“Rick Griffin”
Interviewed by Denis Wheary
December, 2003

excerpted from The Comics Journal #257

In 1962, surfing was all the rage at Villanova, a Catholic school in Ojai, Calif., recalled Denis Wheary: "Wearing Levis and T-shirts to class was forbidden, but that Fall bleached hair, huarache sandals and Pendleton plaid shirts began to appear on campus, and Murphy was on the cover of the Surfer magazine. Surfing was always more than just a sport or fad. It represented a lifestyle of fun and adventure, free of responsibilities and parental controls, and Murphy was our icon."

A few years later, Wheary "discovered sex and pot and stopped going to classes at the University of Oregon. By June 1967 I had flunked out, and returned home to San Francisco for the Summer of Love. I picked up Griffin's Puff of Kief, CAN-A-BLIS and Huichol/Mezcalito posters at the Magic Mountain Festival on Mt. Tamapias. In September, I accepted a three-year MacNamara Scholarship to Southeast Asia." By the time he returned to America, Griffin had switched from psychedelic posters to strips for Zap Comics, which included "beautifully rendered recognizable characters in an entirely mysterious context. My next big surprise came when I saw the windows of Ben Friedman's Poster Mat papered with Griffin's Grateful Dead Wake of the Flood posters in 1973. That blew my mind. Seemingly in one jump, Rick had gone from Zap and Aoxomoxoa graphics to Renaissance-style painting. From that point on, my Griffin collecting got serious."

In Southern California, Wheary found Griffin's name in the Orange County telephone book and gave him a call. The interview was really just an excuse to meet his hero, admits Wheary: "My intent was to publish an article in Richard Kyle's magazine Wonderworld, but our attention soon shifted to publishing the first American graphic novel, George Metzger's Beyond Time and Again (1976).

Although his interview was never published, Wheary kept in contact with Griffin. In 1978, he commissioned a painting, which took ten years to deliver: "I didn't object to the many delays because Rick, who was usually difficult to find, stayed in touch with me until our project was finished."

Griffin did toss Wheary a gentle reminder about his sin of omission 25 years after the interview, though: "In 1989, at Glen Bray's Szulkalski Show at La Luz de Jesus in LA, Rick greeted me with 'Hey, it's Cub Calloway!' a reference to the ancient reporter in Dan O'Neill's Odd Bodkins strip. Apparently Rick hadn't forgotten that I still owed him a story."

This interview took place at Rick Griffin's studio in San Clemente, Calif., in November, 1974. It was located in the rear of a two-story whitewashed adobe building that housed several stores, including a surfboard shop, on the northern street side. The artist's space consisted of a medium-sized room on the top floor that was comfortable and neat. The late afternoon sun warmed a couch draped in Mexican blankets. Against a wall was an old but sturdy wooden drawing table. Some wooden chairs, an easel, airbrush compressor, books and portfolios carefully cased or boxed, artist's equipment and materials completed the furnishings. Displayed on the walls and on top of the shelves were paintings, helmets, skulls and advertising trinkets.

- Patrick Rosenkranz

DENIS WHEARY: Were you pretty close with Mouse and Kelley?

RICK GRIFFIN: Yeah. I worked a lot with them. They're fellow artists. A lot of the reason why I went to San Francisco was I began to see some of the graphics they were doing. Bill Graham and Chet Helms' Family Dog. Wes Wilson started out doing posters for Family Dog, and then he started doing them for Bill Graham, and Mouse started doing Family Dog posters. It seemed like there was something graphically interesting happening. It wasn't real slick, like a Madison Avenue-type of thing. It was a down-home, really soulful type of graphics movement that appealed to me.

WHEARY: What were you doing before that? Working for Surfer?

GRIFFIN: Yeah.

WHEARY: And you started drawing for them when you were 15?

GRIFFIN: I was younger than that. I started drawing surf cartoons professionally when I was 13. They were a couple of comic books, and a photo annual with title drawings for different surf spots -- like one for Hawaii, one for Mexico, one for Mazatlan, one for Makaha. All and all, there were about 12 drawings in that book. This was before Surfer. I did two comic books, and at that point, I met Severson.

WHEARY: Who did you do the comic books for?

