DS Interview – Ben Snakepit talks his new book “Return to the Snakepit”

Ben Snakepit has been writing daily comics for quite a while now, trying to answer the question, “What did I do today?” Typically releasing a new volume every one to three years, Ben has released his tenth volume in his three-paneled daily comic with, Return to the Snakepit released through Microcosm Publishing.

This entry in the series sees Ben return to his hometown of Richmond, Virginia, due to a family emergency with his girlfriend, Karen, and their dog, Frankie. This particular batch of comics is special as Ben starts to embrace using an iPad to produce his strip, giving him the chance to experiment and take the comic to new places. We talked to Ben about his new book and his new band, Carnivorous Flower.

Dying Scene: I really enjoyed Return to the Snakepit and Snakepit’s Big Adventure.  They were mundane by nature, but there’s so much you can grab from those strips. How long have you been doing these comics?

Ben Snakepit: I first started them in the summer of 2000. We’re coming up on 25 years, it was July of 2000. I had the idea and started doing the comics, but I wasn’t being consistent. I was skipping days and kind of being lazy, and then when 2001 started, I dedicated and actually started doing them every single day.

I think you told me it was kind of inspired by Jim’s Journal.

Oh, yeah, definitely. I love Jim’s journal. And like one of the very, very early days of me having internet access like my roommate had a computer with a dial up modem and like you could get ten minutes of Google a day or whatever. One of the times I got on there to find out about Jim’s Journal. What is it all about? I found out that it was fictional, that it’s actually Scott Dikkers, from The Onion. When I realized that Jim wasn’t a real person, it kind of sucked, but then it was like a little light bulb. I’ll do that for real in my real life and that’s what I’ve been doing.

Did you read any comic strips growing up or was it just that one in particular that just kind of hit for you?

I loved Peanuts growing up, you know, that was the Holy Bible to me. I really liked Family Circus. Weirdly enough, I don’t know why. I think I’m the only person I’ve ever known that genuinely likes The Family Circus. I got into comic books when I was a teenager, like X-Men and stuff like that. Then I discovered comics like John Porcellino and James Kochalka.

Do you still read comics?

I haven’t gone to the comic book store and bought anything in a very long time.

Do you make time every day to do the comics or do you catch up after a few days? What’s the process?

When I first started, I tried to do it every single day. And I kind of fell off and would go back and catch up. That kind of bit me in the ass at one point. I can’t remember what year it was maybe 2013 or something. There’s one year where I got to the end of the year and realized I had missed a day.

The New Year’s Eve panel is always a full page, and I was like, wait a minute, why is there an extra comic here? And then, oh, shit, you know. In the last five years, I’m back to doing it every single day. It’s just easier. When you get behind, it’s really daunting to catch up. It’s a lot of work. It’s just easier to get it done every day. I usually do it first thing in the morning when I wake up.

Do you typically do a morning panel, an afternoon panel, and an evening panel?

No, not always, like, basically, I’ll draw the day before. Like, what’s going on now, I will draw in tomorrow morning’s comic. I give the whole day a chance to happen, because you never know something really awesome is going to happen at 11:59. Basically, the approach I take to it every day is I’m going to answer the question, “What did I do today?” I’m going to answer that question in three panels. It didn’t start off like that, but over time, it’s evolved into that. That’s kind of the formula that I like to stick to.

Do you miss doing the comics on pen and paper or are you just are you happy doing them all on the iPad?

I love the iPad. It was life-changing.  Like using pen and paper, it’s simple. There’s nothing wrong with it at all. But I find that there are so many times, I would go straight from pen to paper with no pencils, that if I messed up one line, the whole comic was ruined, and I had to work around it.

It did make for some really funny drawings, you know, and that was that was cool, but it was always frustrating to not be able to get it exactly how I wanted. With the iPad, I can do anything. And I don’t like it, erase it and do it again. It’s super easy and convenient. It took a lot of the shitty grunt work out of drawing and made me really love it. All day I’m drawing and doing all kinds of stuff. It’s really, really fun.

Does it allow you to experiment at all? 

Yeah, you’ll see a lot of weird stuff. I started throwing in clip art and weird effects. Just because I could, you know, and I’m really having fun with it. I’m pushing it even more this year. The next book will be even weirder, I think, I hope.

When the Simpsons went from the kind of thicker lines to the thinner lines, people feel like that feels different. Do you think that’s what’s going to happen going forward? 

Yeah, I think it’s going to feel different, but I think that’s good. I’m not trying to pretend I’m not drawing digitally. I won’t try to hide things. If I want to put a straight-up photograph in there, I will.

It’s a comic book, but I feel like it’s a zine before it’s a comic book. Zines, you have more freedom. You can Xerox stuff. You can put just text in. You can do whatever you want. I want to experiment more with that freedom in my comics, and less drawing the same stupid thing over and over again.

When do you have to have everything in by so you can release it by, you know, mid year?

Another reason that I like keeping up with it every day is when I know the book is about to end and that third year is coming up; in July I’ll start thinking of the cover and what it’s gonna look like. I’ll start working on it. So that the books are the same size every year, every time, it’s always three years. So, I just use the same templates and everything. I give myself a few months and on New Year’s Day, I draw my big full-panel, New Year’s Day strip. Then everything is already zipped up and ready to go. And I literally send everything to the publisher on January 1st.

You’ve moved a few times in the volumes that I’ve read anyway, and you always kind of jump into a new punk rock band. Are you in a band right now ?

I have a new band called Carnivorous Flower. The name comes from an album by the band J Church, a band I played in a long time ago. It’s a weird coincidence. I’m in a band with two good friends I met on tour. I met our bass player when she was living in Liverpool, England; my band played there, and we played together. I know our drummer from Portland, Oregon; we met through playing in bands.

