Graphic Novelist Derf Talks Ohio Comic History, Wartime Cartoons and New Book in Q&A

Graphic novelist John Backderf, known by his pen name Derf, is well-known for depicting his hometown in Summit County in his critically acclaimed books like Kent State and My Friend Dahmer. But his latest release, The Dissidents, expands outside of the Buckeye State and back in time more than a century to carefully examine a cartoon-centric series of events that took place during World War I.

The book’s plot centers around the true stories of the artists who worked for New York City’s The Masses, a socialist political magazine of the early 1900s. Under President Woodrow Wilson’s leadership of the country during World War I, the artists of The Masses were subjected to intense charges, threats and legal battles following the 1917 Espionage Act and the 1918 Sedition Act.

Though the majority of the book takes place in New York, Derf couldn’t entirely pull himself away from his hometown. The Dissidents also highlights a bit of Northeast Ohio’s comic history through its fictionalized narrator.

“I tried my best to break away from doing stories about Cleveland and Akron because all my body of work has been that so far,” Derf says, “but in the end, I couldn’t break away completely.”

Following the release of The Dissidents, Derf says he’ll be working on an upcoming shorter novel comedy, while also putting his first book, Punk Rock & Trailer Parks, back into print. “I'll just keep making them until I can't make them anymore,” he says. “That's my plan.”

We caught up with Derf ahead of The Dissidents' release on Sept. 15 to hear more about the project.

Cleveland Magazine: I really enjoyed The Dissidents; it was a history I did not know anything about. It felt like a really great introduction to this world.

Derf Backderf: Yeah, it's pretty much the only one out there. It's completely forgotten history at this point, which I like. That's fun to do.

CM: Absolutely. With The Masses being the big centerpiece series throughout the whole book, could you talk about, in your life, how you first discovered that magazine? What made you pick it up for the first time?

DB: That happened at Ohio State when I went to school, and that's where the Billy Island Cartoon Museum is, which was just starting back then. But the head curator was one of my profs, and so I was doing political cartoons — bad political cartoons — for the student paper, The Lantern. That's where I started my cartooning career, and I was really struggling. I was looking for inspiration, and it was the head curator, Lucy Caswell, who said, “You might want to take a look at these cartoonists in The Masses,” and I was just blown away. And so that began this lifelong love affair with not only the magazine, but with the contributors. I just expanded from there. Everything was out of print. There were no books written about it, no collections, no nothing. So I just had to pursue it on my own over the course of many years, and here we are.

CM: I'm curious about the research. Just looking through your citations and your footnotes in the back of the book — can you talk more about that process of piecing this together?

DB: This was a book that came together through the archives. It wasn't like, say, Kent State, my last book, where I actually talked to people that were there. Obviously, that was not possible with a story that took place 110 years ago. It was done through autobiographies and the archives of The Masses themselves. I read every issue, cover to cover. There’s six years’ worth. You just look for clues and slowly build your story outward from there. There's just so much happening at that time. All the political movements, some of which I didn't understand at all, and most of which I still barely understand. What happened in the world at that time, it was just so cataclysmic, and at the center of it were these cartoonists. It just all swirled around them, and so that was the story. It's this suspenseful spy thriller starring cartoonists from a comics perspective. How cool is that?

CM: It feels like a cool thing to represent in a graphic novel. Can you speak a little bit more about taking that approach, depicting this artistically?

DB: It was a challenge to bring back these 110-year-old cartoons, and somehow find a way to show their power and show how incendiary they were and why the government went to such extraordinary lengths to smother them and crush these cartoonists. That was a challenge, and hopefully, I've managed to pull that off. You’ve got to describe why they mattered. You've got to describe the context and what they were about and why they were so powerful when they appeared. But I think I was able to do that, and I like a challenge. I reproduce so much of that original art in the book. I mean, I rely on people who are much better than I am, so their art really carries the story.

CM: With The Dissidents, I feel like it was kind of similar to Kent State in that the political energy of each book still feels very relevant today. In the case of The Dissidents, it revolves around freedom of speech and press. I'm wondering if you could speak to how those themes connect in today's political world with the book releasing so soon?

DB: Here we are again, and the similarities in The Dissidents to what's happening right now are absolutely chilling. Chilling. It's not a happy book, certainly, but the one hopeful thing at the end is that we pulled out of it, and we left that authoritarian era behind. Whether that happens again, I can't say. That's anyone's guess. But hopefully, it will.

RELATED: The Lines Between Hope and Struggle: Why Derf Backderf Might Be The Cartoonist We Need In These Uncertain Times 

CM: The way you approach the story, with Joe Hertle, a fictionalized Northeast Ohio native cartoonist — I was wondering why you chose to tell the story this way when most of the remaining characters were real people?

DB: Well, I needed a narrator, and to do exactly what I was just talking about — to describe the context and walk the reader through this period and explain what was happening and why this work was so important. I wrestled with different ways of who's going to be my narrator, and I landed on this guy, and I thought, well, that gives me the opportunity to throw in some other stuff. Like the experience of a young cartoonist struggling to find his voice, which was very much my experience. And also the immigrant experience; that's based on my own family's history. They were German immigrants living in Akron, Ohio, during this time, and I've heard many stories over the years about what that was like and how much anxiety they had and fear they had. Those were all important things, and Joe Hertle allows me to put that into the book and really just get that personal touch in there.

RELATED: Why Isn't Cleveland Embracing Its Comics Heritage?

CM: Yeah, and while a lot of the book takes place in New York, you also share some history about Northeast Ohio's cartoon scene from that time period, too. Could you speak more on Northeast Ohio's place in cartoon history?

DB: Oh, during the early years of comics, and I mean, we're right at the beginning here; The Yellow Kid debuted in 1895. That's considered the first newspaper comic — created and drawn by an Ohioan, Richard Outcault, who was from Lancaster, which is just south of Columbus. Literally all of comicdom came through Ohio, or came from Ohio and the Midwest, during this period. It's really kind of amazing, and there's so many foundational figures that started here, and especially in the first half of the 20th century. I think that's important to remember, especially for an Ohio guy. I like to remind people of that. And it was just fun to track down those artifacts, and a lot of it was in the Billy Ireland, so I was able to go back and look at old newspapers and old proof books and all of this stuff that’s never been collected. It was just me looking through old boxes and piles of old newspapers. For me, it was fun.

I tried my best to break away from doing stories about Cleveland and Akron because all my body of work has been that so far. There was an interview I did a couple of years ago in the Netherlands, and it said, “Derf’s entire body of work is set within a 50-kilometer radius of the house he grew up in,” and I thought, Is that true? Holy sh**. I thought about it for a minute, and yeah, that is true. So I decided with this project, whatever it was going to be, it was going to be set somewhere else, just to break the string, but in the end I couldn't break away completely. So it starts in Cleveland and Akron, and those are great things because I like talking about old Cleveland newspapers and what was going on back in that period when it was so vibrant here.

Find more details about Derf's work at his website, derfcity.blogspot.com.

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