Eric Powell on the Goon

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Eric Powell on the Goon

06/28/2011 11:16am

With The Goon #34 coming out next week, I've been doing a lot of pondering. A handful of short stories, forty-five issues, a 108-page graphic novel, and our tenth trade paperback soon coming out—the book has come a long way from the sloppy first issue published back in 1999. Twelve years ago. I’m thirty-six now, around the time it seems comic artists reach their peak. And that’s where my fear comes in. Is The Goon still fresh? Does it still surprise anyone? After being with some readers for more than a decade, it’s inevitable that familiarity will set in. I have sleepless nights worrying about these kinds of things. I’m not kidding. The thought of the comic-reading world waking up one morning to realize you’re a two-bit hack they’ve been wasting their money on is a scenario of nightmarish proportions. It’s like being a rocket scientist and hoping NASA doesn’t discover you can’t do math. Are people going to get tired of The Goon? Is it going to become stale? What should I be doing to make that not happen? Should I move on to something else? I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Has The Goon plateaued?

I think people start out as struggling artists with a burning desire to get their work out there. They do it out of love. And wouldn’t it be great to get paid doing what you love? But then they find success, and it starts to become a job. They maybe don’t have the passion they once had, and it becomes a race to keep up with what their fans want. I don’t want to do that—become complacent and just go through the motions. I realized during all of my sleepless nights that now, more than ever, I have to do this book for me. I have to turn off the thoughts and fears of thousands of people reading the crap I put down on paper and trying to please them. I have to sit alone and make comics just for me. I gotta keep this shit punk rock: the things I want to draw and the stories I want to tell. Because if I can’t keep myself interested, no one else is going to be. I’ve been coming to the realization over the last few years that The Goon is just not for everybody. Nor should it be. The Goon is for a twenty-four-year-old struggling Tennessee comic artist scared out of his mind he was gonna have to go back to hanging drywall at any moment. That guy did The Goon because it was his escape.

“Well you’re in your little room

and you’re working on something good

but if it’s really good

you’re gonna need a bigger room

and when you’re in the bigger room

you might not know what to do

you might have to think of

how you got started sitting in your little room”

—The White Stripes

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Eric Powell on the Goon

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