ENTER THE LAMEZONE
an interview with Cate Wurtz
Cate Wurtz, pseudonymously known online as Lamezone, is a prolific cartoonist, though to call her one feels inadequate. While the vast majority of her output falls under the domain of webcomics, her stylistic trend is to mix and match media, creating a collage of photography, digital art, faux-broken html files, and even entire ambient soundtracks for her work. Cate is a multimedia artist wrapped in a comics writer, and a damn talented one at that. Her work spans over half a decade, from her earlier, somewhat simplier pieces like the wet dream fairy tale ‘Asscastle’ and the rude notebook scrawlings of ‘Anarchy Anarchy Anarchy’, to her newer works, including the kaleidoscopic narratives of ‘Lamezine 001’ & ‘Lamezine 002’ or its tongue-in-cheek horror sitcom “spin-off” series, ‘Crow Cillers’.
She’s also fucking hilarious, but absurdly modest, which is why I sat down to talk to her about her work, her inspiration, her goals, queerness in writing, and what, exactly, makes it all tick.
J Bearhat: So, starting with ‘Asscastle’, I think I remember you saying before that it’s something you kinda just, wrote as you went without really planning anything, right?
Cate Wurtz: Yeah, that’s generally how I write. ‘Asscastle’ especially though. I think the most I had worked out was that he’d manage to give a blowjob at the end. Super basic storytelling, he keeps trying to give the blowjob and then at the end he does it.
JB: I’m sure you’ve gotten this before, but I always found it interesting that for a stream-of-consciousness thing you kind of tapped into this like, general “sexual discovery” fairy tale.
Cate: I remember I had the idea of, like, “Disney” in my head doing it. That kind of like “grand episodic journey” thing but its just this guy sucking dick. I didn't really work towards that too hard or anything though, but like, stuff like that will just come through. I don’t think making it up as you go gets enough credit as a method. Like people will say that as an insult sometimes. If you just put out what’s in your head it’ll form something. I was new to being gay at that point so I guess that’s what was going on then, and it reflects that.
JB: It’s one of my favorite aspects of your writing. It gives it that edge of effortlessness but you end up tapping into a sort of like, unconscious, whether that be from a personal place or even just from a cultural place. Like, very common themes in “baby gay” sexual exploration, it just ends up feeling very real that all the hook-ups are anonymous disembodied limbs that Asscastle has mixed, even regrettable feelings about. All while he follows around this one guy who just treats them like an asshole but seems to know what he’s doing.
Cate: Yeah, I hadn’t even really thought about that until now actually. The disembodied limbs and dicks and everything makes sense though. I hadn’t had any relationships and until recently had just assumed I was asexual, and I was in this phase where I was like, I got that I was “queer” and that queer sexuality apparently involved like, blowjobs. The way to depict it just seemed to be having him sucking dicks that were coming out of his floor or through some jail bars or whatever, really detached. I’m just analyzing it myself retroactively now with that idea, the only gay guy I knew in Kansas was a very self-assured asshole too, so you might be onto something.
JB: I think another one of the things about your work that really stands out in that stream-of-consciousness style is how you just process culture. Not just using like, pop cultural icons and stuff but also formats, ideas, concepts, the development of culture, who makes it, you draw on so much and just manage to find these connections all over that it’s fascinating. ‘Lamezine’ blends in aspects of the sort of “creepypasta” internet horror story, but its also got aestheticized occultism, bland marketing, the horrifying banality of sitcoms, and it mixes that together all while like telling this kind of depressing story that’s about just a bunch of young adults and young kids.
Cate: I’ve always really loved when media pretends it’s other media. I love doing like, pages in a comic where it’s suddenly a fake Geocities page or cutting into the storyline with parts of some TV show. I used to read this website called Progressive Boink that did the whole 2000s “pop culture comedy articles” thing, and a huge influence from that was how far they’d go for a weird conceptual joke. I remember one of my favorites was this thing where they made a fake forum where the idea was the users were all the people on the cover of a Radioshack employee training guide, and the avatars were all just pictures from that, and they made up personalities for all these people. I liked the idea that the medium was part of the joke, in a like “look how much effort this took, look how complicated this is” kind of way. I like doing things like ‘The New Dead America’ where it’s like, a Twitter account I run that is kind of just a parody of out-of-touch Twitter marketing and stuff like that, but it’s also some kind of character within my universe that other characters have interacted with.
JB: Yeah, that old internet sensibility shows a lot in your work! A lot of your stuff only seems like it’d be possible within this like, online context, and I think that’s a lot of what gives it that hook. It’s so immediate and familiar because it’s stuff that saturates that context, and then to see it recreated in like, essentially a comic is incredible. Actually now I’m interested, what is some stuff that was like, really big for developing your like, humor, storytelling, character preferences, anything!
