QUOTES
“The Sickest film I’ve seen all year. I loved it!” – Bill Plympton
"Blisteringly honest...harsh and hilarious...painfully effective...a pungent trip into sexual eccentricities...unforgettable" - Steve Puchalski, SHOCK CINEMA
"A joyfully twisted look into his fascination with masturbation, cross dressing, and every fluid/cavity the human body offers. Goopy Spasms should be sought out" - Chip Lamey, VIDEO CRYPT
"Trembles doesn't come off as some crazed agent provocateur, but a soft spoken man telling a series of amusing anecdotes about himself. The gross out bits are a set up to the jokes, not the punchline. So is it funny? Oh yeah." - Jeremy Knox, FILM THREAT
Check Out Trembles' Own MOTION PICTURE PURGATORY Strip For His film!
WHAT RENOWNED CARTOONISTS, FILMMAKERS & AUTHORS HAVE SAID ABOUT “HOW DID I GET SO ANAL” (THE COMIC “RICK TREMBLES' GOOPY SPASMS LIVE CARTOON SHOW” IS BASED ON) & OTHER COMICS BY RICK TREMBLES:
"Even more twisted & weird than me" -Robert Crumb
"Immediate impact" -Chester Brown, creator of YUMMY FUR, LOUIS RIEL
"Masterpiece" -Peter Bagge, creator of HATE, author of SPIDERMAN
"Liked your comic a lot!" -Daniel Clowes, creator of EIGHTBALL, GHOST WORLD
"Mighty good!" -Julie Doucet, creator of DIRTY PLOTTE
"Genius" -Darius James, author of NEGROPHOBIA and THAT'S BLAXPLOITATION
“Interesting style where the lines are delicate & the material is not. It’s quite effective & elicits an oddly ethereal quality to basic yearnings & quirks.” -George Kuchar
INTERVIEWS ABOUT “RICK TREMBLES' GOOPY SPASMS LIVE CARTOON SHOW”
Interview excerpts with Rick Trembles from Gravy Magazine (Rob Schacter, 1997) & Montreal Comix Jam Magazine (Maxim Douglas, 2003).GRAVY MAGAZINE…
Gravy: How do you feel about ROBERT CRUMB'S comments and his reaction to your work? (The Comics Journal #158 printed an interview with Crumb from a comix convention panel discussion where he was asked to name "revealing biographical cartoonists who (he doesn’t) like, who (he doesn’t) think do a good job." Crumb responded, "I think I told you about the Rick Trembles comic, didn't I? God, this thing is... I guess he's a guy from <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Canada who will reveal the most disgusting, horrifying sexual fixations & perversions that I've ever seen in my life! I've never seen anything so disgusting. Interesting, but bleeeeechhhh! You couldn't read much of it"). To me, other than being actually published in Crumb’s WEIRDO MAGAZINE, this was your most illustrious moment. When you read his response, did you think that he was missing the point?
Rick: I think Crumb knew more or less where I was coming from.
Gravy: Did you ever use his comments for self-promotion, like "I disgusted ROBERT CRUMB"? It must have made you feel like king of the castle in terms of trying to "astonish" other local cartoonists.
Rick: I tried to milk that quote dry. He hasn't commented on stuff I've sent him since. I was worried for a while that using his quote to generate interest might've peeved him because his disgust is telling of his threshold. Crumb seems to draw the line at anuses. As polymorphously perverse as his work is reputed to be, I've never seen butt-fucking dealt with in his comix.
Gravy: You think Crumb is repressed in terms of talking about bums 'n anal sex?
Rick: I don't really know what Crumb thinks of anal sex cuz, like I said, he's never addressed it. Maybe it's a touchy topic for him... therefore, would I ever like to see him tackle it. Maybe he was feigning repulsion to goad me into revealing more.
Gravy: Yikes! What are you holding back?
Rick: I'm looking for new things worth holding back to reveal. I might have to invent new ones from scratch. Can anyone help me? (Laughter)
Gravy: You must get tired of trying to capitalize on shock value?
Rick: There are a lot more aspects to my work than the adventures of my stinky-assed poop-chute but for some reason that's what's on the tips of everybody's tongues, so I ain't complaining. Beggars can't be choosers.
Gravy: Yeah, back to the quote... I assume Crumb was talking about "HOW DID I GET SO ANAL?"
Rick: Me too.
Gravy: Describe that strip a bit...
Rick: It's about all kinds of holes and what might've been in there before me. Retitling it "EAT SHIT AND GO FUCK YOURSELF" would be faithful to the story.
Gravy: I find it a struggle to come up with acceptable questions for it cuz I don't wanna sound like a prude, or condescending... Do you ever find yourself wondering about the ramifications that stories like "HOW DID I GET SO ANAL" might have on some people's ability to relate to you in person?
Rick: Whoever I ramify deserves to be ramified, including myself.
Gravy: When I think about it, it makes sense that it's the one piece you've done that's been commented on & even "academically analyzed" (a friend of Rick's, Concordia University English professor MARCIE FRANK, published a heavy-duty intellectual analysis of Rick's story & some work by JULIE DOUCET in Duke University Press' Queer Diasporas). It's so intensely personal that there's an alienating effect. At the end of the strip you ask the reader a question: "Should I be put out of my misery, yes or no?" To me that sounds like guilt, so that the strip loses some of its self-assertiveness.
