Born in Duxbury, Vermont, Stephen R. Bissette is an award-winning comic book artist, illustrator, and writer. Bissette was one of the first graduates of the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, and together with writer Alan Moore and inker John Totleben, was responsible for revitalizing the DC comic series Swamp Thing into a critically acclaimed horror classic. His later work includes editing and publishing the influential anthology horror comic series Taboo, authoring the Bram Stoker Award-winning novella Aliens: Tribes, and drawing and self-publishing Tyrant, the unfinished epic biography of a Tyrannosaurus rex.

Bissette was one of of the original faculty members at the Center for Cartoon Studies, and has been teaching there since its creation in 2005. This fall marks the publication of The Vermont Monster Guide, a collaboration with Vermont author Joe Citro, along with the paperback release of a book he co-authored, Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman. He continues to actively write and draw and he maintains a blog dedicated to his ongoing creative projects, film, the horror genre, and the American comic book industry (http://srbissette.com).

We spoke with Bissette as he prepared for the arrival of the new freshman class at CCS.

When did you first decide to become an artist? When did you realize that you had a passion for drawing monsters?

Four. Four years old. I drew a dinosaur that an adult, I believe my father, recognized as a dinosaur. It was that moment of marks on paper that real grown up people recognized as being the thing that was in my head. It was an awful drawing, but just the fact it was recognizable is what I have never forgotten. That's what got me going.

After that, I had a very close friend during my early childhood when I was living in Duxbury, Vermont, my next-door neighbor Mitch Casey. Mitch was a year or two older than me. We were really close friends and he drew the first mini-comic I ever saw in my entire life and because I watched him draw it, I drew my own. So that's arguably the start of what we laughingly call a career.

We used to draw these mini-comics and mini-monster magazines and sell them at school. My mom hates it when I say when I say we sold it for milk money, but that's what we did. We were basically selling the comics for other kids' milk money. And it wasn't that we needed money, we had enough money, it was that we were making comics that people were wanting to own and buy. So that was sort of when the bug bit me.

And I never let up. There was a time in high school where, if the digital technology that's available for your generation had been around, I probably would have pursued filmmaking, 'cause movies are among my first loves. But all we had were 8mm and Super 8 and silent 8mm at that, so although I dabbled with it all through junior high and high school, it never had the power of drawing and of drawing comics. But, as I say, if we'd had the digital technology your generation has, it may have gone very differently for me.

What was your art training like after high school? How did you get involved with the Joe Kubert school?

The first place I went was Johnson State College, and I went there for two years. I was there from '74 to '76. I pursued art training there, and I ended up, because it was as small a college then as it is now, not being able to get into the classes that I wanted to be in. As result, I had to do theater, but they got me into doing drawing because we were doing set design and lighting design. Second year at Johnson, I studied under the head of the art department, Peter Heller, who sadly is no longer with us. He passed away a number of years ago, but Peter allowed me to pursue an independent study program in doing my own comics. And that yielded a magazine format comic called Abyss that we printed at Johnson Press, and that was my portfolio into the Joe Kubert School.

I entered the Kubert School and I was in the first ever class. Joe accepted me for the December, 1976 year, which was their first ever year, and I graduated in '78. It really was the Kubert School that pushed me into doing this professionally. It was set up as a trade school, so unlike what I experienced in studying art at Johnson State College - and there were some amazing painters and artists that were at Johnson, they would graduate and they would have to become contractors or carpenters. There was no way for them to earn a living with their artwork. I think that's part of why I really pursued the Kubert School, is Joe made it clear in their first literature they sent out that it was essentially a trade school, and that we were going to be learning a trade and the goal was to have us working professionally in the comics or commercial art field. So that's why I went for it.

It was a two-year program when I went. I believe it's a three-year program now. The school is still very active and very alive.

I was working before the end of my first year. Part of it was the proximity to New York City. Being a Vermont boy, I had never had that kind of proximity. It was literally a short bus ride from Dover, New Jersey, where the school was, into New York, and number of my classmates and I were already hitting the pavement in New York and showing our portfolios around after we finished our first year. I landed some pretty good accounts. I had my work published in Heavy Metal, in their first or second year of publication. Joe Kubert had student work programs for us, so some of us were getting our work published in comics like Sgt. Rock. We were doing backup stories, which were the short, three to eight page stories that would be in the back of a comic at that time.

