{"id":83935,"date":"2015-03-30T14:55:57","date_gmt":"2015-03-30T18:55:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=83935"},"modified":"2015-03-30T14:55:57","modified_gmt":"2015-03-30T18:55:57","slug":"only-the-dreamer-an-interview-with-victor-moscoso","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/30\/only-the-dreamer-an-interview-with-victor-moscoso\/","title":{"rendered":"Only the Dreamer: An Interview with Victor Moscoso"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo:<\/a>

Photo: Greg Preston<\/p><\/div>\n

Victor Moscoso has, as he says, always ridden two, if not three, horses at a time. As an art student, he made fine-art paintings and did \u201cart jobs,\u201d such as hand-painting grocery signs. Later, he made paintings and posters, and then paintings, posters, and comics. He was one of the \u201cbig five\u201d of design in the sixties\u2014with Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, Wes Wilson, and Rick Griffin\u2014and has been one of the Zap Seven since 1968. Yet Moscoso is every bit his own man.<\/em><\/p>\n

Born in Galicia, Spain, in 1936, he emigrated with his family to Brooklyn when he was three. From there, he went on to study art at the Cooper Union, Yale University, and the San Francisco Art Institute. In San Francisco, he began making psychedelic posters for the burgeoning music scene\u2014for groups such as the Who and Big Brother and the Holding Company and for venues such as the Shrine Auditorium, the Matrix, and the Fillmore. He borrowed from Art Nouveau, Vienna Secession, LSD trips, and contemporary commercial packaging and rendered his elaborate, frequently abstruse compositions in hot, vibrating colors. These designs helped define the psychedelic era.<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1968, Moscoso, Griffin, and S. Clay Wilson joined Robert Crumb on the third issue of <\/em>Zap Comix. When Crumb founded the magazine, there was nothing else like it, and its seven contributors produced stories so bawdy and rowdy and inventive that comics would never be the same. Moscoso\u2019s work for <\/em>Zap is formally innovative as well; many stories are told by way of nonlinear, surrealist dreamscapes in which the imagery morphs and folds back onto itself. Moscoso made three wraparound covers for the magazine, the most famous of which appeared issue no. 4: an eye-bending, joyously vulgar transformation of a dancing Mr. Peanut into a dancing phallus. It is a masterpiece of graphic art that, as Gary Panter has put it, \u201cwill represent the twentieth-century imagination for centuries.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Last year, Fantagraphics gave <\/em>Zap Comix<\/a> the deluxe treatment, reissuing the magazine\u2019s four-decade run in a six-volume box set. And this month, a show of Moscoso\u2019s drawings from 1967 to 1982, including his preparatory work for Zap comics and covers, opened at Andrew Edlin Gallery<\/a>, in New York. Moscoso spoke with me over the phone last month from his studio in Marin County, California, about learning to make art and then having to unlearn it all.<\/em><\/p>\n

Are you on a cell?<\/p>\n

I am.<\/strong><\/p>\n

They\u2019re very convenient. Especially the ones with cameras on them, man. That is dynamite. I don\u2019t have one, but my wife does. It\u2019s a marvel. This may be before your time, but there was this comic strip called Dick Tracy<\/em>, and he had this wrist radio with a little picture on it and a wire running up his arm.<\/p>\n

Where did the wire go?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Underneath his garments, so that when he was getting dressed, he\u2019d get the wire on. And he could talk to headquarters at any time.<\/p>\n

I remember the wristwatch, but I didn\u2019t know he had a wire running up his arm. <\/strong><\/p>\n

That was a detail kids like me were really interested in. And here we are. Jesus Christ, I\u2019m living in a comic strip. Except everybody\u2019s got \u2019em. Not just the cops. In fact, the cops gotta watch out.<\/p>\n

Did you read Dick Tracy<\/em> for the story or the art?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mainly the art, because that was before I could read. Comics was one of the places where I learned to read, because the pictures interested me.<\/p>\n

I remember at the age of three and half watching Hoppity Goes to Town<\/em>, which I saw in Spain. I was blown away, as a little child, with the fact that drawings\u2014I could tell the difference between drawings and live action\u2014were moving. I saw that drawings were coming to life. I think that is when I decided, without realizing it, that that was what I wanted to do. Later on I saw comics, in particular Walt Disney comics. There is one artist in there whose name is Carl Barks\u2014he was on design at Walt Disney, and he was an excellent storyteller. I used to wait every month for the new issue of that comic book to come out.<\/p>\n

Eventually I went through all the comic books at the time, and I came upon the EC comics, and in particular, Mad<\/em>. <\/p>\n

What did you like about Mad<\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Harvey Kurtzman\u2019s fantastic drawing ability, and his ability to put that skill into a story. That\u2019s what comics are\u2014pictures and words, telling a story. Take the pictures out and it\u2019s pretty much a novel. In fact, now they\u2019re getting really snobby about it and they\u2019re calling comic books graphic novels. Well okay, call it what you want. It doesn\u2019t really matter.<\/p>\n

