Jonah Schulz

Jonah Schulz did all of Chief's "Have Gun Will Travel" illustrations.  Besides that, he single-handedly mans The Graphic House of Brooklyn.   Illustrations, posters, books, comics... Jonah does it all, and he does it all damn well.



Chief Magazine: So where did you grow up?

Jonah Schulz: I grew up in Middletown, Connecticut . I’m wary to tell people where I grew up because I really, really hate Connecticut, and most people don’t know anything about the town that I grew up in which is sort of not what people’s idea of Connecticut is. It’s not rich. It’s not incredibly poor, but it’s economically pretty diverse. It’s used to be really wealthy because it was a shipping point in the Colonial period in early America and then that dried up because people were like “Why the fuck are we bringing these huge boats up the Connecticut River when we can just leave at the coast, and not have to move things into smaller boats?” Then there was manufacturing there and that dried up too. So there’s really nothing there, except Wesleyan University. So I grew up with a mixture of my friends who lived in housing projects and then my friends who were the children of Wesleyan professors which was a really weird mix.

What brought you to New York?

School. Going to Pratt brought me to New York, but I was probably going to come here anyway in the end even if I didn’t go to school here. They just offered me the most money.

Did you study illustration?

I studied fine arts. Printmaking. I was originally going to study graphic design because I liked graphic design, but I realized that I really wouldn’t like studying it. I don’t really think that people should go to school for it.

Why not?

I don’t think you can learn it. I think you can only learn it by doing it, and I don’t think you can learn it by doing exercises. I think you have to actually learn it by doing it. Most good graphic designers that I’ve worked with were not graphic design students because it didn’t even exist as an academic program until pretty recently. My dad is an illustrator, and he used to be a graphic designer and he worked a little in New York and he has lots of friends who are graphic designers, some of which are pretty well known and great but they were all like, painting majors. I think that studying fine arts gives you a better aesthetic sense and all the typography and things like that come more naturally. I think it’s more of a well rounded education because you learn about the history of visual information before there was graphic design. My dad convinced me not to study any commercial art. He said “you should be a fine arts student.” Which was kind of strange because it’s like saying “Yes, you should set yourself up for no future economically.”

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So are you making the rent?

Just about. I almost get work a lot. It’s like “Hey we have this great project we think you’d be perfect for it, we’re budgeting right now but we’ll get back to you.” I think my problem is that I do work for non-profit organizations. This is the second project for the Brooklyn Public Library that fell through. They haven’t gotten back to me. They were like “Somebody said we had money lying around, but it fell behind the copier.”

Is that typically where the work comes from or just an interest that you have?

I do have an interest. My mom works for a library; she’s actually the graphic designer for the library in my hometown. It’s one of the things she does there. I don’t know. I’ve always really been into non-profit organizations and they need a lot of help because they really need to get themselves out there in order to survive. I have a lot of respect for institutions that exist apart from being totally commercial. I don’t think I could do illustration for product advertising, my morals wouldn’t allow it.

Not even for the big bucks?

Yeah maybe, I don’t know. I’ve done some stuff recently for minor league baseball because I have a friend who does work for them like, complete rebranding and stuff like that for baseball teams. I’ve been doing some sketch work for him, and that’s about the closest. And from what he’s told me about the owners is a little off-putting.

In what way?

They don’t sound like people who would like me, or that I would like. If you own a minor league baseball team, it’s sort of like owning a Hummer. Like, a really enormous one, one they don’t make yet. It’s like, “Yeah I have this enormous contracting company” or “I own this chain of auto-dealerships, and have a lot of money lying around. I’m kind of bored, and I want a hobby where I can reconnect with my boyhood. I’m going to own a minor league baseball franchise. But the work is fun to do, even though it’s working within a very strict feel, design-wise. There’s only so many risks that people are willing to take in that world. Like, “Is this going to look cool on a hat? Maybe not but I like it anyway because it’s within my understanding.” But that’s the closest that I’ve gotten recently to doing stuff that was that commercial.

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So what’s the Graphic House of Brooklyn all about?

That started right when I moved here pretty much. I guess it was like the end of 1999, early 2000. I did some silk-screening when I was younger and really loved it which was one of the reasons that I became a printmaking major but when I got to school I started doing a lot more of it just because there was more access and the studios were better than what I had set up at my house. So I started making all these posters and I really didn’t want to put my name on them. Not because I didn’t want recognition, but I wanted to do something more official and create an organization. First I came up with the graphics house of Brooklyn, and then I started printing these posters for the Brooklyn poster society, which is like a sub-sect of the poster society. It was like a club, but just me. I really liked the anonymity in graffiti. That’s one of the things that I like about graffiti, is that people come up with these names for themselves. I don’t like in that I have to come up with a name for myself because what I do is illegal and I want to separate myself from it, because what I do isn’t illegal. But I think it’s more impressive that there’s an organization attached to something instead of “who the fuck is this guy?” I’d been making posters and I did some screenprints and a couple comics but I’m sort of starting it more intensely again recently, like in the past few months.