By the time I graduated, in the spring of '78, I was already landing professional sales and doing my best to piece together something like a living out of it.

What did you do following graduation?

For most of us it followed two tracks. The Kubert School had a work program, and I believe they still do, where if you had your schoolwork done and if you were up to snuff on your homework assignments, you could work on freelance projects that Joe would bring into the school. Those were everything from doing spots of Captain America and Spider-Man toys for catalogs to comic stories for comics like Sgt. Rock. And one of the jobs that Joe threw my way during my second year was a three-page horror story for Scholastic Magazines. Scholastic Magazines distributes their books and magazines into all the schools around the United States of America. It was a horror story, and the writer of the story and the editor of the magazine was Bob Stine, who your generation knows better as R. L Stine, the man who created Goodebumps.

So I got to work with Bob and his wife Jane, and the art director was a guy called Bob Feldgus. They were incredibly kind and attentive people to work with and it was a great freelance assignment because I had already had my share of rough ones where you were working for pretty rough characters at times. Scholastic was just a wonderful job.

The first stories I did, most of the work we did for the Joe Kubert School, our names didn't go on. It would be signed “The Joe Kubert School,” if it was signed with anything. They were really happy with the work I did and Joe, god bless him, gave me the contract when I graduated the school. He said, “if you want to continue this work with Scholastic, it's yours Steve.” So I accepted, and I ended up working off and on with Scholastic for the next two, two and a half years.

So, point being – some of the jobs I got, and that my classmates like Rick Veitch and Tom Yates and Ron Zalme and others, we would be allowed to continue working for some of the clients that we had originally worked for while we were students at the Kubert School. Most cases though, all of us were piecing together a freelance career based on our own efforts, our own job interviews and so on. I was working with Heavy Metal off and on, and Marvel Comics.

It's funny. We all ended up doing work for Sgt. Rock but DC Comics had a policy at the time that they would not hire Joe Kubert School students. DC had some kind of ax to grind with Joe, it had nothing to do with us. So we didn't find out for almost two years, what was going on. Finally one of the editors took pity on one of us and said, “look, I gotta tell you guys what's happening, because you're up here every week. No one's going to give you work up here.” Luckily, within a few months of that information the logjam broke.

So you never know. Sometimes you're being groomed for jobs at the college level that you find out after the fact that you can't continue working with because of some sort of grudge between the institution, or in our case, our patriarch, Joe Kubert, and the publisher of note. It's tough when you don't know what's going on. It was kind of a relief to learn that it wasn't us, 'cause we were feeling like, “what is it? We're working at Marvel! They're even harder to establish relations with than DC should be!”

That's how I made the leap. Then by 1979, I was able to move back to Vermont. By then, Federal Express had begun delivering and picking up in rural parts of Vermont, and that was really important. This was before the internet, long before fax machines, and it would been tough to continue my freelance career living in Vermont. Thankfully, one FedEx had established routes in Vermont, I was able to move back up. And I moved up to Grafton, Vermont. And that's really where my independent career started.

Rick Veitch, still one of best friends – he's also a native Vermonter. Rick and his brother Tom Veitch, is one of the premier writers of the underground comics scenes, they are both Vermonters. They were from Bellows Falls. Rick was already living back in Vermont and he and I did a number of jobs together. We called ourselves “Creative Burnouts.” Our big gig that we got was we got to do the graphic novel adaptation of the Steven Spielberg movie 1941, the one that starred John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. That was a real lesson. Here we were, doing one of the first graphic novels, the year before Heavy Metal had done the graphic novel for Alien, the first ever graphic novel to land on the New York Times bestseller list. So we had a high prestige gig in a brand new format, graphic novels were a new thing at that time. We were being paid well. It was a big studio movie, a collaboration between Universal and Colombia, it was supposed to be this big hit. And we almost killed each other doing the graphic novel, it was a horrible ordeal. We had do a full-color graphic novel adaptation in a little under two months. We barely did it. Rick is a work horse and I am as slow as molasses, so you can imagine the fireworks that we had at times. But we got it done! And we stayed friends. And the movie came out and bombed. Within in a year, our graphic novel was being remaindered in book stores. It was a real early lesson in not counting your chickens before they're hatched.

