Cartoonist Carol Tyler’s father, Chuck, is a regular guy. He’s gruff and he’s loyal and he builds things. In her new graphic novel, You’ll Never Know: A Good and Decent Man, Tyler begins to tell Chuck’s story, which is also, of course, her story. The book recounts her father’s experiences in World War II and the life he made for himself and his family after returning from the war. You’ll Never Know quickly proves less straightforward—and more interesting—than a simple biography, though. We find Tyler moving back and forth in time, investigating her relationship with her father when she was a child and now that she’s an adult, and frequently wondering how it’s affected her troubled relationship with her husband.
Tyler published comics in Weirdo and Twisted Sisters in the eighties and nineties, and her graphic novel, Late Bloomer, come out in 2005. She’s long been known for her quirky and moving autobiographical tales. For her new book, forsaking strict chronology, Tyler skips between time periods and between the lives of five characters to recreate what she calls the “primary experience of the world.” She recreates the experience of thought, in which past and present, parents and children, relationships and variations of the self co-mingle, intersect, and layer over one another. Evocative words and images appear in the background or the margins of Tyler’s panels, drawing out subtleties of the story, or clueing us in to unspoken emotional tones.
In a recent phone conversation, Tyler talked enthusiastically about You’ll Never Know (due out from Fantagraphics in April), her family, and her own approach to art. Allowing one topic to flow into another, much as she does in her comics, Tyler offered up a series of small revelations from her life as an artist.
PWCW: I love the very lush, painterly style of many of the pages of You’ll Never Know , and also the richness of narrative detail in the images. Do you place your art in relation to anyone else’s, either in comics or painting?
Carol Tyler: This might be a strange answer but I really don’t know where my art fits in because I consciously isolate myself from print material that’s visual. I’ve been worried since college about inadvertently appropriating someone else’s idea and image. Coming from an art background, I looked at all the classical stuff, but I have no idea about modern art. I look at the comics anthologies but I don’t see myself as a comics person.
PWCW: How do you define what you do, then?
CT: I’m a painter who tells stories. The way I do it is I think, “How can I make this look real nice?” When my dad would build something, he’d want it to look nice. He learned woodworking craftsmanship in school and other places; he had some practical skills. I think of my work the same way. I want the panels to be straight, I want to be nice and neat. Basically, I want to do a good job, so that when people look at it, they’ll say, “She did a really good job!”
PWCW: The colors really add to the richness of the images, too.
CT: That’s because of the 53 colors of ink. I didn’t want to do blackline and fill it in with color so I custom mixed ink instead. Every color is ink and I have 53 colors. I have a key chart and I named them all, things like Lucky Forward—that’s the name of Patton’s advance on Europe. Others are called Beer, Blood, Plywood, Tricky, Redhead, She’s Got It All...
PWCW: Do you outline the story beforehand, or just dive in?
CT: I just jump in and do it. I have an aversion to writing outlines because of the nuns so when you say that, I just go, “Aaah!” I guess I did poorly in that area of school or something. I start with a fragment and just start and it’s a disaster. Eventually, I know the end, so then I work backwards and tell the story.
PWCW: How have your parents felt about seeing their story told this way? Did they have input into the process along the way?
CT: No, they didn’t have any input while I was working. I struggled through it on my own, and when I got it to a certain point, when it looked solid, then I showed it to them. I was afraid my dad would be mad. You know, there are scenes where I’m showing him cussing, things like that, but he’ll read it and then say something like, “That sonafabitch, you know what he did!?” So he doesn’t say, “This didn’t happen” or “It was like this.” Instead, it just triggers a new set of memories.
PWCW: I know there are two more books coming after this one. Where are you with them?
CT: Book two is about 70% done, and three is about 20% done. At first, I thought it would be one big book but I kept running into technical problems, and problems with the story structure and the flow of it, and it was taking longer than I’d thought it would. I told my dad, “In order for you to see the book, you can’t have any medical problems or die on me until you’re 93 at least. You guys have to hang in there.” They were like, “Okay”, but then I thought, “I better break this up because you don’t know what’s going to happen.” I really wanted him and Mom—a lot of part two is about Mom—to see the books published.
PWCW: You talk about your father, but you’re also talking about your father’s generation more broadly in the book. How do you define that generation of men?
CT: My dad is a regular guy like millions of other guys who silently, quietly did their thing after the war. They became the dads of the baby boomers and they didn’t bring any attention to themselves but they did amazing things. When I was little I saw them as can-do people, as reliable, as solid. Now they’re called “the greatest generation” but I thought of them as “the can-do generation.” I just hate that they’re dying off. I’ve always thought, “Oh my God, heaven forbid when we get into power. It’s all gonna be a mess when they die off.” They really did earn us some time out from the troubles by doing what they did.
PWCW: How’s your dad doing these days?
CT: My dad, oh my God, he built a roll-top desk last year. Unless he’s working on a project he drives my mom crazy. Two years ago, he ripped out the staircase because he wanted a hot tub in the basement, of all places. He’s unstoppable.
PWCW: Are you still painting on top of doing the books?
CT: I’m terribly allergic to oil paint but every summer I tell myself I have to paint an oil painting this summer, and I do that. A couple of years ago, I did a self-portrait. It was when the Masters of American Comics came out, and I thought it was interesting that they were all guys. It was at a time when my dog had something wrong and I had to carry her up and down the stairs. We were calling her the queen of the house, and I thought, “Oh, don’t they know I’m the queen of comics?!” So I did a portrait. I don’t know where this stuff comes from off the astral plane. It’s not me. I’m being guided by a spirit, and I truly believe that.
I set up a tent in my backyard with an easel inside, and I come the next day and there’s this drip on the right side that looks like an ink spill, and I built the whole painting around it. I made myself look like Elizabeth the First and instead of a scepter, I have a pen and I’m holding the dog and it says, “I’m married to comics”—Elizabeth said, “I’m married to England.” It’s loaded with symbols having to do with comics and my family, and there are flowers and panels and tons of other stuff.
PWCW: Can I see that anywhere?
CT: Oh no, it’s an oil painting, and there are problems reproducing it. I put a handle on the side and dragged it to New York for some women’s comics thing. They were talking about establishing the canon, and I thought, “This is precisely why I left the art world.” All this talk about who’s the best and everything. I just want to do my best work and hook into my primary experience of the world. You’re dead longer than you’re alive. You’ve gotta leave a trace of something that matters. You’ve got to tell your truth.