Cate: Well, that website was one of the biggest parts I can think of in influencing that whole “mixed media” sort of thing. ‘Powerpuff Girls’ and ‘Dexter’s Lab’ definitely had an impact on my visual style. They’d do so much with so little. The characters look really simple and the backgrounds are pretty minimal, but it worked because they knew how to use it. I remember struggling to understand why my simple drawings didn’t feel as fleshed out as those did. ‘The Simpsons’ and other animated sitcoms helped me figure out comedy pacing. I listened to a lot of ‘Simpsons’ DVD commentary. Every artist has to mention David Lynch in interviews because of some law, so there’s that too. Discovering him and Harmony Korine and other experimental filmmakers gave me confidence in trying out stuff that “‘didn’t make sense” in a traditional way. Early on my like mission statement to myself was to try and fuse like animated comedy and experimental film. I’m really into blurring lines between “low brow” and “high brow” in various ways. I think I’ve mentioned this various places several times before, but the cover of Autechre’s album ‘untiltled’ made a big impression on me. It made the idea of like, composition and balance really click for me, and there was something about all the blank space that felt so cocky and like confrontational. Around that time I was really into Radiohead and Stanely Donwood’s artwork was and still is a big deal to me. He’d do lots of stuff that looks like just shitty little scribbles and doodles and he’d present it as a finished work and that was really interesting to me. I’m really into stuff that goes for that like, naive looking kids-art kinda aesthetic for lack of better words? Rory Hayes shit. I haven’t really read any Rory Hayes but I flipped through ‘The Dolls Weekly’ in a store once and it’s a good example of what I’m talking about. I like “kid’s art horror”.
JB: Kid’s art horror is a fantastic name for your style.
Cate: I love experimental art but it can feel so like distant. Which works sometimes, but like, I’m into the idea of ‘Eraserhead’ but with a protagonist who isn’t a kind of blank slate. Like put realized sitcom characters into that environment. Put this abstract kind of vague horror into a kid’s show context.
JB: Low brow / high brow mixing is also super important and I’m really glad you’re someone who like, pushes that because I think it’s a way to make stuff legible as like, this is accessible, this is something you can relate to, it might be difficult to parse sometimes but that’s part of it.
Cate: Yeah! There needs to be more bridges between these things. I want to see more like general furries getting into avant-garde and more experimental filmmakers studying ‘Tails Gets Trolled’.
JB: I actually worry a lot about how the future is going with attempts to like, bring in “weird internet culture” in kind of an insincere manner. Stuff like that Oneohtrix Point Never music video where the director just stole stuff from Tumblr and Gurochan and only gave the vaguest attributions after getting called out on it, but just kind of made a slideshow of “edgy shit” with no like, context or relationship to it.
Cate: People need to drop that like distance between it, like weird internet culture is fascinating but in a genuine way.
JB: Yeah! I really want people to evolve past just seeing it as some separate entity of “weird” and not like. This shit is made by people in your hometown.
Cate: I feel like a lot of people I show like ‘Spring Breakers’ or whatever in that like, “look at this wacky bad movie” way too. People are willing to engage with weird art but only in the context of mocking it. The lines between what’s “good” and “bad” art keep getting looser to me, what I find bad is mostly what’s either got a shitty message or attitude and what’s boring. But like, stuff like kind of bizarre Deviantart galleries and whatever are a huge inspiration to me because it’s an unfiltered expression of someone communicating their ideas in a really unconventional way. I’m really into this one Arthur fan artist’s gallery I found because they have that sorta “naive” or whatever kind of art style and they’re communicating largely through an existing piece of pop culture, but you can still learn things about them and parts of themselves come through in that naturally. And while I can like, see how it could be funny in the context of “look at this weird internet art”, I think it’s totally legitimate and interesting work. Even if they maybe consider it just something they’re doing for fun or whatever. If it’s something weird enough to shock someone into a response of laughter, it must be something unique or interesting. Maybe they should question why it doesn’t count to them.
JB: I think for a lot of people, they only want things to be art and “good” if it makes them feel smart. Like instead of engaging with something on a level of enjoying it, it’s just “this movie makes me feel smart for getting it”.
Cate: I hate that, it really like helps enforce that whole idea of elitism in art. Which furthers the cycle because now people are gonna react to your art movie by assuming you’re trying to piss them off because they “don’t get it”. People get really angry at art that they deem “weird for the sake of weird”. Art can’t progress if you’re going to be so dismissive of experimentation. I don’t think many artists are really sitting there spending the time and energy to make a movie or something that they don’t give a shit about.