But hey, we got to do an early graphic novel and piss off Steven Spielberg while we were at it. He absolutely hated it. We have a letter from him where he really tears into it.

We, like most comic freelancers at that time – and I tell this to my students now, they're entering a really tough economy – when we graduated the Kubert School in 1978, those were hard years. The gas rationing was going on, the economy was in the toilet, and the entire comic book industry was imploding. Underground comics were gone. The head shops had all closed so there was no distribution for Robert Crumb and the big undergrounders. The mainstream publishers like DC and Marvel were going through really hard times. Most of their comics were reprints at that time. It was hard to get our leg in, but we did it.

Sometimes, for folks your age, as hard as it looks out there, oftentimes that's a great time for the next generation to be entering and inventing new venues and markets. Because the old rules cease to apply. Within two, three, four years, all of us were working in one capacity or another making our living as cartoonists. I've stayed in touch with quite a number of my classmates over the years from the Kubert School, and a lot of us did pretty well. Inevitably, some people didn't go into cartooning. They graduated from the Joe Kubert School and they ended up working in different professions, but a surprising percentage of the class made their mark at got through and have their livings in various capacities, either in the newspaper market or the magazine market, comics, books, some working behind the scenes as editors, art directors.

It turned out to be, despite how horrible the economy was at the time, it turned out to be a pretty good time to be making our mark on the world. By the time I was working on Swamp Thing – there we were working on a comic book that had some of the lowest sales DC had, and it was much like fellow Vermonter, Frank Miller, who was a real inspiration at the time. Frank had taken Daredevil, at Marvel, which was a second or third-tier character no one cared about and turned it into a phenomenal series. That was kind of our wellspring when John Totleben, who was another Kubert School classmate, and I started work on Swamp Thing. And once editor Len Wein brought in writer Alan Moore, that was the core team. It all went from there. And that was in 1983, '84.

What, among your many projects, is the work that you're most proud of?

Two things - I'm really proud of the work we did on Swamp Thing and Taboo.

My personal goal – as a young man, I had a silly goal. My goal was to change horror comics. I loved horror comics. And my goal, as a young, aspiring cartoonist was I wanted to change horror comics for the better. To me, the horror genre could be about anything. Most people think it's just “boogey-boogey,” scary, bloody movies, and to me, horror is one of the great literary genres. In all media. In music, in art, in film, in literature, it's one of the great genres, and yet every critic that was active during my formative years would tend to disdain the genre. Hated it. Treated it like a retarded, hunchbacked brother that was locked up in the attic.

To me, horror was capable of anything. I thought it was a really important genre because it was the one genre of fiction and the arts that - the entire wellspring of the genre is to confront the very things we fear and that are taboo, culturally. So I'm really proud of what we did with Swamp Thing and what John Totleben and I'm proud of what we were able to do with Taboo, because we really did change things. Out of Swamp Thing, and in part what we did in Taboo, the Vertigo comic line emerged form DC Comics. Vertigo wouldn't exist without our having lost the Comics Code on Swamp Thing, and it would not have existed without the wellspring of the work that Alan Moore, John Totleben, myself, and Rick Veitch did in that book. It really had quite an impact, above and beyond its sale base.

And with Taboo, my personal goal was to push that even further and do an anthology that would live up to it's title and really package between two covers, the best selection of international horror comics I could possibly pull together. We did ten volumes in all, each of them well over a hundred pages, and out of that came Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell, Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbe's Lost Girls, Tim Lucas' Throat Sprockets, Charles Burns' story in Taboo #1, Teen Plague, was one of the springboards for what became Black Hole, his graphic novel. A lot of work emerged from Taboo. I'm really proud of those.

The thing I'm happiest with though, is Tyrant. That's the one thing I would like to get back to. I feel like with Swamp Thing and Taboo, I did what I wanted to do. I feel no need to revisit either of those ever again. But I would love to get back to work on Tyrant and find a way to take that to the next stage. And hopefully, if I've got enough time on the earth, and if there's a market for it, I'll be able to find a way to do it.

How did you first get involved with the Center for Cartoon Studies?

