jonathan bennett: I started working on my first comic stories. I made a couple short ones that have since been thrown away and were never published. Then I went to MoCCA [in the summer of 2002] and was introduced to so many more minicomics and other books and stuff like that; I didn't have a table, I just wandered around at that one. But I brought my first Esoteric Tales to that.

gary groth: Because you were something of a designer and because you studied printmaking, you could publish your own comic.

From sketchbook

I can't get anything done without a deadline, so that worked, miraculously. I just started using all my free time, I got out of music, stopped being in band and stuff. My last band broke up badly, and I just put all my creative energies into comics instead.

gg: There are only two issues of Esoteric.

jb: Yeah, pretty much; there's also those two really small minicomics that are sort of Esoteric Tales also, they're just smaller.

gg: They're just really really esoteric tales.

jb: Those are also self-contained short stories, whereas Esoteric Tales is more of a couple of stories in each book. It took a lot longer to produce. I would do those little miniature books in like two weeks, and Esoteric Tales, those would take me forever to do because I was just slowly working on random comics and didn't know what I was doing. Eventually, when a comics convention would come up, then I would say, "Oh, I better start finding stuff I can print."

So I didn't really have a plan of what would be in it until I found out there was a comics show coming up and that I have to fill up 16 pages.

gg: It seems like those first two issues were a learning experience; I can kind of see where you're learning how to develop an inking technique, for example.

Observational painting

gg: There seems to be a real break between Esoteric Tales and all the work you've done in MOME — the first story you did in MOME is not dissimilar stylistically to the fourth story you've done in MOME. there's a stylistic coherency to all the stuff you did in MOME which is quite different from what you did in Esoteric Tales. Was that shift a conscious decision or a gradual evolution that looks abrupt?

jb: I guess you could call it a conscious decision, it was more of a...

gg: A very deliberate refinement?

jb: It was just fear; I was afraid, I had never been published before by anyone, so when you guys contacted me about it, I just freaked out and I didn't feel like anything I had printed to date was good enough for a real publisher to have published. I was already very critical of all that stuff, even though it was only a couple of years old. I just made myself work extra hard at trying to make everything better. I was just really freaked out by the whole opportunity that you guys had given me. [Groth laughs.] I felt a tremendous amount of pressure.