FEATURE: What kind of material did you do in the mini-comics and underground work?
VALENTINO: Sex, drugs, rock and roll. Autobiographical stuff-tales of a misspent youth. Funny stuff. sometimes serious stuff, but mostly just funny stuff. You know. War tales, what it was like to be a teenager in the late 1960s, that kind of thing. normalman, [sic] which was a parody of superheroes and superhero comics. Comics in general but focusing primarily on superhero comics, which I was weaned on. So normalman and a book called Valentino. There were three issues of that. It reprinted, revamped, and added new material along the lines of autobio stuff.
FEATURE: How long were you doing the alternative comics work before you got into the "mainstream?"
VALENTINO: Geez, about five years, six years. Something like that.
FEATURE: So when was your earliest mainstream work and for how long were you doing that exclusively?
VALENTINO: [I got into it] around 1989, somewhere in that vicinity. [So I did the mainstream and alternative work] for about an equal amount of time [laughs].
FEATURE: So why are you leaving the mainstream and getting back into alternative material now? What was it that told you, "This is what I have to do at this stage of my career?" It seems like it could be a risk.
VALENTINO: It was a risk in terms finances. It's not a risk in terms of creativity. While I love superhero comics greatly-always have, always will, and that shows up clearly in projects like normalman and even A Touch of Silver -- I can't exist on a steady diet of anything. I've always tried throughout my career to make every single project that I do completely and totally different from the last, which has presented its own fair share of problems for me. I never have a carry over audience. In fact, I have people who come up to me at conventions and apologize because they like one thing that I did but they don't like another thing that I did. My attitude is always, they don't have anything to apologize about, if they like anything that I did. I feel great about that. I'm grateful to them and if they don't like anything I've done so far, hopefully I may do something that they might like along the way. I'm sort of hopeful about that. I want to do all kinds to different things. I enjoy doing comics, period. Since my influences are strongly in the DC and Marvel Silver Age which is from when I was a kid and then in underground comics when I was a teenager, I have strong influences on both sides. I am just as strongly influenced by Jack Kirby as I am by Robert Crumb; and by Vaughn Bode as I am by Steve Ditko, and neither influence touches me any stronger than the other. I just sort of smoosh them all together.
FEATURE: Returning to the question though, what was it about this particular story, A Touch of Silver, that made you drop everything else and jump onto this?
VALENTINO: That's really hard to answer. I knew I wanted to do it. I had gotten a phone call a year or so ago from Dave Sim about going on the Spirits of Independence tour and that was a big part of it. I was watching other people going out there and doing things. I was also very, very dissatisfied with the work I was doing in the superhero genre. It was no longer exciting to me, it was no longer what I wanted to do and I found that I was enjoying myself when I was doing either funnier stuff or stuff that was a little bit more offbeat, even if it was in the superhero genre. It dawned on me and a couple of friends of mine like Larry Marder pointed out to me that I was starting to lean back towards "Valentino" books as opposed to "Jim Valentino" books. Jim Valentino being the person who does the mainstream stuff. Valentino being the guy who doesn't. That's sort of where it was going, that dichotomy was showing itself very strongly in my creative bent at the particular moment. So it was just the right thing to do.
FEATURE: How was that dichotomy showing itself?
VALENTINO: I think in a very real sense in the fact that the offbeat stuff, the funnier stuff that I was doing, was more enjoyable, both to me and the readers that were writing into me. Whereas the superhero stuff was a lot more strained. It looked to people like I wasn't enjoying myself, like I was not having a good time. In fact I wasn't. I think those kinds of things come through on the page and that's where the strain really showed.
FEATURE: What was the gem of A Touch of Silver? When did it hit you and how did it develop into the story you're doing?
VALENTINO: I had this notion that I wanted to do an autobiographical story only this time set it in childhood rather than adolescence. I knew I couldn't do a straight autobiography because I couldn't remember things exactly so it had to be a semi-autobiography. I was also reading a lot of Will Eisner's work. I sat down at the release of one of his newer books and reread all of his other books and noted that he was doing this. He was not doing straight autobiography and yet you could clearly see that most of it was being built up from his experiences in his lifetime. That was where my head was sort of going to. I really like the idea of a long form story in the comics medium and that's sort of what I want to do at some point or another, [that is] tell a story where it takes however many pages as it takes to tell the story and go as deep into the characters and situations as possible. A Touch of Silver sort of seemed like a way to get warmed up to doing that.
FEATURE: Tell me about Timmy Silver. In what ways is he a reflection of you and in what ways is he an everyman? By everyman I mean a lot of early buzz has come from people saying, "He's writing about me. That's just like me."
VALENTINO: In a lot of ways the same things that make him real similar to me, make him an everyman, at least I think. Timmy's 10 years old, and when you're 10 years old, depending on how intuitive you are, it starts dawning on you that you really have no power, that everyone else has power and authority over you. This is the world that Timmy finds himself in. He's a sensitive kid and an introspective kid so he tends to think rather deeply about the things that are affecting him, probably more deeply than he should. What he finds is that the things that don't seem to disturb other people bother him greatly. He's having a hard time recognizing that, dealing with it, and figuring out that in a lot of ways he's the architect of a lot of his own problems. He can't see that, and he won't be seeing that throughout the series [because] he's not mature enough to come to those conclusions yet. In a lot of those ways he's very much like me. That's very much the way I was when I was a kid. I was precocious. I was very sensitive and very introspective, and didn't realize it was those qualities, in and of themselves, that were making me feel very alienated. Same thing with Timmy. It is that alienation that I think most people can relate to. We all feel alienated at one point or another. So Timmy is kind of a reflection of that. He's also very much like most of my other characters. A couple of years ago it dawned on me that regardless of what genre I'm working in, or what type or format, the basic fundamental thread running through most of my work is alienation. They are somehow or another alienated from the environment, or the people around them, or themselves. And Timmy is a continuation of that basic theme.