James Sturm and I had been in touch via the mail, off and on over the years, late 90s and between 2000 and 2005. In 2004, 2005, James got a hold of me and said that he was thinking about starting a cartooning school in White River Junction, VT. And you could have knocked me over with a feather. I at the time had shifted gears. I was the co-manager and buyer at video super-store in southern Vermont, First Run Video, and that was my bread and butter. I continued writing and drawing. I illustrated a book a year for the horror market and I was very happy as a writer for magazines and a number books that I solo-authored and co-authored.

But I had gotten out of comics, and when James got a hold of me he was putting feelers out to see who he might want to bring in as the core faculty for the Center for Cartoon Studies. And he invited me up to White River and I have very fond memories of eating at the local diner with James and walking around downtown White River Junction and pointing out the possible venues among the empty storefronts where the school might end up. At that point, James was working hard with the town. The co-founder of the school, Michelle Ollie, James' partner in this endeavor, was in the area and they we were doing all the nuts and bolts work of pulling together a board of directors, and financiers, and finances, and everything.

It was obvious to me that this was not a pipe dream, that he was very serious about pursuing this. He and I then met again at a comics' conference that was being hosted at Bennington College in the spring of 2005. I went with my son Daniel, who was in high school at that time. Daniel was starting to think about college. We had a great weekend at the seminar and James showed me the preliminary artwork that the Canadian cartoonist Seth had done for their first brochure and flyer. I shook hands with James on it, and I was teaching as part of the faculty from the first summer workshop in July of 2005. I was regular part of the school from the first week of classes in the fall of 2005 and I've been with the school ever since.

How could I resist? I was in the first ever class of the Joe Kubert School, first class to go through the school. And here's James asking em to participate in the other end of the classroom as a teacher at the first ever class of a brand new school. And in my home state!

It was a no-brainer. I had to do it.

I had left First Run Video early in 2005, ostensibly to work on a novel project that did not pan out. So I was available and the time was right. My kids had both graduated high school, so I didn't have the kinds of issue that I had when my kids were still in school. It would have been a tougher call at that point.

I've been doing it ever since. We've now graduated our third class this past may, and we're about to start a brand new group of freshman coming in. It's a two-year program and it's a terrific experience. There's nothing of I can think that would be more worthwhile then what I'm doing now. I'm fifty-four and it's very important to me to pass on what I've learned. And of course, as with any institution like this, I learn more from the students then I could possibly pass on to them. For me it's been really reinvigorating, creatively and personally.

What kind of things do you teach at the Center for Cartoon Studies?

My primary function there at the school is I teach the drawing workshop with the freshman students and I teach, and now co-teach, a comics history course, which we rather pretentiously call The Survey of The Drawn Story. But it is a comics history course, and I've been teaching both of those since the first semester.

With the seniors it's different ballgame. The seniors – it's a two-year program, so all we have are freshmen and seniors – the seniors have a tough row to hoe. Their year is based around their thesis project, so they really got to be self-motivated. They've really got to be as productive as they can, because it's all about them and their work that second year. It's not the same class structure that the first year had.

Do you assist students with their thesis projects?

The way it's set up is we have a light class schedule – we've got classes like Professional Practices that Alec Longstreth is teaching now, and I guest teach and lecture in that class as well, about aspects of contracts and copyrights – but by and large, my job is to work one on one with the students as they need me on their thesis projects.

Each of them gets to choose a thesis advisor or mentor, choose your word, and for that they tap the pool of professional cartoonists and working professionals in the book and comics industry that are out there. And some of the students have got to work with some tremendous creators who have turned out to be great mentors and advisors, people like Eddie Campbell, Chester Brown, I could go on and on. Stan Sakai, the creator of Yosagi Yomjimbo. And that's a double-edged sword. Some of the students get terrific results and forge very close student/mentor relations with their advisors. Other students get starstruck and are afraid to contact their advisors! But it's a great opportunity and they each make the best of it that they can.

Sometimes it doesn't work out because they choose an advisor who says yes, and they end up on a world tour to promote their new book and some of our best students ended up not having particularly productive relations with their advisors. But that's the exception, not the rule. By and large, this system has worked out very well.

So I am sort of the on-campus faculty advisor working with the thesis projects. I co-teach that year with Jason Lutes who's the creator of Berlin. Jason is amazing. The combination of our various levels of expertise gives a pretty rounded program to the students.