Rick: The only guilt depicted in "HOW DID I GET SO ANAL" is from not living up to people's sex-pectations. What instigated the strip were the incredibly satisfying waking fantasies I was having about pretty girls I knew squatting over my face in order to produce hot, healthy turds into my gaping mouth. I thought it was a curious and genuine enough impulse to investigate. I had time on my hands & wanted to get a long overdue book out. I was sick of the glut of smug, weak, auto-bio comix being done by others & attempted to outdo them with what were my own mundane concerns.
Gravy: So what did you mean by the multiple choice question?
Rick: The interactive aspect of the ending was that I was offering anyone to alter my life at that moment cuz I wasn't capable on my own as the strip illustrates. Asking if I should be put out of my misery was a pun that didn't necessarily mean the firing squad; I was hoping more that it meant some handsome woman's asshole might one day be aimed squarely at my mouth ready to unload a long, solid hunka happiness into me to solve the misery. I was miserable with my unreasonable cravings.
Gravy: I'm confused. Did you want to portray the coprophagia as a manifestation of self-hatred or just an elaborate scatological-sexual fantasy?
Rick: I didn't think it was self-degradation cuz I was too submerged in my fantasies & welcomed the massive hard-ons I got out of them. I was motivated by curiosity.
Gravy: Without really having a sense of why this was going on?
Rick: The reasons for my brush with coprophilic fantasies I haven't fully figured out myself, which is why I drew the comic in the first place.
Gravy: What about MARCIE FRANK'S homo-erotic theory?
Rick: Bless her butt for giving a shit, but other stories in the same book could've backed that argument better, like the one where I have a wet dream sucking my own cock for instance. What she called the "shit penis" that I depicted myself sucking on in "ANAL" didn't come out of any "sublimated desire" to cram cock down my throat. It had nothing to do with anyone else's cock but mine & even that one was inconsequential. The phallic hardness of the turd depicted in my strip was due both to my limited drawing abilities & the fact that I was trying to inject humor into a potentially morbid proposition in an attempt to dilute its impact and make it more realistically feasible. As far as watching myself shove things up my ass through a mirror in drag is concerned, sensory deprivation led me to produce what I viewed of as my own miniature low-budget hard-core porn movie close-ups to jerk off to with the added realistic touches of stinky fecal matter and abdominal cramps.
Gravy: And then what?
Rick: Once it served its purpose I’d get intensely depressed as I always do after jerking off alone & slowly clean up my mess & sulk away until it was time to whack off again.
Gravy: So you weren't actually filming yourself, but just pretending it was porn?
Rick: Who wants to leave evidence like that behind? It's unsanitary!
Gravy: When did you start turning your strips into slide-shows? How do people respond to you personally after performing "GOOPY SPASMS"? (The slide-show version of "ANAL," beautifully enhanced with color & some incidental drawings).
Rick: Only people who like it come up to me & tell me. Right after one of the first times I ever did the slide-show version I lingered around the tiny restaurant it took place in, trying to size up audience response, & I noticed a well-lit couple sitting close to the stage immersing themselves in smooches, oblivious to anything else. I like to think they went home and sniffed each other's butts as a result of my efforts.
MONTREAL COMIX JAM MAGAZINE…
MAXIM: For the last year you've been working on an animated short film, can you tell us about it?
TREMBLES: I received a small grant a few years ago from the “Canada Council for the Arts” to complete an ambitious animation/live-action version of one of my biographical comix, which I also showed around town as a slide-show for a while. I'm still working on it & hope to have a rough-cut completed by this year. It started off as an old-school 16MM traditional cel-animation/optical-printer SPFX project, both disciplines I've actually had academic training in (although I'd been dabbling in it on my own since years before). But by the time funding arrived, digital technologies had practically rendered both these disciplines obsolete (as far as practicality's concerned in a low-budget framework). Materials for cel-animation for instance are now much scarcer & at best prohibitively more expensive than when I originally submitted my proposal. As a result I've had to slowly adapt all the work I'd already done to the computer (when I was a complete newbie to computers). I dropped the ball from time to time because the original money's long gone & I keep getting distracted trying to find ways to pay for such trivial things as utilities, rent & food. The topics explored guarantee that once completed & thrust upon the world I'll most likely never find mainstream work again (not that I ever had much luck in the first place) so the only real monetary incentive for me to finish this project would be that the Council will probably never even look at another grant proposal of mine until I do. Non-monetary incentive is that I hate all-talk-no-action bullshit-artists who never finish what they start, so I don't wanna become my own worst enemy. Further complicating things is the specter of death haunting the work. A key player in this biography died a scandalous death not long ago, making drawing that particular incarnation in the sexually compromising manner the story calls for feel a tad desecrating. It's much more fun to desecrate living beings. Not to mention the fact that the initial idea's over ten years old. I couldn't have asked for a more miserable situation to be in but the only way to get out of this is to finish what I started even if it kills me.
MAXIM: Yikes, why not rework the remaining portion of the project to better reflect you current needs? Are you your art's god or is it yours?
TREMBLES: It's biographical so it's written in stone. I want to see this through to the end & prove my naysayers wrong; I CAN bite off more than I can chew.
MAXIM: But aren't you the artist? It's your world, your reality, can't you do with it anything you want. Make it anything you want?
TREMBLES: Well, I already decided long ago how it's supposed to turn out. It's my side of a story that had other people's skewed versions floating around & I wanted the last word, posthumously or not. Also, animation entails mostly reproductions that have to be rigidly abided by & from then on it's all process of elimination 'til it's done. Storyboards too, they follow prerecorded dialog. I can't go back & change the dialog; that would cost money. I can't subtract sections of it, because the story has a proven pace from the original comic-strip version that builds to a climax. Like I said, it's written in stone.
