In addition to their solo work, Dave Baker and Nicole Goux have jammed together on numerous graphic novels over the last several years that includes books like Fuck Off Squad, Forest Hills Bootleg Society and Everyone is Tulip. Next week they’ll add another to the list, Punk’n Heads, a punk rock, romantic coming-of-age story about being “young, messy and alive.”
“Punk’n Heads is a book for all the broken hearted losers out there,” Baker said. “The kids who wanted to accomplish great things and then ended up playing shitty back-room punk shows. If you’ve ever broken up with someone in the back of a van, right before six idiots in Doc Martens are about to pile in, this is the book for you.”
“For anyone whose journey hasn’t been a straight path, Punk’n Heads might just bring you a little solace,” Goux said. “Join Hannah, Jerry, Morgan and Birdie in their quest to make something cool, make it big or maybe just be a little less sad.”
I spoke with Baker and Goux about getting the band back together for their latest graphic novel, as well as being young, following your dreams and what happens when those dreams get derailed. You can also check out some preview pages from the book before it arrives in stores next week.
You’ve collaborated many times before — Fuck Off Squad, Forest Hills Bootleg Society, Everyone is Tulip. At this point, how has your working relationship evolved? Do you still surprise each other?
Dave: Nicole and I have quite a body of work, at this point. Which is something I’m exceedingly proud of. To think about how much we’ve accomplished in this short amount of time makes me very happy. In terms of how we’ve evolved? Well, honestly quite a bit. Originally, I would just write a script and she would draw it. But now, especially with Punk’n Heads, she’s much more involved in the story. We come up with the ideas for the comics together, then heavily discuss the stories, and then I go away and do a draft and then she weighs in. And I do another one. This is something we do on repeat until the story and script are exactly where we want them. And then Nicole will start drawing.
The book is described as a “DIY love letter to being young, messy, and alive.” How much of Punk’n Heads is drawn from your own experiences — playing in bands, living in shared houses, making bad romantic decisions?
Dave: Oh, I mean, all of it? Nicole and I were both involved in music growing up. And as far as making poor decisions, isn’t that what growing up is? I feel like one of the key aspects we were trying to examine with Punk’n Heads is what it feels like to be a part of a scene. What the emotional and social ecosystem of a large group of people looks like. I don’t know if we succeeded? That’s not for us to say. But I’m pretty proud of how things ended up in the finished book.
Nicole: I think most of what we make is pulled from our own experience or those of the people around us, but it’s less about literally being in bands and more about what it’s like to be part of a group of people. Where goals and experiences meet, where they diverge, and how you stay together or drift apart based on the way you tackle those situations.
Horror-punk with pumpkin masks is a very specific aesthetic choice. Where did the visual and tonal world of the band come from, and how did you land on it together?
Dave: That was Nicole’s idea. It came from the Punk’n Heads pun, I believe. I’m pretty thrilled with how that manifested in the finished book, honestly. I think the character designs and the costume choices that Nicole made are so fun and really pop. I love the way the kids look. I think it really sells the idea of what we’re trying to do.
Nicole: I mean yes, was it largely because I thought Punk and Punk’n was a good pun and a funny idea for a group? Yes. Are punk, zine aesthetics, and horror things that Dave and I are interested in and something that we felt like we could speak to with some degree of authenticity? Also yes.
The book deals with someone whose original dream (fine art) gets derailed and replaced by something unexpected. Do either of you relate to Hannah’s experience of your path not being a straight line?
Dave: I think all creatives have detours and scenarios that they’re not exactly expecting. But that’s what being an artist is. I’ll let Nicole really take this one, though. She’s got the real answer for this question.
