John Pound is an illustrator artist based in California, probably best known as the creator of Garbage Pail Kids trading cards. More recently he has been experimenting with software to produce randomly generated comics and animations and just a few months ago even designed a series of t-shirts for Stüssy. Currently he has work in The BLAB! Show at Copro Gallery in Santa Monica, California.

As a child, Garbage Pail Kids was the first place I ever saw paintings of vomit, blood and gangrenous, mutilated flesh…. Do you remember your first encounter with the grotesque, abject aspect of cartoon characters?

Underground comix in the early seventies. Before that, there was MAD magazine and the early MAD comics. I found something really unpleasant yet powerful in those things – and entertaining too. Even old Warner Brothers animated cartoons (originally made for theaters) seemed like they were pushing that edge, with the violence and rebelliousness.

How did the cut-up technique and John Cage’s use of chance in composition influence you?

There’s a nice surprise factor you get by combining things, images, words, etc. You don’t get that by just showing one thing, like a portrait. People start making up ideas about what has been combined, to make sense out of it. Good art leaves room for the viewer to bring their own meanings, on more than one level. As opposed to illustration-type art, where only one meaning is found and the work is quickly exhausted, I like John Cage’s ideas. His work has a nice feel. His writings are harder to read. Maybe I’m more into visuals than music and poetry.

Someone wrote about his work at a printmaking place, and I noticed Cage went to great lengths to set up and control what would happen randomly. And that’s what I find I have to do too, with randomness. A lot of the randomly generated results are not too interesting, but some are really rewarding.

You started working on computer-generated comics in the early nineties. Did you write the software first, or did earlier experiments with automatic drawing/writing lead you to develop the software?

It grew from earlier experiments. I bought my first computer, an Amiga, in 1986, and started dabbling with programming in BASIC, to see what it could do.  That work was mostly endless abstract designs and color patterns. But one project was a little program that combined words to generate lists of ideas for Garbage Pail Kids. They were fun, and mostly bizarre nonsense. I got one useable idea for an actual Garbage Pail Kids painting from using that program.

During this time I became fascinated by Harold Cohen’s AARON computer drawing program, thanks to his very articulate writings on his own work. He was using programming to deal with issues of drawing and painting from a painter’s viewpoint, not a programmer’s. He had it drawing crude child-like forms based on primitive rock drawings. Later he added the ability to draw figures and scenes.

As a cartoonist, I began wondering what a computer program could do for cartooning. Not just as a mindless drawing tool, but to help with making creative decisions and surprising me. Over the next few years I was jotting ideas in my sketchbooks for how you could make programs to draw simple figures and forms. Along the way I realized that if you combined random sentences in word balloons with random cartoon drawings, put them in panels, and maybe have a horizon or background forms, you would have a little nonsense comic strip. You could make a huge amount of them if you wanted. It didn’t seem like anything the world needed, but maybe because it was such a wrong-headed idea I grew curious to see what would happen, what it would look like.

I took the plunge and bought a PostScript laser printer and a couple books on PostScript. Then I had to find out how to get some lines on paper, anything that looked like a comic. What helped was seeing some naive-style cartoons by Mark Beyer. I realized that the more primitive the drawing methods I used, the easier it would be to draw by programming. And I saw a charm and lightness in naive drawings that was quickly leaving the computer graphics world, as most artists moved toward realism and 3D rendering, which can look suffocating.

By late 1992, things came together in a few little test programs. One program for getting random sentences on the page, one program for drawing a minimal cartoon figure with varied poses. (No hands or feet, just tube-like arms and legs.) Then I combined them in a grid of panels, with a title box over it, and there it was, a nonsense comic page [for examples see Pound's website – ed.].

A year later I started doing a monthly comic strip in local free entertainment newspaper. That gave me more practice and a chance to try a few ideas, and see what resembled comics. I found I just loved the idea of making art by programming, using random choices. I didn’t care a lot about the stories or jokes or characters in the comics. I was more interested in the creative process, the ideas, the systems, and the designs, than in whether the comics were entertaining or popular. I liked the unexpected combinations and the graphic clarity.