It's pretty amazing. I'm very glad to be a part of it. As native Vermonter, I love being part of an institution that's helping to reinvigorate a town like White River Junction.

Do you think something like the Center for Cartoon Studies could have emerged anywhere else?

Well, yeah, the Kubert School popped up outside of Vermont. They're very similar endeavors. They're different in a lot of ways – the Kubert School was much more geared towards mainstream comics and the Center for Cartoon Studies is really geared for the current generation of cartoonists who have grown up reading Maus and Fantagraphics and Love & Rockets and so on. There is a real difference between those orientations to comics. We have very few students whose life dream is to draw Batman. Most of them, their life dream is to tell their own story and draw their own comics. That is not to disparage the Kubert School at all.

It could have popped up anywhere, that's a good question. James Sturm said that winter in Vermont is really good cartooning weather and I've built a career out of that. Not being particularly in love with skiing, one of the best sports of winter is staying indoors and writing and drawing.

Do many of the students at the Center for Cartoon Studies go on to publish their thesis projects?

As a matter of fact, publishing their thesis project is part of their thesis project. They have to present it in some form as a published book.

The basement production lab at the Center for Cartoon Studies is geared so that completed, published books can be created down there and it's everything from photocopied mini-comics to more elaborate personal comics. Many of them have silk screened covers, die-cut covers – it's amazing what comes out of that production lab – right up to hand-bound books. I myself put together my first ever hand-bound book at a workshop that one of the students gave on hand making books this past spring and it was really cool! That's the kind of sharing that goes on.

With the thesis project, part of their requirement is to present it in some sort of finished, published form. That runs the gamut from mini-comics to very professionally bound books. Everything from black and white to hand silk-screened to full color. That's part of what they do.

Now, how many of these books are actually out there in the world that you can order online? I would say, probably about a quarter or third our of graduating classes so far have either published their thesis projects for public consumption or ultimately found a home for it in the book market and comic market. There is an online venue called www.iknowjoekimbel.com and it's the first online website that the students have set up to sell online their self-published work. And anyone who's interested can go there.

Other students like Joe Lambert and J. P. Hoover came in to the school already part of a collective and both Joe and J.P, who are terrific cartoonists and just great people, great guys, their work is available through www.onepercent.com, which is a collection of CDs and mini-comics and comics publishing. And Joe and J.P have their work up there.

And Joe is the cartoon editor for the CCS page that appears biweekly in Seven Days newspaper. Every two weeks, in the Burlington area, if you open up Seven Days, they have the color, full pager that's in there every other week. And Joe Lambert is the alumni who keeps that going.

Can you tell us about The Vermont Monster Guide you recently completed with Vermont author Joe Citro?

Joe and I are old friends. We've know each other, god, quite a number of years. He's one my best friends in the world, we're both native Vermonters, we both love weird stuff, and we really hit it off.

I think one of the first projects Joe and I did together – his last fiction novel was Deus-X, and it was originally published as a limited edition hardcover and I did the illustrations for Deus-X. Joe and I had a good time with that and we decided, well, let's see if we can come up with something to work on together every few years. And we did a map called Vermont's Haunts and that still hangs in a fair number of Vermont school libraries. Then we did the Vermont Ghost Guide with University Press of New England. We did that back in 2000. And the Vermont Ghost Guide was a little paperback of true Vermont ghost stories that I did illustrations for, and we prepared a map that appeared on the back of the book and we numbered each of the stories and put the corresponding number spots on the map so people could use it as kind of a little tour-guide of the state – if you wanted to check out some of the locations and some of the haunts.

And for years we wanted to follow it up with a monster guide. It seemed so natural. And the stars aligned properly last year and we sold University Press of New England on doing a larger format companion book, and that is the Vermont Monster Guide. I did a lot more illustrations for it. There's eighty illustrations in all in the book. Joe Came up with sixty-two monster stories and we just got out author's copies this week, yesterday as a matter of fact and we're very happy with the results. We worked on it all winter, finished the book in May. Some of the CCS students and alumni pitched in to help with things like scanning of the artwork for the book. Another member of the CCS community, my friend Cat Garza Jr. did the color and the digital production work for the wrap-around color cover and if I may say so, I think it's a pretty cool book.

