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THE Q&A: EMILY FLAKE, CARTOONIST, ILLUSTRATRIX

Week after week, Emily Flake delivers a wry, single-panel syndicated comic strip: "Lulu Eightball". With dark levity (and perhaps a few shots of bourbon), Flake offers a clear-eyed take of our absurd days. The result is consistently funny and a bit wrong. A self-described "illustratrix", her work has appeared in the New York Times, Time and Forbes, among other places. And in the last year she has begun contributing cartoons to the New Yorker. Her book of comics about smoking, "These Things Ain't Gonna Smoke Themselves", came out in 2007. 

Living in Brooklyn, Flake has taken a moment to answer some of our questions about being a cartoonist: why she does it, when she knew she would, and why humour is often necessary to address what's hard.

More Intelligent Life:  When did you know your calling was to become a cartoonist?
 
Emily Flake:  I always knew I wanted to draw, and I always knew I wanted to write. But I didn't really start using humour in my work until I took a really incredible painting class with the inimitable Ken Tisa. Without humour I tend to skew terribly maudlin and cliched--it's like my inner 15-year-old girl is showing. But when I realised I could make people laugh instead a light bulb went on in my head. Beyond the joy of eliciting laughter, it also allowed me to address difficult or painful things in a much more interesting way. The cartooning kind of grew out of all that.

MIL:  Injecting humour into otherwise dark preoccupations is tricky. How did you achieve what is now your distinctive voice for "Lulu Eightball"? Were you influenced by other cartoonists?

EF:  Oh, I think it's way harder to address darker things head on--things like relationships or family trouble or being broke. Issues that fall into that zone of quotidian pain are nearly impossible for me to take straight on without sounding like a hopeless whinger or an adolescent. (I am not certain, by the way, that my emotional life has really moved so far beyond the Young Adult section of the library. That's where many of my favourite books still are.) The clown nose is a necessary piece of equipment. I think the tone that runs through "Lulu Eightball" is a mix of bemused melancholy and total absurdity, two things that pretty much form the basis of my sense of humour. The strips I like the best are those where I think I've managed to find that resonance.

I definitely have my cartoon influences and heroes. Early on, from when I was about five, I loved Edward Gorey and Gahan Wilson (I was precocious, but lazy; eventually everybody else learned to read and by the time I looked up they'd gone and learned shit like math, and I was sitting there playing with my toes). Shary Flenniken, who wrote "Trots and Bonnie", is a giant to me. More contemporarily, Ivan Brunetti and Lynda Barry, of course. And right this second, I think Zach Kanin is doing amazing things. I am intensely jealous of Zach Kanin.

MIL:  When did you know you struck that proper balance between dark and light? Was there a eureka strip? And when did you hit upon your alter-ego, that pudgy, dim-witted, booze-loving (ie, unflattering and unrealistic) version of yourself?

EF:  I don't think there was a eureka strip per se. I think the strip took a little while to really find its voice, and that voice sort of gelled almost without my realising it. I didn't so much hit upon my alter ego as much as develop a way of depicting myself, or at least the more joke-worthy aspects of myself, distilled into one hair-bunned, pupil-less cartoon lady. As I am pudgy, dim-witted, and booze-loving, this was pretty easy. [Editor's note: Flake is not pudgy or dim-witted.]

MIL:  You've begun drawing gag comics for the New Yorker. How did you get the job, and have you had to tame your "Lulu Eightball" self to fit in?

EF:  Turns out anybody in the world can submit to the New Yorker in person. You go in on a Tuesday at 11:30am and wait your turn with Bob Mankoff, who looks at your submissions, while you sit very quietly and try to wipe that weak egg-sucking grin off your face. Writing jokes for the New Yorker is definitely a different animal than writing "Lulu". There's what I've come to think of as the New Yorker hum--a tone that runs through the magazine that I try to tune my own internal pitchfork to when writing for them. I try to push a little beyond that sometimes--and sometimes far enough that I know they'll never take it, but if it's a joke I love I'll submit it just for the hell of it. You never know.

MIL:  Do you ever worry about running out of funny? What do you do to jumpstart the punch-lines on a slow day?

EF:  I don't worry, I obsess and fret and spend a lot of time staring into the middle distance where despair lives. I keep a running note--on my phone, which feels like a ridiculous thing to say--of funny things that occur to me. When the phone list is cashed, I read the newspaper. If that doesn't work, I start writing down lists of things that jokes are about--death, taxes, relationships, monkeys--and go from there. If that doesn't work, I start fingering the cyanide tablet I keep in my pocket.

MIL:  What is the ultimate accomplishment for a cartoonist? Is there one thing that you know, when it happens, that you're triumphant?

EF:  You know, I think getting a gag in the New Yorker is a huge milestone for a lot of cartoonists, myself included, and I'm incredibly thrilled and grateful to be in there. But you can't stop at one, it's not like you get one in there and you can just ride your own coattails to fame and fortune and swanky parties. Really every week is like the first week all over again. I guess the next ultimate would be having enough cartoons in the New Yorker to fill a thick best-selling coffee-table book. And then get flown out to Hollywood to punch up scripts or something.

The other, entirely cringe-inducing answer to that question is that making yourself laugh is the greatest accomplishment. It doesn't happen to me often while I'm working, but when it does, it is the sweetest, most good feeling in the world.

See Emily Flake's official website.

~ EMILY BOBROW