When did you finish all The Golden Vanity?

That was in December. A friend of mine who’s a graphic designer, who makes personal accessories like pins and stuff. Her name’s Jessica Wolf. She was in this show called La Superette last year which was like this craft show that was started in France in the 90’s I think. They have it in Chelsea, right before Christmas and Chanukah time. Artists make products and sell them and they make a very small cut, like 20% I think, which is pretty good for something like that. So I thought “I don’t have a job, I’m not getting a lot of work. I have a lot of free time, I should really do something and see if I can sell anything. So I thought “Ehh, I’ll make a book, it’s something I know how to make and I had recently heard a recording of the song “The Golden Vanity” which the book is based on, and I thought, “This would make a good story, it can be easily represented visually, it’ll be short.” So I applied to this show thinking I wasn’t going to get in, but then I realized that they let everyone in, because it’s a money making operation. So I had two weeks in order to make it and actually made a recording of the song, did the drawings, made the linoleums, bound the books, made the CDs and brought them to this show. It lasted a day. I think I sold seven books at the show, but when I went to pick it up five of them had been stolen as well which kind of sucked but, I signed a release.

Yeah, they make damn sure you sign a release.

Then I was kind of disappointed, but they said “don’t be disappointed, we never sell things here, it’s set up in a weird way, people don’t really have time to look closely at things. Also, the book was in a plastic package so it’s like a grab bag item. So I decided maybe my friends and friends of friends will buy it, so I sent e-mails around, put a bulletin up on MySpace and in the past month and a half I’ve sold pretty much every other book except for a few. It’s been nice, people who I didn’t know bought them, people from other parts of the country, friends of mine who I haven’t seen in years that’d moved away. It was very affirming. Also, people bought it and told me they liked it, they didn’t just buy it and like, I never heard from them again.

What’s next?

I have three more of those book and CD things that I’m working on, all with folk songs. One is of this song “Daniel Prayed,” it’s a song about Daniel in the lion’s den; the Old Testament story. It’s an amazing song. It’s a traditionally acapella song, so I’m doing a strictly acapella recording for the book. Then I’m doing the songs “Dying Cowboy,” and “Shenandoah.” It’s an old folk song that’s kind of been relegated to being a children’s song, but it’s really, really sad. I don’t know why anyone would play it for their kids.

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I’m also working on a Western comic about a cowboy who never uses his gun, not that he’s a pacifist. He’s also mute after an incident from his childhood. It pretty much follows every tried and true Western storyline. The first story, which I’m in the midst of drawing right now, includes everything that you could think of. There’s the possibility for revenge, weird Desperados hunting down Native Americans. There’s not that much dialogue in these pages I’ve drawn already.

Is this pencil and watercolor?

It’s ink-wash and graphite… and a little Gouache.

What appeals to you in comic books or specifically the western genre?

I’m really interested in the lawlessness. Brutal violence really interests me, and it’s a pretty great background for brutal violence, there’s just something incredibly raw about it. I also like the fact that it’s been watered down so much by popular westerns in the 50’s. It kind of softened the image of the West so much that you can pretty much do whatever you want. Also, people know so very little about what it w as actually like that it’s easy to make things up completely. Like this story, it doesn’t take place in any particular time frame. There’s a clock radio in it at one point. The idea with this character is that I want to make as many things with him as I possibly can. I want to do a radio play as the third story, and I’ve also asked some of my friends who I’ve told about this already to write stories for it which I’ll use pieces of. For instance, one of my friends is writing an Inca gold story line, and there’s one that I started working on that has robots and things in it. I have a hard time describing it nothing really ever happens to him after the first story, things happen around him and he’s a witness to them but he’s never directly involved. Also no one ever realizes that he’s a mute, because the only people that really talk, talk a lot, and people that talk a lot tend not to notice when other people don’t talk because they don’t give them time.

What’s it called?

It’s called Kid Genre. The first issue is about sixteen pages and will probably end up being saddle stitched with a silk-screened cover. I also have two very long running projects; one is making Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. It’s a French novel from right around the turn between the 18th and 19th centuries. It’s a bout a country boy who doesn’t really fit into his community who’s the son of the owner of a mill. He’s not strong, he can’t really do anything, he just kind of sits around and reads. And he’s obsessed with Napoleon during a time where being obsessed with Napoleon was not a good thing. So he gets a job as a tutor because all he knows is that he wants to make something of himself and be famous, to be part of high society so he pretends that he wants to become a priest. So he gets a job as a tutor with a rich family, has an affair with the mother then it develops and gets more complicated. It’s a lot like a soap opera. I’m adapting it into Bazooka Joe-like comics. The ultimate dream is that someday, you’ll buy a box of gum with The Red and the Black and each box will have the entire story.