GRIFFIN: I did them for Greg Noll Surfboards. He was a surfboard manufacturer in Hermosa Beach.

WHEARY: Was it a giveaway?

GRIFFIN: No, he sold them. I did decals, two comic books and a photo annual, posters, all kinds of stuff before Surfer. It was all printed and sold. At that time, poster collecting was real big among surfers, collecting posters for surf films, so he sold like a pack of surf posters - some with cartoons, some with photographs and cartoons and there were decals in there.

WHEARY: How did you start doing that?

GRIFFIN: There was a real, real small surf shop on the beach in Hermosa, and when I was a little kid -- about 12, I guess -- I went down there. They knew I was a cartoonist, so people had written things all over the walls, drawn things, and so I drew some cartoons in there, some cartoons and murals. People would come in and see them. Greg Noll saw my work in there, got in touch with me and asked if I'd be interested in doing the cartoons for his book, and so we worked out a deal where he traded me surfboards. Severson saw my work there, and he came to our high school to show a surf film. I think I was in the ninth grade. And I went in and talked to him, showed him some of my cartoons, and he said, "I'm going to be starting a magazine myself in about a year, and if you'd be interested in doing cartoons, that would be great." He contacted me about a year later, when he started Surfer.

WHEARY: So what did you do for him? Did you get right into Murphy, right away?

GRIFFIN: I started right out with a comic strip called The Gremmies. It was about these guys that go to Hawaii. They've never seen any big waves, and they go over there and they're real stoked about getting there. It shows them buying their tickets. A real simple one pager, you know; real naive. They're buying their tickets, getting on the plane, talking about how they're going to rip those waves apart. They get off the plane, they're running down the beach, they all have their boards under their arms, and talking about how they're going to really, really do it up. And they walk down to the beach, and here are these monster waves breaking, and they each take one look at them, and they're back at the ticket office, just totally trembling, really shaking, buying return tickets back to California. That was the first one. I started Murphy right after that.

WHEARY: You've said before that everybody drew Murphy on their binders. Did that happen after a while? Is Murphy your character? Would you claim Murphy?

GRIFFIN: Oh yeah. He kind of evolved out of Don Martin. At the time I was copying Don Martin. If you look at the first Greg Noll surfer thing, Greg Noll's Surfer Annual, you will see the style looks like really early Don Martin characters.

WHEARY: I remember one, when I was in high school, where Murphy got put in a tube, and went through time, back to when guys were surfing on logs.

GRIFFIN: Right. I always did that. He always got caught in a time warp of some kind. That was the second adventure, back to the time of the cavemen. What happened was he fell asleep on the beach, and when he woke up he was on the edge of a primordial forest. So his friends are gone, and there's all these strange tropical plants, so he starts off in the general direction of home, and he gets chased by a dinosaur, and he goes in this cave and these two cavemen sneak up behind him, about ready to do him in, and he goes to shield himself with his surfboard, and they see this thing, and they're amazed by it, by its technical aspects -- smooth, shiny, they are not at all familiar with the materials. It's strange to them. At that point, they're more interested in that than they are in killing him. And he realizes this, so he shows them what it is, he goes out and surfs. They really dig it. They go off into the forest and there are all these noises of cutting down, and they come down and they've cut down these logs, pointed them at the end. They're real crude surfboards. So they go out and they're all surfing and having a good time when this volcano erupts. The two cavemen head for the beach and disappear into the forest. Murphy heads out. And there's a tidal wave, the volcano creates a big tidal wave. Murphy takes off on that, and he's in the tube, so anyway he wakes up, and he's running up the beach yelling, "Help! Giant tidal wave!" and a little shore break breaks behind him. His friends are all laughing at him, saying, "Hey, Murphy, you've been dreaming, having another nightmare." And he says, "Hey, no, listen. I was back in time. There were all these dinosaurs, and cave people, and I was teaching them how to surf," and they're all laughing at him, "Oh, sure." So after a while they kind of run him off, and he's still saying, "Man, I know it, I know it was real." And at a different part of the beach, it shows these archaeologists, digging in this cave, and they break into this inner part of the cave, and they shine their light on the wall, and they're going, "What do you make of it?" And there, up on the wall are these crude cave paintings, of these people surfing, and one of them is a crude characterization of Murphy. It's obviously these two cavemen and Murphy. Most of them had an ending like that.

