What makes his
work unique is that his books are chock-full of his own illustrations; in-your-face
depictions of slobbery sex acts, tweaked versions of exploitation film
campaigns, even a version of himself, often portrayed as a sweaty, cringing
disembodied head which presents an article or two—kinda like if the original
Crypt Keeper were drawn by Ralph Bakshi. All of this explodes across articles
crammed with quarter and eighth page fully illustrated factoids and film
reviews.
When my buddy
Justin Jasper (R.I.P.) handed me a copy of Cinema Sewer and I first laid eyes
on the hilarious drawings of boa constrictor-sized erections and blood dripping
gore scenes from my favorite horror flicks, I knew I was in for a crazy trip.
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| A Death Wish 3 Bronson Next to a Worried Guy with a Box |
BURGESS: Last year
you produced a 44 page magazine, a 68 page comic, and a 200 page softcover
book.Your day job is a clerk in a video store but describe your working process
in your home office.
BOUGIE: I also
did freelance writing for dvd releases last year. Mostly essays for dvd
booklets for Arrow in the UK, so most people here don't get to see them. My
working process isn't very glamorous. I live in a little 700 square foot condo
near the city center of Vancouver BC, Canada, which is stacked to the rafters
with books, movies, and vintage porn magazines. I've got an art desk in my
bedroom next to the bed, and a computer/office set up in the living room where
the dining table would normally be. That's where I am right now, and where I do
all my writing. The drawing I do at the art desk, although I do a lot of the
post production stuff on the computer, and some digital jobs too. I draw with
pencils and pens, and then scan it in, and clean it up on a wacom cintique.
Sometimes I do color on the computer too, but I've got a real hard-on for black
and white for some reason. I think it comes from reading so many zines and mini
comics when I was younger, and always having that cheap black and white printed
look seem cool. Spent my teens making zines, and trading them through the mail
with other kids in other towns and cities. That community that I met through
the mail really formed a lot of my interests going into adult hood. What else
have you got when you're stuck somewhere like Saskatoon Saskatchewan?
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| The Future of Pornography? |
BURGESS: You’re
creating the type of magazine teenagers find on the street and hide under their
mattress hoping their parents don’t find it. Can you talk a little about your
early experiences of showing and being shown pornography and horror films as
well as your parents’ attitude towards sex and violence in movies?
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| Another Classy Installment: Cinema Sewer #27 |
BOUGIE: It's
funny you should mention finding my work on the street, because that's exactly
what I'm creating. And I've never mentioned this in an interview before -- but
I have this thing I do sometimes when I'm on the bus. I take out an issue of
one of my porn comics, or Cinema Sewer, and I leave it on the seat after I get
up. You know, for the next person to discover. I like the idea that the
magazines are finding an audience totally removed from someone who would seek
it out. They just sit down, and it's there. And the covers are so LURID, you
know? Haha... so they have to have a look and see what it is. And then I've
infected them with the ink I squirted out of my dong -- metaphorically
speaking, I mean. My dong is mostly normal.
First time I
ever saw porn was when I was a little kid. This was the late 1970s, early
1980s. Around there. I was playing in the woods with 3 other little girls, and
we found some soggy and moldy spread beaver pages displayed on a log that had
obviously been left there by some other kids, who had probably stolen it from a
store, or from their dad's stash. I think I was in grade one. I remember that
all 4 of us stood there in awe of these pictures. Staring them up and down,
until finally one of the little girls said it was bad or something, and that
she was going to tell on us. I remember being horrified that an adult could see
us, or would know what we had witnessed of the adult world. The taboos we had
been made privy to. I remembering being amazed about what a cunt looked like.
Not turned on or disgusted, but just... amazed.
Then, a couple
years later my hippy mom, who was single and a teacher, took me over to hang
out with a friend, whose parents she liked to smoke up with. The adults all
went to party in the kitchen and have a good time, and they wanted the two of
us out of their hair, so they sequestered us in a den -- a TV room. There,
under the coffee table we found his step father's stack of Cheri, Oui, High
Society, Hustler, and Gallery, and we began pouring over them as if they were
important documents with important answers to questions we didn't hadn't even
thought to ask.
Suddenly one of
the adults walked in before we could hide it back where we found it, and I
remember feeling like we were in huge trouble. But they were so happy and high
and casual, that just laughed about us finally having an interest in girls.