It sounds like some kind of mutated advent calendar.

Yes! That’ll be a while and it will take a lot of money. So if I ever have a lot of money. But other than that I’m just trying to make the comics. I started a while ago, and I have to come at it from a different direction than I was using before. The reason I picked Bazooka Joe is because he never has thought bubbles, or almost never. Most of it takes place in dialogue, if anything, with horrible sight gags. But the drawings are really simple and they communicate very directly. Also The Red and the Black was one of the first novels that takes place largely inside the head of the characters, so most of the comics are thought bubbles. There’s dialogue every once in a while or nothing, and you’re just looking at facial expressions. I have some of them on my website actually, there’s about six which I’ve done up there. Then I’m doing some other comics. One is based on this book called The Pantropheon which is a book about the history of food. There’s a section about the food in Rome, and eels which were both eaten and kept as pets. There’s a story about an incredibly rich Roman who had a dozen or so eels that lived in a pool in his house and he would feed his slaves to them. There was this one in particular, that when the eel died, he had a monument built for it in his house and he buried it. So I’m doing a comic about this guy and his eel. Most of what I do has some connection to death, I’ve realized that recently.

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It’s either fucking or dying.

I’m not that good at drawing fucking. I’m much better at drawing dying.

How would you describe your style, besides not being very…

Profitable? It’s all right you can say it. I like to rip things up, but not in a direct way. It’s hard because everything I do looks different. Like, the drawings that I’ve been doing for you are kind of like Pulp illustration, and I was thinking that doesn’t totally fit. It’s about places that are obsessed with America and the idea of America that exists in movies and in popular culture. The closest that that America’s ever come to being like it is in a movie was during the ‘80s. So it’s sort of like Pulp illustration but with a filter of the ‘80s color-wise, thinking about David Hockney paintings and things like that. I don’t know. I’m totally full of myself or something.

I think you make a good point about ‘80s films actually being the closest representation of the time in which they were made, like Manhattan in Ghostbusters.

Yeah. Some things I’ve forgotten what they were really like in the ‘80s and my only memory of them is what they were like in film. I went to Miami in the ‘80s, because my grandparents lived in Miami Beach and I have really no memory of it. But the idea of Miami in the ‘80s is Miami Vice. So when I think of Miami in the ‘80s I think of neon and pastel everywhere, vomited everywhere. Maybe I’m too dependent on popular culture.

Where do you draw the line between your dependency on pop-culture, and not being dependent on it?

Well, I’m not really aware of what’s going on now because I don’t have TV, I don’t read magazines, I don’t really spend that much time on the internet so I guess I’m a little out of it. I’m even out of it with the things that I’m really into, mostly comics and food. I don’t really know what’s going on with different restaurants anymore, I used to. I guess that’s what comes out of being broke.

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So you must cook a lot.

Yeah, all the time. Obsessively.

Square meals with salads and desserts?

Sometimes. It depends on how I’m feeling.

What’s your favorite: Italian, Mexican…?

I don’t really make any specific ethnic cuisine. I mix it up. I love to cook. If I could spend half the day cooking and half of the day making comics…that would be amazing. But I have to spend a little bit of the day attempting to make money, which is the worst part of the day.

Do you think you would be happier with a “jobby job?”

I don’t know if there are real jobs drawing. I used to have one. I worked in the fashion industry.

Well, then there are real jobs drawing.

Yeah, but it wasn’t a real job. I mean, they paid me on a normal basis, I sort of had benefits, there were other people in the office that I didn’t like so it was a real job. But it wasn’t really drawing. I was a plagiarist. Someone would send us something and say, “We’d like this but A) somebody already made it and B) We can’t afford to buy this pattern from whatever pattern house: rip it off.” So I would rip it off.
I did that for two years.

Did it weigh down on your morality?

It did. But I was like, “Man I need a job.” When it came around to two years…actually this was about one year ago, my brother was supposed to be getting married in France and I was supposed to go to his wedding so I decided to quit my job right before I left. I thought, “That’ll be nice, because they’re not going to let me take that much vacation anyway.” Then they laid me off before I could quit, but the great thing is when you get laid off you can collect. So I was on unemployment for a while. Unemployment payed for my trip, which was okay with me. Now I want a job that doesn’t relate at all to anything that I’m interested in.

Like busy work?

Yeah busy work is cool. Anything really. I just applied to be a produce stocker at Whole Foods. Yes, tangentially it’s related to something I’m interested in, produce, but not really. It’s like, I’m moving some lettuce around for a while, someone’s going to ask me where something is. I’ll tell them, and then I’ll go home.

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Is that the description on the Craigslist ad?