WHEARY: Have you done many interviews?

GRIFFIN: Did you read that interview with me in the Trinity Times? That was this year.

WHEARY: I don't know the Trinity Times. Is that a Jesus freak paper?

GRIFFIN: It's a... "A Jesus freak paper"?

WHEARY: I don't know!

GRIFFIN: It's weird about Jesus freaks. I wonder why they call them Jesus freaks? Well, actually the word "Christian" was derogatory at one time too. They called them Christians in derision. The word Christian means the same thing as Jesus freak; someone who's tripped out on Christ, someone who identifies with

Christ so much, that that becomes the purpose of their life, to bear witness to Christ. That's what I like to do. I like to talk about Jesus.

WHEARY: You use his symbols.

GRIFFIN: What?

WHEARY: His symbols are used.

GRIFFIN: What do you mean?

WHEARY: A lot of Christian symbols. You know, the lamb and all...

GRIFFIN: Well, that was when I first came to know Jesus, when I first decided I wanted to be identified with Christ. I wanted to know about what he was, I asked his living resurrected spirit to come into my life. The first thing I did was go out and get a bunch of pictures of Jesus: I'm visually and graphically oriented, and I'm always looking for symbols. Before I knew Christ I was really into symbols, because I tried to use symbols to explain to myself what it was I was trying to find out. I don't think I would use any Christian symbols now.

WHEARY: When did this happen? Did it happen after you were making posters?

GRIFFIN: Oh, yeah. It happened after I left San Francisco.

What's the date on that Surfer you have?

WHEARY: March '65. I went to the Surfer office to buy back issues and that's the oldest they had.

GRIFFIN: That's pretty old. There was a gap in there.

WHEARY: The posters started to come out when I was in college. I recognized your style and knew it was you right away. Maybe I picked up on the name -- I remember your name from high school, I'm sure, because we liked Murphy. That was the reason for buying Surfer, because I never surfed.

GRIFFIN: I've heard that. For a lot of people, that was an important part of the magazine.

WHEARY: I think so. Do you still like telling stories, doing comics, or do you just do it when the Zap thing comes up? When you were doing Murphy, there were stories. Did you read science fiction? Almost all the stories in Surfer talked about guys getting caught in tubes, going into infinity and things like that.

GRIFFIN: The tube. That was really a good vehicle for changing gears in a story. Even before I realized it, how pure it was, I intuitively knew the tube is kind of like a mystery spot. When I first started surfing, I thought the object was to stand on a plank, and ride the foam in toward the shore. When I was told the object was to angle down the beach and remain in the unbroken part of the wave, and that you could actually ride inside the curl of the wave, I didn't even believe it. I said, "No, that's not possible," and was told, "Yeah, you can ride in there, and if it's a small wave you have to crouch down, and if it's a big enough wave you can stand up inside there, and actually be totally surrounded by a tunnel of moving water, and not be knocked down by it, and actually come back out of it." I really doubted that, because I always thought of a wave as a force that crashed and roared its way up to the beach. But actually what it is, the water is not the wave, the wave is the energy moving through the water, the energy lifts the water up, as the energy rolls up on the shore, and as the energy begins to sound the bottom, it's forced upwards and it pulls the water up with it, and the gravity begins to pull the water off the energy, it topples forward -- but because it has this forward momentum, it pitches out and creates a tubing curling action. The whole object of surfing is to try to get in the tube. That's the whole point to surfing, to get tubed. It's like bullfighting or any type of sport where it's one man contending with the forces of nature, whether they be in another animal -- like bullfighting -- or like skiing. Skiing can be parallel to it, but somehow surfing is really pure, because it's water, man. What needs to be said about water? Water is water, energy is energy and a wave is a combination of the two. It has inertia and momentum, and the object is to blend with it as much as you can and still retain your identity, because the tube is constantly collapsing and if you get too far back in there, it collapses and you collapse with it. You get wiped out. If you get too far out in front of it, you're out on the shoulder of the wave, and it's slower out there. You don't get that real excitement. So the tube, like I said, is always a mystery spot, and I used it to transport my character into these different realms.

