Recently I managed to secure an interview with David Willis, the cartoonist behind 'Roomies!', 'It's Walky!', 'Joyce and Walky!', which are all available
Here, '
ShortPacked!', and most recently '
Dumbing of Age.' Although David is 'not a foodie,' what he has to say about food showcases the way food, food preparation, and diet are tied into the core of who we are and how we think. At least that's how I took it, but I'm a weird food obsessed kind of person. Let me know what you think.
The Columbus Digest- "Your art style changed so drastically in the first four years of your comics career but has had a much slower and more subtle progression over the last four, do you feel like you're finally homing in on what works best for you? Congratulations on your newest comic making it's first anniversary by the way."
David Willis- "Thanks! This one I actually just got asked about on my
Tumblr. I don't know if I'm ever going to finally get to a point where I'm completely satisfied with my art. I'm always finding newer and better
ways to do things and changing my mind on what I think are the best proportions for my characters. (I think the heads are slowly shrinking again.) Things changed a lot more in the early years because I'd just started out, I was 18, and while I did draw comics all the time back t hen, I'd never yet actually committed to drawing one a day for the rest of my life. And so that lends to a lot of experimentation, a lot of rapid growth... it's like when you're first born, and you shoot up several feet in height in just a few years,
then you slow down as your body finds where it needs to be. Also, somewhere in the middle there I took some life drawing classes (at art school) and that fundamentally changed how I drew people.
Though I've never drawn particularly realistically, the adage that you have to know the rules before you can break them is very true."
C-Bus D.- "You, like me, are a transplant to Columbus, correct? Wikipedia is unclear as to your origin story, making you sort of a mysterious wanderer, maybe a Bard of some sort, telling many tales but not your own."
D.W.- "I was born in
Indianapolis, Indiana, while my dad was still in dental school. Somewhere around two years old, our family moved to
La Porte, Indiana, where I stayed until I left for college. I took a few
semesters at
Indiana University in
Bloomington before switching to the
Illinois Institute of Art in
Schaumburg. After graduating there, I moved to Columbus, where I've been for... ....many years. I like it
here. Many Taco Bells. And Fazoli's is a must. They don't just have those anywhere."
C-Bus D.- "Have you visited many of Columbus' big attractions yet? COSI,
TheColumbus Zoo, The
Ohio Theater, or the absolutely bitchin' sweet main branch of The
Columbus Public Library?"
D.W.- "I've been to all of those except the Public Library. I've been to the Grandview Library, but I sort of lost interest in libraries once the Internet was invented. The only reason I ever went to the one at
Indiana University is because they had a Chick-Fil-A in the basement."
C-Bus D.-"You claim to completely adhere to fast food places, why is that?"
D.W.- "It's cheap and I want to die. Well, more precisely, it's cheap and I have incredibly particular tastes. I can go to a fast food place and not ask them to take half of the food off of a $20 entree. I'm also
boring and find repetition comfortable. I find what I like and then stick with it until the end of time. That's part of why I love Taco Bell. There are like five ingredients in the entire menu, and I'll eat three of them. And I can eat those three ingredients in a dozen different ways. It's artificial variety."
(Speaking of artificial variety, it's mentioned in part of an episode of
FourCast, featuring Cartoonist Zach Weiner)
C-Bus D.-"With your love of Fast Food have you heard of or tried, 'Dirty Franks Hot Dog Palace,' downtown? They have more than 40 different hot dogs on their menu, some of which are pretty sweet. Thy also have 'Tater-Totchos,' which are exactly what they sound like, Tater Tots smothered in Nacho toppings. My Fiance and I have only eaten there once, which is why we haven't reviewed it yet, but that once definitely convinced us to go back."
D.W.- "I have not heard of that place, no. I did go to Wonderdaug a few times, which was a place on High Street in
Clintonville that was run by a very friendly lady who was very excited to be running her own hot
dog place. Unfortunately, my preferred hot dogs are pretty boring so I don't tend to eat them very much, so we didn't go there very often. Which is too bad, because it's totally my lack of patronage that it's
not there anymore."
C-Bus D.- "Do you do any home cooking at all?"
D.W.- "I have cooked a few Thanksgiving turkeys and once I made lasagna from scratch. The latter was to prove to a girl that I could. And I could, it turns out. Normally when I'm home I make various kinds of
Kraft Macaroni & Cheese (see the "artificial variety" mentioned above), Chef Boyardee, and plain old turkey sandwiches when I realize I've been eating too much of the Kraft and Boyardee recently.
I am basically seven years old."
C-Bus D.- "Of the few things you do make, what's your specialty? Will you share your recipe with us?"
D.W.- "Make a box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese according to the box. Add some salt."
C-Bus D.- "If a friend or family member is going to surprise you with your absolute favorite home cooked meal for some special event, what would that be?"
D.W.- "If we're sticking with home cooked, I guess steak and mashed potatoes. Probably some broccoli. Broccoli's a vegetable I will eat. My problem is that I don't trust other people's cooking. It's not
that it's ever bad, it's just that I have paranoia issues. Going over to somebody else's place for a dinner they're making is a stressful thing. I know I'm annoyingly picky and plus I don't know if there's going to be hidden stuff I don't like buried somewhere in there. I'd rather just go to Burger King. I've already learned that their burgers are all the same, I know I like them, plus I don't know the people there so I can ignore the creation of it, like it's toast coming out of a toaster, with the bread magically disappearing. I don't want to know how the sausage is made. If I know the people making the sausage, then I'll think about it, and that just makes things weird. There were fingers in there, touching."
C-Bus D.- "How would that steak be prepared? Some people would sooner commit seppuku than let you near their recipes and as much as we'd like to include any new tasty morsel on our site we'd rather not have any blood on our hands."
D.W.-"Uh, I guess you put the steak on our George Foreman Grill. When it looks done, take it off. Grab some A-1, because that's probably going to be pretty dry. Grab some Bob Evans garlic mashed potatoes from the grocery store. Those are pretty good. Heat according to the instructions. Probably a frozen box of broccoli. Yeah, I'm not a foodie.
C-Bus D.- "Odds are when you were a child someone in your life did some baking, odds are that whenever possible you would snag a still warm something to munch on, (Children are all Sticky Fingered Nom Bandits, ruled by their hunger, a state that I have happily never outgrown,) what was the one treat
you would risk life and limb for?"
D.W.-"I guess chocolate chip cookies. I will eat desserts. I hope we all learned a little something not only about my childlike food preferences, but also about some deep-rooted psychological issues
that are obviously involved."
In closing, I have a really excellent Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe somewhere that I have to track down and send to David Willis now. It doesn't help that most of my (probably around 300) recipes are written on 3 inch by 4 inch pieces of paper scattered throughout all of my belongings. Also, 'D.W.' is what Launchpad McQuack called Darkwing Duck, just saying.