Nicole: I mean yes, quite literally. I didn’t make a move from art to music, but I had no intention of being a cartoonist when I graduated college. As I grew up my dream shifted constantly from artist, to mangaka, to animator, to fine art painter, to editorial illustrator, and then looped back around to making comics. I think many times we pursue the creative outlets that are in front of us because that’s what we have an understanding of or access to, but there are whole worlds of creative possibilities that go unexplored (in fact it’s incredibly frustrating to me that I can’t test out every creative medium). Punk’n Heads is about being open to the journey and not denying a creative outlet because you’ve defined yourself a certain way.
Nicole, you have your own solo work — This Place Kills Me — and then there’s this long collaborative history with Dave. How does drawing someone else’s script compare to working from your own stories?
Nicole: In some ways it’s completely different, and in others totally the same. I like to think I have a decent amount of creative input with most of my collaborators. They listen to my ideas and feedback, we make changes together, so I feel a good amount of ownership before I’ve even put pen to page. And in turn I take feedback about design and character all the way through. There’s something about the alchemy of creating something with two brains where you can push each other and make something better that really appeals to me. When I work on my own, I’m sort of my own creative collaborator. I do all the planning and the editing on my own, but then I go forth and draw almost as though I was working on a script written by someone else. And I make changes and adjustments in the way I would with a collaborator who trusts me. The main difference is there is sometimes a loneliness to making my own work. At the end of the day, if you fail, that’s on you alone and there’s no one else to fall back on for comfort or blame haha.
Hannah is a visual artist who abandons painting. Nicole, was there anything interesting or strange about drawing a character whose relationship to art is so fraught?
Nicole: I think every artist’s relationship to art is fraught. Show me an artist who hasn’t cried at 3 in the morning about whether it’s worth it or they should just quit and get a desk job and I’ll give you $100.
The band has costumes and a campy horror aesthetic. Nicole, how much creative freedom did you have in designing that visual identity, and what were your reference points?
Nicole: I have ultimate creative freedom with my collaborations with Dave. He offers suggestions and references, but he’s very open to whatever I come up with. For this one I think Dave put together some pages of 1800s halloween costumes, and I looked up those old death photos and memento mori. Combining that with what I know of zine kid aesthetics gave us the look of the Punk’n Heads.
Nicole, your page layouts in this book feel very alive and unconventional — can you walk us through how you approach the architecture of a page? Do you think about layout as part of the storytelling, or does it come more intuitively? I was reminded of some of the visuals that go along with punk rock, things like zines, hand-lettered flyers, collages, that whole DIY aesthetic as I read the graphic novel. How did that vocabulary find its way into how you structured pages or panels?
Nicole: I don’t think you could extricate layouts from visual storytelling if you tried. Even if you’re not intentional about it, or just use a grid, those decisions are adding to the feel and meaning of the pages. Layout is as important to me as words on the page. Some of it is intuitive and comes from legibility and the language of comics, and a lot of it has to do with what’s happening in the scene, what I want the reader to focus on, and what I want them to feel.
Dave, Mary Tyler MooreHawk was described as “wonderfully strange” and landed on a lot of Best Of lists. Did the reception to that book change what you were willing to try with Punk’n Heads?
Dave: I think of the work Nicole and I make as in dialogue with itself. So, I don’t know that I picked much from my MTMH work to incorporate here, but I think there’s definitely stylistic and thematic carry-overs from Forest Hills Bootleg Society and Fuck Off Squad. Each book I make is built on a rubric of formalist elements. For MTMH it was Earl Mac Rauche screenplays, David Foster Wallace’s work, and 1960s Jonny Quest comics. For Punk’ns it was more 50s romance comics, The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal, and Wet Moon. I really wanted to build a formalist building block that would allow us to create the most emotional vulnerability possible with the characters and the reader.
Dave, your quote about “broken hearted losers” who wanted to accomplish great things and ended up playing shitty back-room punk shows is pretty specific. What were you trying to accomplish when you were young and messy?
Dave: I’ve always been someone who’s working toward making art. Sometimes that art takes shape in the form of zines or podcasts or weird outsider theatre. I’m always trying to make something weird. I hope I never stop.