Everett S. Glenn is our new Comic Artist in Residence. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio and now based in Vienna, via a stint in New York City, the American cartoonist creates offbeat, morally bankrupt worlds: featuring high-speed car chases, daring heists, and gun-wielding crows. To celebrate the launch of Un Smooth, a new recurring story made for Huck, we sat down with the enigmatic artist to find out what really makes him tick.
Text: Fabrizio Festa – Photography: Andrea Siegl
What first drew you to comics? When I was very young, like seven, I was in a library and found Robert Crumb’s Complete Crumb anthology. When I saw that, I just fell in love with comics. I had never seen anything like that before… all this adult material, the weird animal creatures, the wild artwork – it blew my young mind.
The funny thing is, my birth mum though the cartoons were regular [children’s] cartoons, and got me all of them. It was the best mistake a parent could ever make. She thought it was like Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
How did you end up where you are today? I’m from Cleveland, Ohio. I’m from the ghetto, but I ended up making my way to an art school. When I was 18, a buddy of mine was moving to NYC, so I helped by driving with him. And I never came back. I stayed in New York until I was about 26, then I moved around. After that, I met someone and decided to come to Vienna to be with her – that was around six years ago. But I have been working steadily trying to be a cartoonist from the age of 18.
What’s your process when you’re writing stories?
I don’t have a very strong process. When I write it’s mostly chaos. I take a year of just making sketches, or what I would call poems: little vignettes where I draw whatever I feel – a panel, or a page, or a chapter, about something that I’m feeling at the moment – and it’s mostly something to do with my life, something journalistic or autobiographical. I’ll always change the characters to be more fictional than me. But, for instance, if I’m going through something, maybe I’ll have one of my characters go through something similar. I’m debating whether I’m gonna keep doing that or not.
You have a very particular style of storytelling. Can you tell us more about it? My characters have become a recurring cast. Now that I’m starting to analyse what I’m drawing and who the people are, I see that I’ve basically spliced my own personality up into different people, different characters. Every recurring character I draw is a part of me. That came about because I was drawi
