R. Kikuo Johnson and The Strip Life

R. Kikuo Johnson insists he is a nerd. But us real nerds—those of us without a widely hailed first graphic novel, or gigs at The New Yorker and The New York Times, or an envy-inducing custom loft in Williamsburg shared with three other young designers and illustrators, and those of us that don’t have a beautiful girlfriend and amazing bone structure—might not let him into the club.

We might not even let him stand in line out front.“If the definition of being a nerd is knowing a lot, exclusively, about one thing, then I’m qualified,” says Johnson firmly. If you ask him what makes him a nerd and not a geek, dork, or spaz, he barely pauses before claiming brotherhood with the entire outcast pantheon. “Wow, I qualify for all of those things. A geek is a social misfit. A spaz is like a geek, but with erratic physical movements. Being a dork is more of an internal state, less externally imposed on you. A dork, in his mind, is someone who just can’t fit in.”

So what exactly is Johnson’s claim to outsider status and nerdy knowledge? What makes him a nerd-geek-dork-spaz? Oddly enough, it’s the same thing that makes him completely cutting edge: comics.

Twenty-five-year-old Johnson loves comic books and will happily talk about them for hours. “Comics are like my only base of knowledge,” he says. “It excludes everything else. It’s really kinda sad.” He enthuses about everything from best-selling illustrator Jim Lee (“He’s my guilty indulgence; in eighth grade, all I wanted to be was Jim Lee”), to Fantastic Four heroine Alicia Masters (“She’s this blind artist, which cracks me up”), to the revered creator of Jimmy Corrigan, Chris Ware (“I copy him quite a bit—if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then I flatter him all the time”).

His addiction to the medium began early. When he was eight years old, he saw Frank Miller’s cover for Wolverine #1. “He was all evil, with these claws...the violence, the luridness, it was irresistible. And I liked to draw. More than anything, what I liked about comics was that I could take three pieces of paper and staple them together and make my own.” His first works were superhero tales, with a hero based on (or, he says, “ripped off from”) a He-Man character named Sy-Clone; his nemesis, “the Dark Destroyer,” was a dark homage to Inspector Gadget, with a fully rigged trench coat of death. “I made piles of these things in third grade,” he says.

Although Johnson continued to read and draw comic books up through high school, “I definitely fought the idea of being a nerd,” he says. “I think that’s basically the plot of Night Fisher,” Johnson’s widely acclaimed graphic novel. He even tried to ditch comics when he left Hawai’i to study at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), taking the opportunity to focus on a more typical arts education. But it just didn’t work. “I felt like all of my paintings and drawings were studies for something else, that they were never really finished. They were missing a larger narrative. And comics really had that.”

When Johnson read Chester Brown’s I Never Liked You in his freshman year, his fate was sealed. Brown’s poignant, autobiographical coming-of-age story—bullies, girls, and a mentally ill parent—led Johnson to embrace his inner nerd and let his freak flag fly. “I realized that all I wanted to do was comics. It just seemed so much richer in terms of the medium, and in terms of its potential, than the alternatives that I was studying. So that’s when I decided that, hey, if that’s going to make me a nerd, then well, that’s cool.”

Johnson began Night Fisher—a beautifully brushed, melancholy story of fading teenage friendship and drug use—in his senior year at RISD. He worked on the partly autobiographical story for three years, cold-submitted it to Fantagraphics (publisher of revered cartoonists such as R. Crumb and the Hernandez Bros.), was immediately accepted, and became the most widely heralded graphic novelist of 2005. Everyone from TIME Magazine to the smallest comics blogger praised Night Fisher. The rest is comic book history.

Sort of. Some comics fanboys—such as the lardy, officious Comic Book Guy from “The Simpsons”—might claim that Johnson’s work isn’t really “comics comics,” but a brand new hybrid for the pop-culture snob crowd, called “art comics.” These are the readers who believe that a comic without a superhero is like a veggie burger pretending to be meat, and that the only reason to call a comic book a “graphic novel” is to pretend that it isn’t really a comic at all. But Johnson disagrees. He sees them as different, but equally valid, ways of consuming the medium.

Comic books—always the bastard child of literature and pulp, illustration and art, permanent and pop culture—have reached a point where there’s an audience for just about every narrative style. This new style of comics sans superheroes is simply a new, unconventional way of pushing the medium on its own terms, much like outsider art. “A lot of independent comics, I feel they’re definitely folk art. Like other outsider artworks, the appeal is in its authenticity; it’s clear the artist did it completely for himself.”

In fact, Johnson’s current project is based on the life of outsider artist Morton Bartlett, known for his disquieting, sexually questionable images of baby dolls. The appeal isn’t immediately obvious, but Johnson was drawn to the subtle way Bartlett’s work disturbs the viewer. “His work has this innocent and pristine surface, very clean, but within it, a real darkness and ambiguity, which makes it intriguing,” Johnson says. “I see my strip about his work being, in a way, a strip about comics—about how this weird childhood innocence is fetishized by adults.”

“Comics aren’t about seeing in a real sense,” he maintains, “they’re more about insight—about the craft controlling the story to the point where it transcends the reading experience and reaches this whole other level.” Comics don’t just record what is seen, but interpret what they show to make a story, using a language of symbols.

So how does Johnson support his comic book habit and keep himself in Windsor Newton series 7 #2 brushes, “the Holy Grail of comic art brushes”? He works fairly steadily on a series of commercial illustration jobs, for The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Nickelodeon, PBS, and others. But the real money comes from waiting tables two days a week at a high-end steakhouse in midtown Manhattan. “It’s the best possible job for financing your own work,” he claims. “Unless you draw really fast, so you can finance work with, well, work.” Plus there’s the creative stimulation: “After spending four days alone in my studio, working 17-hour days, to cover maybe two square feet of paper, it’s great to get out and smell alcohol.”

As far as Johnson is concerned, this utter devotion more than qualifies him to join the Comic Book Guy at the comic book nerd party. “I take pride in being a nerd,” he says. “To me, being a nerd implies a certain amount of intelligence. And I think comics are building their own status, their own historical continuity and critical universe. Comics are just mind-numbingly cool… How can you not be into comics?”

Okay, Johnson. You win. Welcome to the club.