You won’t come out of Rick Parker’s new graphic novel memoir Drafted thinking “Cool, time to join the army.” But there is a good chance the Abrams ComicArts book will sell you on the transformative power of art.
“Art has always been an escape for me, going back to my childhood,” Parker told Comic Book Club over email. “But while in the Army, I wanted to use art to show the people I served with what I was good at.”
The new book takes the Beavis & Butthead comic artist to a much more serious place, remembering his time getting drafted into the US army. It’s an unflinching portrayal of a very difficult training regimen, full of conflicting feelings fighting for the United States. But throughout, Parker hung his hat on his ability to use art to escape — and help others escape, as well.
To find out more about the book, read on.
Comic Book Club: Something that I took as a running theme through your book is how you used art to escape a very tough situation… I’d love to hear you talk about that a bit.
Rick Parker: Art has always been an escape for me, going back to my childhood. But while in the Army, I wanted to use art to show the people I served with what I was good at.
Stepping back, I’m always curious when you’re putting together a memoir like this, how did you “research” it – assuming you don’t have perfect recall.
Many of the incidents depicted in the book struck me at the time as remarkable and I’ve replayed them over and over in my head a thousand times. I finally got around to putting them down in words beginning in 2014 and pictures in 2017. It took me around five years to complete this project. Not counting the years 2015–2016, during which I obsessively practiced drawing the human figure a thousand times.
You’ve had a pretty prolific career doing Beavis & Butthead, among other things. Why was now the right time for Drafted?
From 2009 to 2013, I did all the art for seven MAD magazine-style 50-page full-color parodies in which I made surprisingly little money considering the amount of work involved. I thought to myself, “Well, if I’m not going to make any money drawing other people’s stories, I’d rather not make any money drawing my own stories.” I didn’t become an artist because I wanted to make money, but at some point one has to face reality. While I have collaborated with some excellent writers, over my nearly fifty years in comics, I have been much happier doing my own work.
You do a lot to center the other “characters” in your book and give them inner lives as well… How much vetting did you do with people in your life at that time?
Most people depicted in the book are either dead or unreachable, so I didn’t talk to them, even if I could have reached them. I have a few people I’ve met through the Internet whom I consulted with.
Were there any moments or scenes that you found particularly difficult to return to?
The most painful and difficult things were the pages with my parents and grandmother. When you’re working on a project like this, you leave reality for hours at a time and enter the world of your imagination, and the people you encounter become very real to you when you’re depicting them. That was the most difficult part.
On the flip side, what was it like putting the finishing touches on this? Did it provide some closure for the experience, or will being drafted always be with you?
At the time I was living through this, I often thought, “This is unbelievable. I’m going to have to TELL someone about this, or write a BOOK about it someday.” Little did I know at the time that it would take me over fifty years and it would be a comic book.
Drafted is now available in bookstores everywhere from Abrams ComicArts.
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