Joe and I grew up loving these kinds of books. There were books like Strangely Enough! by C. B. Colby and Ivan T. Sanderson did books about true monsters and guys like John Keel, who passed away this past year - John Keel is best known for The Mothman Prophecies. Joe and I grew up loving those kinds of books about flying saucers and true monsters and ghosts and stuff and that's how we conceived and designed and executed the Vermont Monster Guide. We did it for the ten-year-old in us. Its the kind of book we would have loved.

And we knew we had found a good home for it when we brought the proposal up to the University Press of New England and our editor on the project, Richard Holt, brought the photocopies of the drawings that I did for the proposal home, and his son, his little son had taken them to bed that night. So we all knew that this was going to work. We had written it for all ages, this is for adults as well as kids, but we really wanted to fill it with really cool monsters and Vermont has a lot of really cool monsters.

You've done Vermont Haunts, and the Vermont Ghost Guide and now the Vermont Monster Guide - what is it about Vermont that makes it such a weird state?

That's a good question! What do you think?

Well, I had a friend who once told me that the thing about Vermont was that all the hills trapped things in....

That makes sense to me. During my traveling years, in my early to mid-twenties, I met my first wife out in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I had a lot of friends who, for some reason, all ended up in Santa Fe. I spent a lot of time out there, off and on, for two years. I always felt bare naked when I was out in New Mexico because the landscape – the sky just goes on forever! Here in Vermont, we kind of live in this bowl, we're kind of in this fishbowl. There's always a mountain range or a ridge or something to stop the sky. It feel likes a more aquarium-like environment in some ways. I think that, combined with the extremes of weather. We have really tough winters sometimes and that brings neighbors closer together and people help one another, but it also means that really awful stuff happens sometimes to people during the extreme weather of the winter months. I think the extremes of the season fuel weird stories and weird phenomena.

And these are really old woods. I've got a lot of friends and now students and colleagues who come from all over the world and all over the country. Guys from Colorado or gals from the state of Washington will say, “these aren't mountains! These are goosebumps!” Well, that's because these are older mountains than out west. These mountains have been eroded down and broken down by years years and centuries and millennia of glacier actions and erosion and it feels like old country around here.

Vermont also been really fertile soil for unusual human activity. Ranging from what became the founding of the Church of Latter-Day Saints and religious factions like that to sects that believe that the end of the world is right around the corner. Back in the 1700s they were talking like that. I think it's just fertile soil for a lot of odd stuff out here. Which is odd, because it terms of our natural history - I brought up my kids here in my home state, and part of it is, it's pretty safe around here. We don't have any truly venomous animals. There are not a lot of dangerous animals in Vermont. And yet, we have all these monsters that people see and talk about! Man, that's half the fun.

And they're not just crazy stories. Very credible people have seen some very odd things. One of the tough things about doing this book, as Joe pointed out to me earlier, is that unlike the Vermont Ghost Guide – when you hear ghost stories they tend to be very evocative. Ghost stories always imply some ancient event that's either forgotten, or somebody has uncovered what really happen. Monster stories tend to be: “I saw something really weird, and then it was gone.” Or “I saw something really weird, and then I ran away.” It's one or the other. There's not a lot of variety to the monster stories.

But people see things. There's the famous ones like Champ, there's a lot of sightings of what out west would have been called Bigfoot, big hairy men. And those date to the colonial era with Old Slippery Skin, which was either a bear or some kind of northeastern-state sasquatch, to the present day. I met someone on Saturday at a family gathering, they were having an outdoor barbecue and one of them asked what I was working on and I mentioned the monster guide and two people, husband and wife, immediately told me about some weird thing they had seen up in Dorset, Vermont, years ago. They both saw it. It was a big, hairy man, that got a clear look at it. These were credible people and they're no making money from this story. There's no reason for them to make up something like that. And they talked about it in a very pragmatic matter - “Yeah, we saw this weird thing and we could never figure out what it was. Can you put that in your book?”

What kind of music are you listening to right now?

I don't have an iPod or any such thing, but I've been spinning Ennio Morricone soundtrack CDs, Captain Beefheart, and Bruce Arnston's excellent EXISTO soundtrack CD this week while drawing and working on CCS chores.