JB: I think that’s probably something that like, kinda really is obvious in your work, is that you’re always pushing yourself to experiment and try new things, not just in your art and the different things you try but even in your writing, your approach, format, ideas, characters.
Cate: Whenever what I’m doing stops feeling like it might be “too weird” I try to mix it up. I’m planning to experiment with that written stuff more in ‘Crow Cillers’, that felt like a pretty new thing for me. I already wrote a bit for the episode I’m working on now. Sometimes it feels like there’s not really a lot of other directions to explore but something always happens. I feel like Season 1 was kind of a new thing for me in how it was more heavily plotted out than anything I’ve done before. It’s still pretty stream-of-consciousness but I actually took some notes and planned out a few things loosely. This season I wanna try to work the abstraction and seeming non-sequitor back more strongly into that.
JB: It definitely shows, and it felt like it worked a lot for the “tone” of the show, since the universe of ‘Crow Cillers’ feels way less chaotic, as it were.
Cate: ‘Crow Cillers’ feels a lot like the most pure distillation so far of what I’ve been working towards in a lot of ways, in that giving them that more straightforward universe highlights the more abstract / meta stuff and vice versa. The more like real the characters feel and the more quiet moments of characterization and story you get the more horrifying the weird shit comes across etc. At least in theory.
JB: It totally does! I bring it up EVERY TIME we’ve talked about this, but it’s why that “I killed your mom” moment in ‘Lamezine 001’ is so horrifying, because they’re these goofy sitcom characters and then just something really grotesque happens out of nowhere. But they can still only operate with that in the realm of a sitcom, and after that moment they kind of just like break down.
JB: Also, I don’t know how much you wanna talk about it, but the Mickey/Minnie section from ‘Crow Cillers’ is just, “beautiful” feels like the wrong word but it’s an incredible page to read and everything from pacing to format just, frames it perfectly.
Cate: That’s actually the only feedback I’ve heard on that page and I’m like PHEW, because I had no idea how that worked out, like “is this too blunt and too abstract simultaneously”.
JB: I think that mix works really really well for it, and your commentary also gives a bit of context that I think would help folks who didn’t recognize it immediately, like, it ties it all into your larger work really well. The way I end up reading it is basically, that it’s really, really personal but also really, really tragically universal. That it’s a horror story that too many people have been in.
Cate: Yeah, dang that’s a pretty good way of like describing that idea, like I’ve been conscious of the like, I’m bad at wording this stuff out, but yeah with stuff like having lots of fake forum posts and brand promotions and commercials and etc, to communicate this stuff, kind of posing it as a commodity or like the experience as an inherent part of products and culture or whatever. But I hadn’t been able to like articulate it this much until you said that, and anyway for the season finale it felt appropriate to be like, lets go to this logical extension of that to just, “here’s my history of abuse but via Mickey and Minnie Mouse”.
JB: I took it a lot as like, those framing devices are how things are presented in “mass culture” in order to be “relatable”, like Micky/Minnie being the every-couple, so it works within the sort of language of undermining that, but it also reifies it because these things ARE prevalent. So it only undermines it so far as it, takes off the “marketable” part and shows the “every” parts that are a lot more painful.
Cate: Yeah, they seemed like the best pair to use just like, I mean Mickey Mouse BUT EVIL in a zine seems kind of done but, I was like it’s either him or I guess Marge and Homer? I don’t know who else fits and they’re too like developed.
JB: Yeah, it doesn’t come off as like “Mickey Mouse but fucked up” because it’s not using them in this edgy Vice Magazine way.
Cate: I worry about that whenever I use like, the BIG BOYS like McDonald’s or something.
JB: It’s a real concern to have but honestly, the intent and experience brought to it shows immediately, it’s a lot more obvious when someone who isn’t some like, upper middle class white dude with nothing to say but “I love Johnny Ryan” uses corporatized / mass culture imagery in ways that work against it.
Cate: Ways that communicate the artist sneering and going “Wait’ll they get a load’a this pic of Ronald McDonald sucking dick.”
JB: It worked with Micky/Minnie BECAUSE they’re the “every couple”, but by telling your story with them it kinda, Idunno, made me think about how fucked up that is, that the model for the “every couple” is just Boy Mouse and his sidekick, Girl Mouse.
Cate: Boy and his partner, Girl Boy with Bow. It also felt like kind of a culmination to the like all the outside the main narrative stuff with menacing hateful pop culture, like Emma being kidnapped and having lots of pages in-between it with forum posters saying they hope she gets killed because she’s annoying and it’s just like, here’s a whole long page of just awful pop culture icon being direct about it. Mickey off camera.
JB: Yeah, I really liked that inclusion especially because it like was a weird meta-textual moment of realizing “Oh god there probably are people who would hate Emma for no reason” & how your fictional show still falls under the same ruts of fandom. I also really like how the metatextual forum stuff is always like “in the future”.
