Temporarily hobbled by painful sciatica that for months made it difficult to even move around his house, Ken Eppstein began last year to take deeper stock of where he was in his career. In doing so, the Columbus comics writer, artist and publisher said he was struck by a realization that he had in some ways drifted away from those things that initially drew him toward the form, and that he no longer had the motivation to continue down the same off-track course.
“You get nestled into this ‘you’re a comics guy’ thing, and you get sucked into what people think your genre is, and there can be a lot of gravity to that,” said Eppstein, who described the kind of work in which he is most invested as out of vogue with the comics world in which he inexplicably found himself. “I don’t really fit in with what’s going on with the indie and small press scenes in and of themselves, and I thought it was time to get back to doing what I want to do for the people I want to do it for. … To some degree, it’s wanting to get back to the mission of making comics and stories and zines for the weirdo record kid crowd again, because that’s how I started.”
First, however, Eppstein, the founder and creative mind behind the long-running Nix Comics imprint, wanted to put something of a stamp on this early era, accepting the last couple of years as a gradual line of demarcation that has helped to set the stage for whatever might be next. With that in mind, the artist recently compiled past works for a trio of paperback collections, including: “Undead Ballads,” comprised of all of the Nix Comics Quarterly horror-rock stories; “The Sheriff and the Gunsell,” featuring Nix Western Comics Nos. 1-4 and tracing the lives of two gunfighters backwards from their demise; and “Living With Explosions,” a series set primarily in the early ’90s Columbus music scene and based in the stories and recollections of author and Anyway Records founder Bela Koe-Krompecher and drawn by artist Andy Bennett. (All three books are available now for preorder.)
In revisiting the titles, Eppstein said different aspects of each book struck him, including the realization that many of the Nix Comics Quarterly characters populated the same universe – though he hesitated to apply that term to the comics. “Because, again, that’s branding,” he said, and laughed. “But I do have a block of cute little stores [in the books] that all have the same customer base. It’s like Athens, Ohio – a cute little college town with a bunch of stuff to visit for a day. And I hadn’t quite realized I had done that, and it was a happy discovery.”
“The Sheriff and the Gunsell,” inspired in part by what Eppstein referred to as “the cowpunk aesthetic” of artist and collaborator Bob Ray Starker, brings up more conflicted emotions, Eppstein having initially discontinued the series in the wake of yet another mass shooting (he couldn’t recall which one), afraid the work might send the wrong message to readers. “I can’t write anymore stories that imply problems can be solved with gun violence,” he writes in an editor’s note introducing the collection, which also includes contributions from artists Michael Neno, Rich Trask and Rick Brooks.
“I went to [Bard College at] Simon’s Rock, which was the site of a mass shooting [in 1992]. And it was on the same day, not the same year, as Sandy Hook, right?” Eppstein said. “So, on the day that most of the country is looking back to Sandy Hook in mourning, everybody my age I know from college is mourning our friends and people who were lost. And once days start overlapping like that, what does that mean?”
At the same time, Eppstein still sees value in the way these books unpack the larger American mythos – both the good and the bad – and he’s confident that the violence in the book isn’t glorified but rather presented as an unending, vicious cycle that consumes anyone who falls prey to it.
“Living With Explosions,” in turn, serves as a vivid time capsule of an era for which many long-time Columbus residents still have fond memories (Google “Campus Partners destroyed High Street”) – a draw Eppstein attributed at least in part to the reality that the 1990s music scene repeatedly got hit with a “Next Big Thing” label that never quite materialized. “There were all of these references to Columbus being the next Seattle, which never happened,” said Eppstein, who tasked author and New Bomb Turks singer Eric Davidson with assembling a companion soundtrack for the project. “And I don’t think anybody wanted or expected that, necessarily, but it implants in your brain that something significant happened.”
Having revisited the past, Eppstein has started to turn his focus to the next era of Nix Comics, expressing an interest in collaborating with up-and-coming artists with whom he has yet to work, such as Frank Lawson. One thing is certain, though, whatever shape Nix 2.0 does take is likely to be shaped by those things from which Eppstein instinctively recoils, including crowdfunding (“I feel like those platforms thrive on a not-so-healthy set of anxieties”), world-building (“I have no intention of making a franchise”) and an overt fixation on the overall business of things.
“I’m going back to the idea of making a bunch of stuff, and if it costs me money instead of making me money, so be it,” said Eppstein, who added that he has been greatly unburdened by the sense of stability provided by his 9-to-5 job at Columbus State Community College. “Now that I have the freedom to just go about it the way I want to, I’m going to explore that freedom. … There’s definitely going to be a return to those ideas [that first inspired me to take up comics 13 years ago], and maybe a recommitment to them. I think one of the things I realized is that I had been looking at the wrong group of heroes, because you can have your comics heroes and your punk rock heroes, and I should have been applying the punk rock lessons to comics making all along.”
The Vicar panels by Michael Neno