They even went through the magazines with us for a minute or two, sitting with
us on the couch as if they were going to read us a story. I remember my mom
being kinda worried, but his parents poo-pooing her, and saying "They're
going to see it sometime, may as well be while we're around to keep an eye on
them." And then they left us. And suddenly this weight was lifted. We just
happily looked at the pictures of spread asses and open lady thighs, and
nipples. That was the very first time I had this idea that maybe it wasn't so
bad. Maybe it wasn't so bad to like girls. Maybe there was nothing wrong with
being curious about sexuality or what people looked like under their clothes.
Someone I'm
friends with on social media posted a picture a few days ago of a dad showing
his infant child an issue of Maxim, and they were saying what a terrible parent
this guy was. That's so far away from my kind of thinking. The other side of
the planet. Not wanting a baby to look at nudity doesn't even make sense. What,
do you worry that if they see their mom's tit when they breastfeed that they're
going to be perverted for life? Seeing graphic sexual acts should be reserved
for people old enough to understand the implications of it, but I see nothing
inherently wrong about the human body, or anyone of any age knowing what it
looks like naked.
My mom was far
more against violence than sex. By far. I was never ever allowed to play with
guns, or own GI-Joe guys, or anything like that. I never owned any my whole
life. But as a young teen, the second thing I ever bought with my own money I
had earned over the summer was a laser tag set, because I was so curious what
it would be like to get to shoot my friends. Hahaha! But at the same time, she
wasn't really into censoring violent movies. I think she had a sense that
playing with war toys was like training a young boy to be a soldier, but
watching a violent TV show or movie (as long as it wasn't TOO violent) was
something else far more divorced from reality. Abstract notions. A funhouse
mirror reflection of society. And I agree with that. I think she raised me
good. She's a very intelligent woman. I adore my mom. I'm a feminist because of
my mom.
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Bougie's Bum Fights Drawing My $30 Scanner Mauls
|
BURGESS: The voice
you use in your writing is very intimate and you tend to sneak in a lot of
personal facts. For example, regular readers will get details of your
relationship with your wife, your sexual preferences, even the passing of your
old cat, Orson. How different is the real Robin Bougie from the one that you
present on the page?
BOUGIE: It's
pretty much exactly me. I don't make up anything. I'm an exhibitionist in that
sense, and feel liberated to tell private or embarrassing things, because after
its told, you're free. You know what I mean? It's a fast track to creating
important work when you're working with the written word or with comics,
because you're letting the audience see themselves in you. The only time I
really use fiction is in the little comics in Cinema Sewer about Rebecca and I,
or those little comics I do about getting abused for being a comic artist, or
jerking off together with my friend Josh. All of those are for comic relief.
Like where I make Rebecca seem like she's scolding me all the time. That's just
for fun. It's just that I need a "straight man" for the joke to work.
In reality, she's very open and accepting, and is never telling me what I can't
do. She's incredibly supportive of me. She's fucking incredible.
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| Barbarian Babe Drawing by Rebecca Dart via r-dart.tumblr.com |
BURGESS: Your
wife, animator and illustrator Rebecca Dart, and you seem to have a great
creative relationship—collaborating often in your publications. You’ve joked
before about being too carried away on a sexy drawing and your wife getting
jealous. Is it possible to become too attracted to a drawing?
BOUGIE: Haha no.
That's another one of those little comics to make her laugh. She doesn't get
jealous about that stuff. I get attracted to stuff I draw all the time. If
you're working in the genre of porn/erotica/sleaze, and you're not able to make
yourself tingle or get a little red-faced -- you know -- tapped into your
fantasies and your turn-ons -- then you're clearly doing it wrong. You're
keeping the work at arms length, and you're a coward. You're too scared to be
making porn. Do something else. That's how I see it. Unfortunately, with the
amount of terrible porn I see, there must be a lot of scared creative people
out there. But I mean, c'mon. What's the worst that could happen? OH NO!
They'll find out that I'm just like everyone else on earth! That I have sexual
interests! Grow a pair if you're going to work in this medium. Don't just
regurgitate a bunch of porn cliches. Make something personal.
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| Bougie's gangly visage takes in a weird scene. |
BURGESS: You write quite a bit about cliches in cinema and like many good critics you challenge cinema to do something new. You’ve
said that the last taboo in genre film is racism. Do you think that it’s
possible for an exploitation film to improve social conditions?
BOUGIE: I think
it's possible for any kind of film to improve social conditions, or make some
kind of difference -- even if its just a small one. Film and music, and writing
and art are all amazing like that. That power and those implications is one of
the reasons why we're so fucking fascinated with them. It's why so many people
will give up lucrative careers so they can toil away making nothing doing this
stuff. That said, I don't think we rely on something like exploitation movies
to improve social conditions. We're probably in trouble if we're putting our
eggs in that basket. It's entertainment.