FEATURE: Tell me about Timmy's world, topographical reference seems to be very important to the book. You're very strong on the idea that objects have to be drawn on money and that references need to be precise. What role does this play in your overall story?
VALENTINO: It just sets up the world that he inhabits. There's been some misconstrued notions that this is somehow or another about the silver age of comics. It is not. Comics are just a touchstone in his life. They're something stable, for that matter it could be television, movies, any number of things. The reason it's comics is because I know that better, but there's certainly a lot of references to television in there. I think in the first issue we talked about The Twilight Zone. The reference to The Twilight Zone is that it was no longer on TV at that point, well in fact The Twilight Zone was canceled for a while, about a six-month period halfway through its five-year run. [The book] is historically accurate. Things have been researched in there. It's just important to set the stage of the era that he lives in, but you can transpose the era that he lives in into any era, it doesn't matter. The era isn't as important as [the story]. The topographical reference just helps solidify it, but it's not the key issue here. The key issue is Timmy's emotional reference to those things, that's the issue. That's what the story's about.
FEATURE: How do the people Timmy is around, his immediate social environment, contribute to his alienation?
VALENTINO: It contributes in all kinds of ways. His parents are obviously dysfunctional. They're in a dysfunctional relationship themselves, they're a bit overwhelmed. The mother for example, in the first issue the only time we ever see her is when she's yelling and screaming, except for one bit where she's hanging up the streamers for Timmy's party. Then she's June Cleaver, like somebody pointed out. She's not a yelling and screaming and abusive person all the time. She's doing the best she can to deal with an overwhelming situation. She's obviously been abandoned by her husband, emotionally, sexually, physically. He's out with bimbos, she knows it. She's raising the kids, trying to do the household, trying to do the best she can.
Timmy has a friend who is obviously dominated by his mother. The mother has been shown to be prejudiced and to foist that on her son. Timmy will be shown in the third issue as being the victim of schoolgirl taunting. He has a good friend who is his next door neighbor who is obviously having some problems of her own with her mother. Those will be shown pretty well what they are by issue four. I've kind of given some hints to it, but will bring them out to the foreground by the fourth issue. The idea basically is that everything in your environment affects you. In Timmy's particular case there are things that are beyond his control, such as the way that the people who are empowered over him react to him and the people who are empowered over his friends.
FEATURE: This almost suggests an "Us vs. Them" or "Me vs. The Rest of the World" mentality that ties into that powerless childhood alienation.
VALENTINO: I don't necessarily see that. I just see kids as being in a situation where parents, teachers, school, whatever, really holds the crux of power and kids are just sort of forced to ride with whatever waves the adults around them are creating. They have very little control over their own lives. I think there are a lot of kids who go along with it, but some kids have a hard time with it. There comes a point, which explains the rebellion of adolescence, that they kind of put their foot down at that point and say, "No! You can't control my life. I'm sick and tired of this. I'm sick and tired of being pushed and pulled and prodded by every single person I come in contact with. I need to take some control. I need to take some authority." But I think when you're a kid, when you're 10, you can't do that. That's what it seems to be more about to me.
FEATURE: Will we ever see Timmy take that kind of authority?
VALENTINO: Yeah, we see it in the third issue. He makes a stand in the third issue which I think is kind of uplifting. We may see it with his parents or his school at some point in the future. I'm not real sure. Of course, when you establish that kind of authority when you're a kid you have to suffer some severe consequences for it because every adult around you will not allow that to happen. So he'll be dealing with that too.
A Touch of Silver: A Sociopath in Training
(W/A) Jim Valentino
Collecting the first five issues of A Touch of Silver, this collection is the perfect introduction to Jim Valentino's groundbreaking autobiographical work. It opens in 1962 and introduces us to its 10-year-old protagonist, Timmy Silver. Timmy's life is far from the "Leave it to Beaver" ideal that was proposed by the times, rather it's far more turbulent than that. His home life is in shambles, his father is an abusive womanizer, and his mother is falling apart at the seams. Meantime, Timmy's school life isn't much better, as he deals with bullying peers, teachers on violent power trips, and cruel girls who mock his interests in them. While everyone's experience differs from the specifics of Timmy's, the experiences are fundamental. One can't help but relate to the confused anger he feels when his father and friends skip out on his birthday, the awkwardness of his first kiss, or the pain of his parents' separation. Valentino weaves basic human milestones and his personal experiences with those milestones to create an honest, gut-wrenching, unsentimental coming-of-age story. The paperback edition is available everywhere and a limited signed edition is available from Shadowline, Ink. The signed hardcover is limited to 200 copies and is $24.95 plus $3.50 shipping from Shadowline, Ink., 31878 Del Obispo, Suite 118-602, San Juan Capistrano, CA 92675
Copyright 1997 by Charles Brownstein, All Rights Reserved.