Alex Krokus’s Loud and Smart follows Krokus, in the form of a raccoon, and his friends—depicted as worms, cats, and hammerhead sharks—hanging out and getting high in the big city. Krokus’s comics cycle between the absurd, the mundane, and the insightful while mastering the vocabulary of internet-age humor. His first print collection, Loudest and Smartest, was published in 2022, and his second collection, Loud & Smart & in Color, debuts from Silver Sprocket this month.
Why animals?
I think I first started to create some separation between myself and the avatar I was writing jokes with. I will often break the boundaries of reality, and it feels easier since they're all cartoon animal people. If I was drawing pictures of myself and my friends and family and people I know, it just feels too close to home. I just finished this graphic novel about my family, losing my dad and grief. In that context, them being animal people adds a sense of levity. It's easy to talk about dead dads and grief when the dad's an owl and my brother's a bear.
This new collection is in color. The last one was in black and white. What do you think color brings to your work?
I started working in color with Loud and Smart because when I was shopping the proposal for the graphic novel around, my agent Ed [Maxwell] said, "I think that we could probably find a lot more interested publishers if you made this color." I rolled my eyes and groaned. I'm color-deficient. I don't have all of my rods and cones. I think I was scared of color for a long time because of that. Digital is a little bit easier because people with color blindness can use a lot of tools to incorporate color in their work digitally. Both my graphic novel and a lot of the comics in Loud and Smart in color are traditional. I was nervous approaching it.
I experimented a lot in Loud and Smart. I started to figure out a process that I think I get good results from. A great thing about the comic strip format, and the webcomic format, is that it allows for a lot of experimentation. You can screw around with one style or a palette for one strip and then switch it up for the next one. It doesn't feel like you're disrupting the harmony of the story.
I feel like every comic strip artist who has worked for over a decade, you can look at their first strip and then look at their most current one and be like, "Oh, wow, that guy looks totally different now." I think that's great.
Do you have any favorite comics in this collection?
I think my favorite comic was one called Doctor Visit. It's about a guy going to the doctor because he has a hangover. The doctor prescribes him a beer. Then there's a panel of both of them just drinking in silence and the doctor smoking inside. The guy asks him, "What do you do for a living?" He says, "I'm a doctor." That's the bit. I just felt I was cooking with that one. There isn't a conventional punchline in it. It's a vibe I'm chasing again, but I just got to let these things happen. I can't force it.
You've had a few of your comics go mainstream. What’s it like when one of your comics becomes a meme?
I still find it exciting. I posted a comic a few days ago about 1984 by George Orwell getting banned in school libraries. The punchline is that while all that's happening, protecting children with restricting media, they're still looking at their phones watching a guy killing cats on a livestream. I thought it would resonate with people with a dark sense of humor, but it struck some discourse. Everyone's arguing whether or not 1984 should be banned or if George Orwell is a piece of shit. It wasn't really my intent. I just picked 1984 because censoring a book on censorship felt apt, but all discourse is good publicity.
I could see how, for some people, it’s a nightmare when something leaves your circle. They feel maybe they'll get doxxed or they're endangered, but I haven't yet experienced that. There are people who told me my comics were tasteless and bad for the world. I don't know. It doesn't really get under my skin. I usually get excited when people who don't already look at my stuff see it, whether they like it or not.