When I moved back to Richmond, by pure coincidence, they were also living there, and the three of us immediately thought it was great. This is the most fun I’ve had in a band, and I’m really enjoying it.

Have you guys recorded anything yet?

We have an album coming out this summer on Dead Broke Records, and we will also play the Festival in Gainesville this year.

At one point in the book, it says you have done 2,000 pages of comics. I know you have done zines and daily comics. Do you also do fiction comics?

The only other kind of stuff I’ve done is that I used to do a regular comic in Razorcake magazine. I treated it like a Maximum Rocknroll column where I would just talk about whatever.  It would be like a list of bands I like or how to do something, like how to make a bong, or just stuff like that. I did that for a hundred issues of Razorcake.

I actually have a book out of just those Razorcake columns. It’s available from Silver Sprocket. Aside from that, I have a subscription tier to my Patreon, and every three months I do a quarterly zine that I print here in my bedroom. It has a few bonus comics in it. Someday, when I get enough of those, I’ll put them out in a book or something. A lot of them are just single stories. If I think about a funny childhood story, I will write just one page about that specific incident. It is still autobiographical. I don’t really do fiction at all.

Each day has a song, is that just what you’re listening to that day or do you just give a theme song to each day type of thing?

Sometimes, if there’s someone else in the room, I’ll say, “Hey, what’s today’s theme song?” They’ll tell me. It’s very, very, random and there’s no rules. A lot of songs repeat over and over. Like in Snakepit’s Big Adventure, there’s like a whole month where I listen to the same song every day for the entire month. I just have fun with it. It’s a stupid comic book; I try not to take it seriously at all and have fun with it. Actually, there are a few Snakepit fans that have made playlists. There’s one called “Snakepit Quarantine, 2020”.

I did a little special zine. That was the thing that happened during the pandemic. It’s a fun story that not a lot of people know about. I made a zine of just my pandemic comics that I’d started the day the pandemic started. Up until that time, six months or something, I sold it on my website. You could only buy it on the website and I used the money to fund a jigsaw puzzle. They’re long sold out, unfortunately. It was just really cool to do that. You know, that everyone in the pandemic was like, learn how to bake bread or like play the guitar or whatever. I made a puzzle.

Has anyone ever gotten upset over how they thought in an interaction went and it went completely different on the page?

Not quite like that. I’ve definitely had people not happy with me putting them in the comic. This was in the earlier days when I was kind of running more wild. Occasionally, I would put someone in there that didn’t want to be in there. I’d get in trouble for that. Since those early days I’ve always made it clear. If I’m hanging out with somebody and they’re not going to be cool with it or anything; I’ll let them know ahead of time, “Hey, is it okay if I draw this in the comic” The only exceptions being my coworkers. I don’t let anyone at work know about any of this.

 At one point you were getting frustrated with your boss and you’re like, I hate this shit.

Exactly. I’m not going to tell them about the book, although it has happened before by pure randomness, a coworker has been at a comic book convention where I was tabling and they come up and like, what is all of this? I’m like, Oh shit. You know, like, what are you going to do?

At my current job when the last book came out, I had just moved here to Richmond and the local weekly free weekly magazine did a little article about Snakepit. I had my picture in there and somebody at work saw it and they’re like, “What’s this comic book you do?” It just got real weird and kind of hoped they’re not wanting to talk about it or discuss it. Cause they never brought it up.

When I was in my punk band, I was not very cool with anybody in my office knowing I was in a punk band. I mean, we were also called Donkey Punch, so that didn’t really help. Then having to explain it to people’s moms, that’s not ever fun. I was seeing this girl and the mom was trying to get to know me. This girl had seen me play a couple of times before and the mom goes, “Oh, so I heard you’re in a band called ‘Rusty Punch.’” She mixed two of them up. Now, I have to explain what a rusty trombone is, which is worse than what I have to usually explain. I’m just like, I’m not explaining the other one. I’m in this contract for one.

I think I would’ve just made something up, you know, it’s a weird video game or something. You know what I mean? Just like make something up.

I tried, her daughter looked at me and went, “No, you did this.”

Damn, she held your feet to the fire.

I saw something online. Are you in Fugazi’s Instrument?

Yeah. I’m wearing a backwards baseball hat. I’m 20 years old and I’m talking about how I’m only at the show because it was free and I didn’t have anything better to do.

That was you? I just rewatched it a couple weeks back. Were you just not a fan at the time or just not a fan ever? 

I love Fugazi. I was just trying to be an asshole. I’ve heard stories that Ian McKaye has figured out who I am. A friend of mine was in Los Angeles at a talk. Ian McKaye was doing a talk for that other Fugazi movie that just came out. There was a Q and A somebody asked, “Oh, what about that kid from Instrument that like blah, blah, blah.” He was like, “That guy’s a popular zine writer now.” He figured out that’s who I am. 

He was a good sport about it. I was a total asshole. Then to further be an asshole, once I saw the movie and I wrote a letter to Dischord and was like, “Hey, I’m in the movie, can I have a free copy?” Ian sent me one with a little handwritten note. It was fucking awesome of him to do despite me being a jerk. He’s a good dude.

I never got to see them. They came out here at some point in the late nineties and I just missed them.

I saw them shit loads of times growing up. Richmond is just two hours from DC and they were really active when I was in high school. They would play at the Capitol all the time. I would go up there all the time. Probably seen them a dozen times in my life.

You can purchase Return to the Snakepit and other books from Ben Snakepit at his website, https://www.bensnakepit.com/