How old were you when you started reading Mad<\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was at the High School of Industrial Arts\u2014the same school that Tony Bennett went to, and he\u2019s not a bad painter, by the way\u2014and I went one day with a couple cartoon buddies\u2014we would hang out according to our tastes, and we\u2019d do art cartoons and compare them and see who\u2019s the best cartoonist, stuff like that. So we decided to go down to the EC offices, which were on Lafayette Street in New York. I remember this rickety birdcage elevator wobbling its way up to the third floor or wherever. I wanted to see Harvey Kurtzman, but he wasn\u2019t there that day. But Al Feldstein, who was the editor of the science comics, and Jack Davis, who was one of the artists\u2014he was not one of the better artists, but he was a pretty good artist\u2014they were there. I had heard from a group of students that EC was planning on producing a humor comic. At that point, they were doing Tales from the Crypt<\/em>, horror stories, and combat stories. Kurtzman was doing Two-Fisted Tales <\/em>and Frontline Combat<\/em> war stories. And we found out there was going to be a comic called Mad<\/em> coming out from EC. Since we were all EC fans, we waited with bated breath till finally Mad<\/em> came out. I bought it out off the rack. Number one. Off the rack … and my mother threw it away. I had it stored in the basement. It goes for about five to ten thousand dollars now, depending on the condition of it. She threw away number two and kept number three. I don\u2019t know why. Mothers and wars are the greatest destroyers of art.<\/p>\n

\"Moscoso's<\/a>

Moscoso\u2019s cover for Zap<\/em> no. 10 (1982). \u00a9 2015 Victor Moscoso<\/p><\/div>\n

What did you think of the first issue?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I loved it. As an art student, it was what I was living for, to get these things and then try to copy them somehow, to draw like them.<\/p>\n

But in high school you were also interested in Norman Rockwell and N.C. Wyeth. What did you like about their work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was very well drawn. It was very clever. Rockwell was probably the best propaganda painter, not unlike Michelangelo when he did the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo made propaganda for the Catholic Church. Norman Rockwell made propaganda for the American way of life. At his rosiest, at his Ozzie-and-Harriet level, he was what we in Brooklyn called white bread. In Brooklyn, when I was growing up there, it was all immigrants\u2014Irish, Italian, Spanish, Puerto Rican. That was my neighborhood. It was the United Nations. It\u2019s changed completely now.<\/p>\n

This was near Brooklyn Heights?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was the neighborhood of the junior high school I went to\u2014Kane Street, Thompson turf. It\u2019s now called Cobble Hill. When I was going there, one kid got knifed because another kid wanted his baseball bat and he wouldn\u2019t give it to him, so he stabbed him to death.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s changed quite a bit since then.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It has! Yeah, it wasn\u2019t Cobble Hill then. When you walked to school, you walked a certain path and they would leave you alone. You can avoid trouble if you know what trouble is and where it is.<\/p>\n

After high school, you went to Cooper Union to study painting?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I got to Cooper Union I was sold on fine art\u2014art that you do first. With commercial art, you get the job first, then you do the job. With fine art, you do the job first, then you go to sell it. When I finally discovered so-called fine art, it was Abstract Expressionism that I discovered besides the old-timey stuff.<\/p>\n

And my painting career, let me tell you\u2014at the age of eighteen, I knew more about painting than anybody in the world, and every painting that I was going to do was going to be perfect and brand new. And then I started to paint. And I was disappointed. Because it looked like crap. It was crap.<\/p>\n

What were you trying to paint?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think it was my stool. You got a blank canvas. Beautiful stretch\u2014I\u2019m very good at doing stuff like that, stretching it, pulling it tight\u2014and I got this blank canvas. I think, Okay, what do I do now? Since I\u2019m going to be doing perfect paintings. I looked around me and saw my stool, so I painted my stool, and it was probably the worst painting I ever did. But then I started looking at what my fellow students were doing, and I learned more from watching what my fellow students were doing than from the teachers.<\/p>\n

What were you reading at the time?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I had bookshelves with all kinds of books in them. I bought Carl Jung\u2019s Man and His Symbols<\/em> because he had a lot of pictures in it. Freud had a stick up his ass, really. He had all these rules on what your dreams could mean. It just didn\u2019t strike me right. I finally discovered Carl Jung, who said that only the dreamer can interpret his dreams. It clicked. Freud is interpreting\u2014in fact, to use his words, he\u2019s projecting. He can\u2019t help but project. Who can be absolutely subjective? It\u2019s impossible. It\u2019s like perfection. You can think about it, you can talk about it, you can try to do it, you can come pretty close. And sometimes it feels like perfection. But how do you measure perfection? You put it on a perfection scale?<\/p>\n