I played with these comics and cartoon designs in black and white for a couple years. I re-wrote the program to allow multiple-pages, and I made a little zine of experimental comic pages and designs, but I never published it, as the work was unfinished. Then I got side-tracked with some non-computer projects.

Meanwhile, I saw ideas everywhere for things I could do random versions of. Ideas for shapes, figures, scenes, posters, books, etc. I have a notebook full of these ideas. I will probably never have enough time to do them all. Of course some are more promising than others.

In 2002, I got back into the programming again, and found out how to use color. A local printer had a nice large format color printer that I wanted to try, so I made some new pieces poster-size, and entered a few art shows with them. People liked them.

Would your ideal comic-generating software be a completely autonomous system?

I have fantasies of that. Like a website generating endless random comic strips, or a TV station making 24-hour randomly-generated cartoon animations with sounds. Or maybe a large video wall installation of slowly animated cartoon landscape designs. Such a system would probably work better as a background artwork, like wallpaper or ambient music or a screensaver, instead of something to give our full attention to, like watching a movie.

I have a little program I call LOOP that I showed in a couple gallery group shows, which draws endless random variations and combinations of a few figures and scenes. It’s hypnotic to watch. It runs within another program on older Macs. I started re-doing it in Flash Actionscript, but it’s not done yet. Other projects have been more urgent.

But I think that viewers get used to everything – at least I do. So even with an autonomous system that was random and non-repeating, over time the patterns and images would start to feel similar, and the novelty would fade. I find that to keep me interested, each new project or idea requires the program to be updated, with new forms, new designs, new ways to combine things. With each new piece, I like to find a fresh “organizing idea”, so it feels new to me.

Has modernist and contemporary art/music, as opposed to mass media, always had an influence on your work?

They were probably less of an influence than mass media, at least in my younger years. As a kid, I was into cartoons, Disneyland, monsters, comics, and a little bit of horror and science-fiction, until college. Then art classes and friends introduced me to experimental music and art. But a lot of that went through my brain, instead of going directly to my heart, so a lot of it had little emotional weight.

For reasons that elude me, a few things stuck, like Brian Eno’s early solo work, both the crazy stuff and the ambient stuff. Maybe, again, it’s because he was so articulate about what he was doing. I’ve listened to a few old taped interviews he did more times than I can count. I like Eno’s ideas of making complex music (or art) by combining a few simple parts. I like that idea more than the actual music even.

I see a similarity between the computer-generated comics and Garbage Pail Kids. In both of them there’s this joke, showing a something basically wholesome like a comic strip or a doll repeatedly transformed into this totally irrational thing. Do you see a kind of continuity in your projects? Is there a similar satirical, critical voice at work in all your work or is each new project a complete and separate thing?

Maybe there’s a thread of subversiveness, rebelliousness, or humor, but I take each thing, each new project, as pretty separate – like I’m solving a new problem and what I’ve done before may not even be relevant to the new problem. Over time I acquire a certain amount of craft, like how to draw or paint, but each piece has to be felt and considered fully.

One of my favourite  stories about Frank Zappa is one where he says he got into music as a kid after he heard a hi-fi salesman using an Edgard Varese record for an in store demonstration of  the speakers. Was there a specific situation where you became aware of art’s potential for experimental thought or play?

I love that Zappa story.  Much earlier, when I was about 14, I saw a comic strip on a newspaper page crumpled in the gutter. The paper was from a nearby high school where they put out a school paper every so often. When I saw that simple little comic, I thought, “That’s what I want to do!”  So I took the journalism class and started doing comics and cartoons. I loved seeing them printed and seen by everyone. And I loved playing with a mass media form, like comics. The possibilities seemed endless. Also at this time underground comix were coming out, which were heavy into experimentation, in all directions.

Years later, I found that same sense of endless possibilities when I started playing around with random comics programming. Ideas would pop up everywhere. Like I’d found a world that hadn’t been explored yet. Of course the trick is to get some of those possibilities down on paper and out into the world.