The thing is that the job only kind of exists, it’s like nebulous. It’s for that new store on Houston Street, which I know is going to be full of people who will look down their nose at me, which I can not wait for.

You’re into that?

Yeah, why not?

So you’re not only providing a service to Whole Foods, but a service to the community...

I’m like a non-profit organization. I’m throwing myself to the mercies of the residents on the lower east side because I would like to have regular income. I’m not good at getting jobs. I’ll get far along in the process sometimes, and I’ve applied for about 80 jobs since I lost my last job. First I took a month off and didn’t think about it. I didn’t do shit, but it’s coming down to the wire now a little bit, maybe more than a little bit. Some people have the skills.

Usually if I get a job I have a hard time keeping it.

I’m not that bad at that. Most of the jobs that I’ve had, I’ve had for a while. Unless it was really, really awful. When I was in school, I was freelancing and I was like the in-house exhibition design studio, but around the time I graduated, the work started to dry up so I was like, “Fuck, I need to find something else.” I was depending on that to become my job. So then a wife of one of my professors had a friend who was a fashion designer who was working for a silk-screen printer in a studio which was really just an apartment on Mercer. The job was nine hours a day, just silk-screening. I thought “I can do that, why not?” Because it wasn’t really a studio, and just some guy’s apartment, we would lay a towel out on the floor and print on our knees for nine hours. There was a table, but it was the wrong size, the wrong height. After I left, they moved into a real studio, but I couldn’t take it, I was only there for about two months. My knees fucking hurt like I was an old man. I mean the people were nice, but… So I recommended someone I knew for the job. He stayed there for a while though, because he got there right before they moved, so it had it sweet, or at least sweeter than me. But no, I don’t have that much of a problem holding onto jobs, even if I really, really hate something, if it’s not completely unhealthy I’ll do it. Like that fashion designing job. I detested it, there were only three people there that I liked, hated my bosses, most of the people above me, all the account executives, just awful people. I was amazed; I thought, “These are people who shouldn’t be employed. How do they have jobs?” A lot of them were related which I guess doesn’t hurt. But I went every day and worked my ass off…for nothing, really. But I’m fast. That’s the best thing about being fast at what I do, because if you don’t like working on something, it’s going to be done a lot quicker.

Anything else?

I’m really into folk music. Folk and blues music.

Do you play the guitar?

I don’t really “play the guitar” but I can do things on it that I like the sound of, but other people don’t like the sound of it. I’m self-taught on every instrument that I play. I own a ton of instruments that I don’t really know how to play.

How about a Theremin?

I don’t have a Theremin, but I was going to buy a pocket Theremin online. It’s like a tiny circuit board, and you hold your hand next to it, and there’s a headphone jack in it. It cost like thirty bucks. I haven’t bought it though. But I’m not making spooky music anyway, at least not yet. I own this thing called a guitar zither which is like a mid nineteenth century German farmer instrument that has been replaced with the auto harp which is a lot easier to play. I have an auto harp as well. That’s something I can actually play. I’m becoming an auto harp player. I have two marching snare drums. One is a marching band one that used to belong to the Boston fife and drum club or something. I don’t know how I ended up with it. Then I have an all wooden one that’s from the early 20th century. A couple of guitars, an alto saxophone which I used to be able to play, a couple drum machines, synthesizers, and a ton of other shit that I don’t know what to do with.

It’s like somebody broke into your house and left all that shit there.

I know I bought this stuff, but I can’t figure out when I thought “I really, really need this analog synthesizer so I can make house music.” But I own it, it’s in my house, there’s things that I’ve programmed on it at one point I just don’t really remember.

Have you ever recorded anything?

Yeah, I have this 8-track Tascam cassette recorder. I made recordings; I have all these tapes lined up on my windowsill. I have no fucking clue; I don’t remember any of this music that I made. I’m in a band with my roommate called the Hapless Child. It’s our second band. We used to play songs that we wrote, but now we only play traditional songs. He plays the banjo and the guitar, and I play the auto harp and an incredibly primitive drum kit that’s just a marching snare drum with a tambourine on the edge of the head. We haven’t played a show out. We never played a show out with the other band, but we’re going to. People ask us all the time. I don’t have any problem performing in front of people because I used to do lots of theater when I was in high school. I don’t know. Music is a different thing, because I don’t consider myself a musician at all.

Where do you live?

I live in Kensington. It’s the tenth stop into Brooklyn on the F train. Church Avenue. I don’t really live in Kensington; I live in Kensington Village, which is just Boro Park east. It’s kind of out there. It allows me to be a hermit, which is great when you’re broke because something has to be really tempting in order for me to leave the neighborhood. I also rarely use public transportation, I walk everywhere.

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Websites

www.jonahschulz.com
www.graphicshousebrooklyn.com

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