Kevin Forbes | Simulated Comic Product
The Flak Comics Interview
By James Norton

Simulated Comic Product satisfies its fans by delivering a weekly horsepill of tragedy leavened with humor, or vice versa. Heavily influenced by science fiction and dark as Kurt Vonnegut on a bad day, the strip is consistent only in its ability to provide constant surprise. Kevin Forbes chatted with Flak on a recent phonecall.

FLAK: In what city do you live, and how do you pay your bills...?

KEVIN FORBES: I live in Vancouver right now and I lived in Toronto when I started the comic. When I started it I was a grad student and right now I'm a video game programmer.

FLAK: What kind of video game programming do you do? Are you on the creative end or the execution end? Do you do art?

KEVIN FORBES: No, unfortunately, I'm an AI animation programmer. So far I did the fielding work in The Bigs, which was a baseball game that just came out this summer.

FLAK: Oh right on, yeah. That's got a national ad campaign, that's a serious game. So how long have you been doing your strip for?

KEVIN FORBES: I think I started it in really early 2005. Maybe in February.

FLAK: And where does it appear, other than Flak and your website?

KEVIN FORBES: It's been in a (printed) Web comics magazine a couple of times... the name escapes me. Other than that, I enter them in a Strip Fight quite often, which is a weekly web comic contest thing.

FLAK: What's the story with the name of the strip? Is it self deprecating, is it ironic, is it referential to the commentary on capitalism that appears all over the place, all of the above, none of the above... In short, why is it called Simulated Comic Product?

KEVIN FORBES: It was originally supposed to be something like a food additive which I guess I thought was funny at the time. The original logo was a Photoshopped version of the nutritional information of a box of cereal that I had.

FLAK: What got you started as a cartoonist and are there any sort of early influences you would kind of credit with helping you develop your style?

KEVIN FORBES: Well, it's kind of a chicken/egg thing. I bought a Wacom tablet and I wanted to test it out and I just kinda grew from there.

As for influences, I was really enamored with Perry Bible Fellowship. I thought: "Wow, this is really great. I wonder if I can do something 1/10th as good.'

FLAK: You had a really good strip recently with no words in it called "Everything is Relative." It's kind of a pirate- style interpretation of Gulliver's Travels and it's a real departure for you in terms of style. Is there any kind of story behind why you did that one?

KEVIN FORBES: I just wanted to branch out a bit... occasionally I just like to change the form factor of the comic. Usually I don't really work ahead with these things and I'm always... I try to update on Sunday night, so you know, its usually like Sunday 8 o'clock at night and I'm thinking: "Oh crap, I have to finish something before I go to bed."

The look for the pirate comic was actually a time-constraint thing. I ran out of time to color it so I thought: "Hey I'll leave the pirate black and white... yeah!" And it worked, I guess.

FLAK: Yeah, I thought it really popped. Off the top of your head, and other than PBF, are they any other peers on Flak or off who really knock your socks off and you follow their work?

KEVIN FORBES: I'm a big fan of Bob the Angry Flower. I work in the industry, so I check in with Penny Arcade every so often. It's kind of the only video game comic that has fans. I like Ryan North's work a lot.

There's an old comic that's defunct now for years, The Parking Lot is Full It was from the mid '90s onward and they've got all their archives online. Really dark stuff, like, almost too dark.

FLAK: It's funny that you mention Bob the Angry Flower. Question number 7 was asking you whether you read it because you've got the strip with the napalm-dropping robot with halitosis. It reminded me of Notley's style... just in terms of how you're turning from "tragic and realistic" to "comic and light" on a dime.

KEVIN FORBES: Yeah... that comic was an interpretation of one of the fake short stories written by Kilgore Trout in a Kurt Vonnegut book. I wouldn't be surprised if Notley was also a Vonnegut fan.

FLAK: I can definitely see some Vonnegut influence on your stuff. You grapple with the way capitalism works and it sounds kind of heavy and serious but you manage to make it entertaining which I think is quite a feat.

KEVIN FORBES: Oh, thanks. A lot of people get by on the Web just with — you know — fart jokes every week. But I like to, I always try to have at least two levels on the comic. There should be an interesting premise which could be a little funny by itself but I try to always have kind of a little satirical twist thing in there somewhere. Sometimes I forget, but usually there's something at least attempted.

FLAK: What's your take on newspaper comics? Are they dead, are they dying but mostly dead, are they dying but in the process of being reborn...?

KEVIN FORBES: The problem with newspaper comics is that you can't offend anybody. The second you even attempt to offend anybody you'll get ten letters to the newspaper and their subscribers are far more valuable to them than their comic strips. They're just kinda destined to become more and more bland as time goes on and the media becomes more conglomerated and the newspaper audience shrinks itself.

