Fantastic Metropolis

Rick Klaw: Many of your projects feature your own artwork. Are you a frustrated artist who became a writer or are you a writer who dabbles in art? Do you enjoy producing the art that accompanies your writing?

Steve Aylett: I’m a writer but I like drawing, music and stuff like that. In art I like extreme color, as I’m synaesthetic and get really interesting stuff from colors. There are reversed-acidic colors you can get with Photoshop artwork that’s difficult to get by painting unless you’re using metal flake. I did a lot of fun stuff for the LINT project, and I’ve just done a cartoony cover and title page for the US edition of The Inflatable Volunteer (Wildside Press)—though they inevitably chose the less colorful of the cover options I sent them. I get music from color and color from music, so I also do music projects like the music/textures/shrieking bloody vortexes I do with The Wesley Kern Gun, of which there’s a CD coming out soon from Humbug in Norway, who specialise in weird music. I’m also doing a project with Stephen O’Malley of the subsonic guitar band SunnO))). And it’s fun doing mindlessly stupid comedy like Lord Pin too, which is just mumbled stand-up.

Rick Klaw: When did you first use your own art in conjunction with your writing?

Steve Aylett: I remember writing a version of Jason and the Argonauts when I was about five or something, with illustrations of the monsters. But the sailors would always run away when they saw the monsters or the seven skeletons—Jason would shout “Get back to the ship” and they would sail away from the island. They never had a fight. That’s me: lack of appropriate conflict, too much conflict in areas that aren’t meant to be disputed.

Rick Klaw: I really enjoyed the Tao Te Jinx. Whose idea was it? What is the book’s purpose?

Steve Aylett: It started off as a printing test—I’d heard that print-on-demand had come on a lot since the pie-in-the-sky days and so decided to do a test. But since the test would result in a book—and I love books—I thought it should be a good juicy object, even if only one copy existed. So I ended up spending a lot of time filling it with stuff—nearly 600 selected quotes and pics and rarities and stuff that hadn’t appeared anywhere else. The quotes and stuff that I think are good, as opposed to the ones that get quoted a lot. It turned out really good printing-wise. It turns out POD printers make up their money on exorbitant delivery charges, but before I had the sense to realise that I put it on sale for a couple of months pretty cheap. So there’s a couple hundred of these little rare things out there, that might even be worth something one day. Fuck it.

Rick Klaw: You’ve written short stories, novels, comic books, audio productions, reviews, and more. Which is your favorite?

Steve Aylett: Novels—which I write in the same style as my short stories, because I don’t like to water things down.

But I like the idea of doing stuff that has a visual, like comics, cartoons or movies. The comic world is near-dead at the moment. Powers is okay but considering it’s a graft of Top Ten and Watchmen, it should be a lot better than it is. But why put two other comics together in the first place? Why not just do something new? I really wish someone would do something new. There aren’t any actual laws against it yet—not quite. The Nerve comic, which I wrote in 2001, is about the stuff which is happening now as regards using fear as a manipulation tool and general vacuum maintainer. It’s better than any comic I’ve read lately. Matthew Petz has done the artwork. No idea if it’ll ever be in print anywhere—probably not. It’s really good.

I’m not a consistent enough artist to illustrate a comic—I think you need to be a confident draughtsman to do that, and I’m a total amateur, a mess. The Tom Strong I wrote was illustrated just right (by Shawn McManus), except the flower at the end which should have been simpler, like a sunflower. The different versions of the comic world in it were done really well.

The one comic I’m looking forward to is Grant Morrison’s Vimanarama. I’ll read anything with vimana in it.