BURGESS: I
remember when you could only get The Holy Mountain on the tape trade scene and
if you ran into a guy who’d seen it, you could bitch about those damn hardcoded
Japanese subtitles! As digital culture puts obscure movies into the hands of
the average Joe, do you feel the joy of connection between fellow film hunters
has been diminished? How much does rarity define the bond between cinema nerds?
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| Standard VHS Tape Trade Bootleg Picture Quality (Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, 1987) |
BOUGIE: It made
finding the movies more special and I believe it did make the movies better in a way. It's like if you only get to eat the most
delicious ice cream once a week or once a month, or if you get to eat it every
time you think about it. Before long, it's not going to be a very delicious ice
cream anymore. All you have to do to watch a movie now is to know that it
exists, and have internet access. That's it. That's all. How can that not
diminish the value of it somehow? I know people with thousands of movies
they've never watched. I myself have probably 200 films I've never seen. That's
obscene, man. We're just going through the motions -- utilizing the primal laws
of possession that were so important to use in order to get what we wanted to
see, and to experience. And they aren't serving us anymore. They're just
cluttering up the little cubicles we live in. Or at least, the one I live in. I
feel like a dinosaur sometimes, but what can I do? This is the way I was
raised! It's hardwired in me to GET THE THINGS! hahaha You know? I need to
possess the things. Maybe that's our connection now -- guys like you and me.
That we're all dinosaurs together, with our physical media. Maybe that's how
we'll bond instead. We'll be that older generation of old blue haired ladies in
poodle skirts and saddle shoes, listening to Bobby Vinton. Grasping for what it
was like when we weren't almost dead. Except we'll be wearing Fulci T-Shirts
and making jokes about Tarantino. Nostalgia-based gray-haired geek-creatures
who share the same wonderful memories of the damn hardcoded Japanese subtitles.
Hahha!
BURGESS: So far
your only film production credit is as producer on Chelsea Chainsaw’s The
Cumming of Jizzus (2009), a XXX re-telling of Christ’s resurrection. Any scripts
or film projects on the horizon?
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| The Next Time the Boss is Looking Over Your Shoulder Do an Image Search for "The Cumming of Jizzus" |
BOUGIE: None.
That was a really fun project, and it was fun getting all naked-ish on set and
being around all these people who were all sweaty and fucking, and having to
clean up puddles of piss -- and I'm not joking -- even cleaning up the piss was
fun! But it made me realize that I prefer comics as a storyteller. It's so much
more fulfilling. I get to be the director, actor, producer, cameraman, and my
whole budget is the cost of $6 worth of drawing supplies. And better yet, I
don't have to rely on anyone else. If you can't afford to pay your cast and
crew (and I couldn't), how can you expect them to be as passionate about your
project as you are? My cast and crew on a comic is *me*. And all of me is
passionate as fuck!
BURGESS: You’ve
recently published a book about classic adult film posters published by
(British Publisher) Fab Press?
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| Alluringly Janky Poster for XXX flick Hot Teenage Assets (1987) |
BOUGIE: Yeah,
it's called Graphic Thrills. It's the best thing I've ever done. Easily. You
can't even believe how happy I was to get it back from the printer. I had to
keep from weeping holding it in my hands the first time. It's the only time in
my life when I imagined a thing, and worked on it for a year, and it came out
just like I imagined it. Usually you have to make all these consessions, and it
morphs and changes so much from what you first started working on, but not this
time. It's so beautiful. Sorry, I know I'm gushing, but I'm still in that first
bloom phase. I just got the book a few days ago, and I'm still crushing on it. I'm
sure I'll get all worn down and sick of it the more I live with it. There are
500 signed and numbered hardcover copies, and an unlimited softcover edition. I
open the book with a twelve page history of the American Porno Chic era, which
covers most of the major ups and downs of the industry, from the first nudie
cuties in the late 1950s when Russ Meyer started the ball rolling on that, to
the video explosion of the mid Eighties. It's a love letter to American porn
shot on film, and the posters used to advertise it. I used to be a photo
retoucher at a photography studio before I was a smut peddler, so I finally got
to utilize those skills, and spent many many hours restoring the posters, which
had creases and all kinds of damage on them. And then spend hundreds of hours
researching the movies, tracking down the people who made them, and finding old
magazines that reviewed them and wrote about them. I wanted the inside story,
and the personal story. Not just a poster book of pretty pictures! This is the
poster book I've always wanted to read about adult films.
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| Bougie's Latest Thrill, it's Graphic |