That said, I do read Pearls Before Swine. I read that and the occasional Dilbert because it reminds me of my life and that's about it. I mean, there are some comics I just look at and I'm like: "How did this person get to where they are today with art like this, and jokes like this?" It blows my mind.

FLAK: Right, although one thing I will say is I don't know if you've read Garfield at all in the last five or six years, but it has wandered into some very surreal and at times disturbing territory. I think Garfield's working on at least two levels these days.

I don't think Jim Davis has anything to do with it anymore, I think it's a team of probably pissed off 20-somethings who are trying to figure out why they're there. Keep your eye on Garfield, it'll really surprise you.

Have you ever considered doing a more sort of narrative strip or a strip with established characters or are you kind of in love with the freedom of starting from zero every time you begin drawing?

KEVIN FORBES: My overall plan for Simulated Comic Product is kind of to learn how comics work and learn to draw and get my technical skills up to a point where I can take on kind of a more meaty topic.

But yeah, I just don't know if I could have something new to say with the same characters every week unless it was a finite story. Nothing really bothers me more than creators who take a premise and story and set of characters and make it never end. Like things that keep going and going and you're like... you've said everything you need to say, just stop and try something new. I really respect Bill Watterson for ending Calvin and Hobbes when he did.

FLAK: Yep. Take a strip like Funky Winkerbean where you have characters dying of cancer and it just gets really grim and strange as you try to keep changing people in a realistic way. There's been some dark stuff happening there and I'm not sure that it entirely works, but I think that's something every comic creator kinda wrestles with.

KEVIN FORBES: Another good example is For Better or for Worse which I never really liked but... it's interesting at least there that she doesn't have the same things going on as the characters get old and age and whatnot but I mean, again, there does come a time when its time to end the comic. It's just kinda sad when you get these classic strips where the original author dies and they hire someone to ghostwrite the thing because people still want to see it in the newspaper.

FLAK: Oh you know what I found out, the craziest thing on this very topic: Originally Dennis the Menace was actually kind of funny. I went back and read the first couple years of Dennis the Menace and it actually had some edge and it was not a bad strip. I was shocked, my jaw dropped.

KEVIN FORBES: I had a similar experience with Peanuts. I was born in the 1980s so my experience with Peanuts was like the really late stuff and the greeting cards.

But then I was in the bookstore and I was flipping through one of the early books from the '50s and the '60s and it was really shockingly good and I finally understood why everyone was always going on about Charles Schultz. But yeah, again, you can't do it for 40 years.

FLAK: My dad had some old 1950s and 1960s Peanuts books lying around the house and I remember reading those as a kid and actually being really kind of impressed with it. So I grew up aware of the duality the mawkish or sort of bizarro "losing grip on sanity" Peanuts versus early really cutting, crisp, excellent Peanuts. It's interesting how that strip kind of evolved over the years.

KEVIN FORBES: I think they that still show it in a lot of papers.

FLAK: They do, there's not that much willingness to try anything new in the newspapers. That's why the comics page is in my opinion kinda archaic at this point till one of the big newspapers finally gets their heads around how to reinvent it.

KEVIN FORBES: Well I think alternative weeklies have pretty good comics, they have Red Meat and stuff like that running but they're only weekly. That's another thing: I kind of have maybe three quarters of a good idea per week which I can then translate into a strip and I couldn't imagine doing five a week and then a color one on Sunday and keeping any kind of quality control as a one-person production.

FLAK: Yeah, it's amazing that Bill Watterson kept it up as long as he did. With the level of quality he did, it's pretty mindblowing how much that must have taken out of him to sustain it at that level.

KEVIN FORBES: Do you know what he's doing nowadays? I've tried to find out but as far as I can tell he's just kinda retired.

FLAK: He's painting. He's living in Chagrin Falls, Ohio where he's from and he's painting, is my understanding.

Anything else I didn't ask you that you wanted to mention, future projects you wanted to chat about, anything else on your mind...?

KEVIN FORBES: If people want to know something concerning the strip that I have or things like that, I have all sorts of feedback forms on the website. And thanks for taking the time to chat with me, I really appreciate it.

FLAK: Oh, cool. And thanks for featuring SCP in Flak. I really like the way the strip's come along — I think you've really been wrestling to find the right voice and the right art and it's definitely made progress as I've been reading it.

KEVIN FORBES: Yeah, I remember actually I tried to get in [to Flak Comics] really early in the strip and you said no. And it was very helpful feedback. I think I tried two or three times and eventually you let me in and I felt as though I had made progess.

FLAK: I always try to give everything a chance and sometimes — and you're totally one of these people — sometimes you tell people: "Well, it's just not there yet but here's some stuff you can do." And they go off and they play with it and work at it and lo and behold... it gets there.

E-mail James Norton at jim@flakmag.com.