Owen Kline Turns the Funny Pages

When it comes to the issue of obsessive collecting, and its resulting culture of snobbery and one-upmanship, there's a word that director Owen Kline uses often: "Funny."

In A24's Funny Pages (read our review here), the particular subject is comic collecting, and that's a medium clearly dear to Kline's heart. From an early age, he loved caricatures and cartoons, "how to draw googly-eyed whacky-faced people, and transitioning that into trying to draw comic strips in the newspapers - that was what I wanted to do, that was my obsession."

Eventually he transitioned to reading comics which, like for most kids, meant superhero comics. While there were a few creators whose work he loved (Jack Kirby, Mike Mignola, Steve Ditko, Wally Wood, Alex Toth, and Jim Starlin all made his list), he said, "I liked the artwork, but I couldn't get into the stories, and didn't connect to the stories as much as Peter Bagge's Hate or Daniel Clowes' Eightball."

It was the final issue of the critically-lauded Eightball (#23, June 2004, containing the Harvey Award-winning story, The Death-Ray), that really got Kline into underground comics, "and I just worked my way backwards with the back issues, and read all the trade paperbacks of Clowes and Peter Bagge and the Hernandez brothers. Indie comics, I connected with a little bit more, because it's just one creator connecting with one reader. ... That specific connection, and that brain hookup that is a different one from the interstice between screen and audience."

In Funny Pages, the connection is more immediate, as a fresh-out-of-high-school obnoxious underground comic snob, Robert (Daniel Zolghadri), meets up with Wallace (Matthew Maher), a former bottom-of-the-heap color separator for Image Comics, "and finds some kind of perverse outsider fascination with this guy's colors."

For comic fans, there's an immediate in-joke: Image, founded, in 1992, was supposed to be a radical alternative to the superhero comics of the Big Two (Marvel and DC), but was still churning out superhero comics - all the while, actual alternative comics from publishers like Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly were selling a fraction of the copies.

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Austin Chronicle: I have to ask, why Image?

Owen Kline: I thought it would be funny in some regard that Wallace was an Image veteran. Funny to me for many reasons, one being that the foundation of Image happened because all these artists employed by the majors decided to break off and say, "Hey, we can make our own company," and cared about creator rights. It's especially twisted that Wallace is a casualty in some regard of the mill that was created by independent artists - independent superhero artists.

AC: I'll admit, there's a corner of my house that is probably structurally unsound due to my Mike Mignola obsession ...

OK: The Amazing Screw-On Head! That's the one for me. I bought that when it came out. I was so excited and still hold that one in high regard. Do you have the Hellboy Ouija board that talks?

AC: That's one of the few Hellboy things I don't have.

OK: I'd be a little freaked out to use that. Ouija boards are already scary, I don't need Hell incorporated in any way with my Ouija board.

AC: There's an understanding of comic culture of the era in here, like the Beanworld references.

OK: It's also just funny to say, so it's a reference that works even if you don't know what it is. Choosing those fill-in-the-blank moments, you try to install personality. It's funny to think about getting to choose a character and what they're reading, what their t-shirt says and what that says about them, what they're reading says about them.

I love those details of retail store movies. There are a lot of types - it's like people and their dogs, and when they look like their dogs. There's just a lot of types in retail stores, and I worked in record stores, and a video store, and you just pick up on certain archetypes that are interesting, that are just strong characters. Experiencing a relationship across a counter from someone and taking in a person's intellectual and entertainment diet is kind of a awkwardly intimate relationship. You don't know how either person feels about each other - you're a clerk and they're a renter or a buyer.

AC: And those kind of comics, a big part of it was the challenge of actually hunting down back issues. I remember the birth of the trade paperback, and how radical it was that you could get all 12 issues of Watchmen, and now everything is collected and everything is on Nook or Comixology.

OK: As a collector, there is an inherent obnoxious pleasure in thumbing through a cultural artefact. This sat in some stinky head shop and was probably bought by a hippy, it's a little bit ratty, and you see somebody bookmarked a page in a Freak Brothers comic, or dogeared something that reminded them of their friend. That aspect of underground comics, they were these certain kind of records - or freako toy collectors, or anything else that has a certain kind of cultural connoisseurship and elitism.

In film, film collectors are really greedy, funny people. People who collect film prints and trade and buy, prying through other people's collections, beg for things and are petty, get in these dramatic, hilarious fights - all this stuff happens over private Facebook groups in 2022. The sort of character dynamics that play out in these things are really entertaining to follow if you find whacked-out, bitter collectors fighting over some pre-code movie interesting.

AC: The kind of collector who argues whether it's better to have the original title card, or a print where three different title cards got spliced in on the drive-in circuit.

OK: Or yelling about some Blu-ray company who recolored something, complaining because "That's not true to the Technicolor!" People's gripes are so hilarious. Plenty of times they're merited, but when emotions come into anything, it's funny.

AC: A lot of underground artists, especially after Robert Crum, leaned into the physical grotesquery of characters. You capture that with a murderers' row of physically distinctive actors, and that can be complicated, using people where you look at them and go, "Well, they're sweaty," or, "They have a cleft lip," "They have wild hair," these aspects that key into that aesthetic, but you don't want to go, "Come down and look at the freak."

OK: I can tell you, very easily, that the process is very collaborative. There's no one in the movie who steps into it and doesn't know how they're being used. Everybody's self-aware and funny. It's just a variety of people.

Even down to the Santa Claus, sitting on the steps. That guy (Peter Lucibello) studied with (American Theater Hall of Fame inductee) Uta Hagen. He's a really, really funny guy, and I know him from (talk show host) Joe Franklin's office, he was Joe Franklin's assistant. We just talked about what this Santa Claus's day was, and how he's relating to the Wallace character, and he came up with some really funny lines on the fly.

He is telling a real story about pissing on the steps. The one time he got arrested, he was pissing in a cup, and the police came, and they threw him against a wall, and it was terrible then, but now he laughs about it. And I tell him, "Tell it like it's sad," but we were cracking up every take. It infuses the movie with real character and personality, in a way.

Even Michael (Townsend Wright), the sweaty guy. He's just a brilliant theatre actor, and he came in and was fearless about playing this untethered man in all his rage and bitterness, and how these things would manifest in this kid who would see him in this very particular way. It was really interesting to see this character and really interpret his logic.

I really tried to create an internal logic around all the characters and their actions. Even if they're not apparent to the audience, I nailed them down, respectively, with each actor. We tried to create a reality to those things, and we were caricaturing certain aspects to enhance things. I'm not making fun of anyone for sweating - there's not a joke to that. It's an insane detail that these guys live in a boiler room. The fact that they don't seem to mind it is where the humor comes from.

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Funny Pages is in theatres now. Read our review and find showtimes here.