This is from an image for the Friends and Family show at Shaheen Gallery in Ohio. Hamlet 1999 was a homoerotic, sci-fi screenplay I had written back in 1999/2000, with the faint hopes of somehow turning it into a film or comic but ended up making an extensive body of work that was like a “comeback” show for me, and the beginning of this My American Dream body of work encapsulated in this tome. I worked for over twenty-five years teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, in the Cartooning & Illustration Department, as the Cartooning Coordinator, the head of the comics program. I came from comics, and the non-linear aspect of how I arrange my shows of different images in consciously juxtaposed sequences comes from an avant-garde-like idea of comics and their language structures. I went one summer to a three-day symposium by Bryan Singer, then the famous young director of The Usual Suspects, the X-Men movies, and more. He had gone to SVA as an undergrad and was “paying back” his dues by coming and pretty much just doing Q and A and regaling us with his stories.

I had created the graphic novel Horror Hospital Unplugged with author Dennis Cooper, and this, and a couple screenplays under my belt, and aspired for a time to bring my vision to films and/or animated movies, etc., and thought it would be inspirational to meet him. He was sort of nice, but also sort of a jerk, he had a student following him, bringing him in his books, etc., and you could tell they had struck up a relationship—later Singer would get into trouble for things like this and it was a little creepy. But his stories were good, and I thought it would be edifying to try to learn something—also comics are very much like storyboards for films to be made, and this was important for me as the head of the department.

But the whole experience also reinforced the idea that I had made a great choice to be an artist who also taught comics (in addition to fine art). Singer’s stories were about so much business and compromise, and it takes so long to bring about a movie from conception to production, that I realized how happy I was being a master of my own domain and making paintings to please myself and hopefully others too (and keeping it real teaching comics by students who then would make comics for the world!). There was a homeless guy that I would pass getting coffee for SVA every day, and sometimes he would have interesting trinkets to sell. On one of the Singer days, he had this photo—which was sepia toned and wonderfully strange—and it was “signed” by Laurence Olivier—this seemed obviously fake, but it could have been an image of Olivier—the homeless guy mentioned that it was from a production by Olivier in Russia, or something? Also weird, but I thought the image was compelling, the backdrop of Elsinore (where we also had a cabin in CA) looked like a castle rocket ship, the proscenium was alluring and magnificent, and the whole thing seemed like it came from a dreamworld, one in which the Hamlet figure looks proud, but also with great misgivings, about the world around him and power, something in the W. era that was very much on my mind.

It was fun to spend days on this painting, to me it was like a self-portrait, committed as I am to the language of art to change things, committed as I am to be painting and storytelling (and teaching, too). I loved the theater of this—and Olivier was also a titan of an actor—who was openly bisexual and/or gay, who brought emotion and feeling, like a method actor, to his roles, something that I try to emulate in my paintings and in my life.