Cate: They’re on like Season 22 in there.
JB: Whenever you include fandom stuff for your fake shows, yeah, it’s always taking place in a COMPLETLEY DIFFERENT context from the actual plots.
Cate: There’s a constant struggle with like, wanting to maintain enough reality with the kids that they can feel like they’re in genuine danger or like have tension and etc, so it’s like, I want to let this more abstract shit threaten them without it feeling like, you know, “oh this is a high concept thing and they’ll be okay, its just like conceptual”. If that makes sense. But there would definitely be ways to do that I think, like I don’t want it to veer too far into territory where you read the characters as like, art film avatar ‘Eraserhead’-type protagonists where it’s like, I can relate to this and everything and it’s effecting, but it’s like, I don’t care what happens to Joey Eraserhead the same way as a developed character you know?
JB: I can definitely see why it’d be hard to do without like, making the characters feel too “television”. Though I feel like you struck that balance well in ‘Lamezine’? Especially since it’s obvious the like, “show” we’re reading is different than the universe’s show that fans interact with.
Cate: I stress about finding the right balance in this kinda stuff a lot, I think there’s like several pages of the ‘Crow Cillers’ commentary that are just me being like “is this too obvious or too subtle”.
JB: I think some of the last stuff I also wanted to touch on is how like, your stuff is “queer” without just being, it’s Queer Comix Time. It feels so much more natural.
Cate: I’m very subtle. Sometimes. Stuff like queerness or any other themes I’m always unsure if I’m too direct or if it’s detectable.
JB: I mean, like your first webcomic [ffff] had two queer-ish trans girls in it.
Cate: I didn’t know it though, so much of the subtext of my comics is just stuff I’m not of aware of until later. And then I’m like, “Oh wait I see what I’m doing”.
JB: I think that’s what makes the queerness work, like the characters just ARE there, it’s a part of them, but it’s not like, highlighted and underlined or completely swept under the rug, they just are.
Cate: Yeah, exactly, it’s more like I get an idea of the character and who they are and just write what they’d do. Like a page description will be like, “the gang is talking about a video game”. And then I just kind of write how I feel the conversation naturally would happen. One piece of dialogue at a time and then whatever the other character would impulsively respond with. I do plan some stuff in ‘Crow Cillers’ and stuff, like after the pilot I’d keep bringing up reminders of Cortney’s mom or whatever, because that’s obviously important. But I won’t really figure out why I’m calling back to things or how they relate to other things until later, like as I go along I’ll just eventually have moments where stuff kind of connects because it’s all coming from similar places and then it’s like, ok now I can try to consciously tie this stuff together. So far it always does.
JB: That’s honestly a really impressive skill.
Cate: It’s just like the only way i can work. Anything more structured or planned out and I’d get bored.
JB: While rereading your stuff I noticed that ‘Lamezine 002’ has a much sweeter end, like, it’s still “oh well we cant actually defeat the demon” but it follows that up with “so lets just get high and hang out and do goofy shit”.
Cate: It’s more cheerful than ‘Lamezine 001' anyway.
JB: Yeah, considering ‘Lamezine 001’ ends with everyone being dismembered forever. ‘Lamezine 002’ sets up ‘Crow Cillers’ well, though. Like I’ve noticed with your works that each story progressively resolves itself closer to something happy. There’s this theme of kind of “hopeless” endings, but what that means has changed a lot? Like there’s ‘Asscastle’ where it ends with him alone and suicidal again, there’s ‘Smokes’ where the main characters are just stuck in a self-destructive cycle.
Cate: Have I ended anything cheerfully?
JB: Uhhh, no I think even ‘ffff’ ended with them all dying.
Cate: Well.
JB: But it’s just like, all these works deal with characters fighting their demons (or literal demons) and ending hopeless and helpless before them, but as your stuff has gone on the characters find like, friends and support groups, and the shared character recycling kind of suggests a like progressive iteration, where they’re fighting the same patterns and stories and struggles again and again until they resolve somewhere better. I feel like that’s a very “queer” narrative. Nobody in the ‘Lamezone’ oeuvre can hope for a happy ending, but they can keep progressing until they find one with happy moments.
Cate: I’ve definitely been conscious of the support/friendship thing but hadn’t really thought about it applying like overarching like that, that’s a good point.
JB: The stories aren’t resolved by any of them overcoming or defeating their conflicts, but kind of, surviving or living with them.
Cate: Both ‘Lamezine 002’ and ‘Crow Cillers’ Season 1 ends with the gang gathering around a television.
JB: Mmmhm, and like, basically accepting that they cant really stop whats going on, but they can survive it. There’s a weird kind of inspiration to that.
