For these guys, too, this is their second single, their first single authored publication
and their second book. You know, so. We were all kind of learning together at the same
time, you know. But we're all, you know, pretty savvy guys and know what we like so we can
just sort of go for aesthetic and see how that came together. Yeah.
[pause]
All right, thanks a lot. Oh I have some stickers, some sticker packs, if anybody wants to get
a free sticker pack. Oh yeah, and I also just launched my website. These guys are going
"Website!" I just launched my website. I haven't updated my website in a really long time,
and I just launched it like within the last 12 hours. FudgeFactoryComics.com. [pop noise]
All right. Thanks.
[Clapping]