WHEARY: I have a quote from Michael Barrier in Funnyworld #12. He says, "A comic strip is a narrative medium, a means of telling a story, in a progression from panel to panel, through a combination of dialogue and drawings." Then he says, further on, "Some underground cartoonists like Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso aren't really producing comic strips at all, if you accept the definition I advanced above. Griffin plays with shapes and colors in whatever medium he's using, and it's not especially important that sometimes he uses a sort of panel to panel continuity." I think he was referring to the Zaps -- specifically #2 and 3 -- but you've certainly used panel-to-panel continuity and done stories.

GRIFFIN: I had gotten out of doing comic stories, even in Surfer. They were doing the Griffin-Stoner adventures. Ron Stoner was the staff photographer and I was the staff artist. We'd go off and investigate certain areas, and send back letters, photographs and cartoons. It went from comic strips into these adventures where there were just comic type of illustrations. I got to San Francisco and I started doing posters, and I was concerned with a poster image. At one point, I got the idea -- not because I was particularly interested in comics, more than I was interested in finding a new way to do a poster -- to do this comic-strip poster. [FD 89] I had a flash to do it. I said, "Well, it wouldn't be important for it to have a story, because that's not the purpose of using a comic strip." The comic strip was only a format, like there's the title of the paper up here, and there's a panel-to-panel format and it was in color. It was a trip to have a poster and disguise it in a different format, and I thought it was irrelevant to have a storyline. I thought it would be better to just have images, because if it had a storyline, it might even take you too far; you'd forget it was a poster. I wanted it to function as a poster, but look like a comic strip. So I got the idea and I thought it would be interesting, but I dismissed it because I thought there was something so basic about it, so obvious, that it almost seemed like too obvious a solution. I thought it would be corny, or something. I kept trying to think of a better idea and I couldn't. Finally, my deadline was catching up to me, and I hadn't thought of any type of image that was better, so I went ahead and did it. I just rattled the thing off, made three-color separations on it, took it to the printer and thought, "Well, I hope this doesn't go over like a lead balloon." I remember going down with Mouse and Kelley to the printer, to look at this thing. I didn't tell them anything about it. They were going down there to do some work on some of their posters. They saw it, and Kelley went, "Man!" and he really freaked out on it.

I remember going to the dance, and the announcer said, "Now listen, go out into the lobby and look at the poster for next week's dance, because it's by Rick Griffin and it looks like a comic strip, but it's the poster for next week's dance. It's really a trip." Everybody was fairly blown away by it, and I was amazed, because I thought it was a trite idea. Crumb saw it -- this is what he told me later -- he saw the panel breakdown, how there was no storyline. He was always concerned with story. At that time, he was working on Zap #1, and said he realized, by looking at that poster, that you could do that, and he took the liberty from that poster, to do "Ultra Modernistic Abstract Expressionist Cartoons." It shows all this panel-to-panel activity. So I went along, doing my posters, and then Zap came out. I bought a copy of it in City Lights Bookstore, because I saw it and thought, "Hey, this is a comic book, but it's done by a hippie." I mean, it's an underground, it's a subculture comic book. So I bought the thing, and I ran home and read it, and really liked it. Shortly afterwards, Crumb came over to my house, and asked me if I'd draw for the next set, if I'd do something for it. At the time, I was kind of tapering off the posters, and I was doing pen exercises. I got this idea from Moscoso; he'd sketch out a lot of his ideas on these cards, so I went to the printer where they were printing our posters and got a bunch of these cards, and I started doing these pen exercises, with different sized Rapidographs, getting into a real fluid drawing. Just drawing, trying to learn how to draw form and shape. I wasn't concerned with any type of story. He said, "Do you have anything we can use in the next issue?" And I showed him these cards, and he said, "This is great! Let's use this. I want to use this." So I said, "OK," and pasted them all up. If you look at mine and Moscoso's stuff in that first issue, you'll see we used the exact same images -- the same shading techniques and everything -- because we had collaborated on some posters. When he saw my comic-strip poster, he immediately did a similar type of comic-strip poster for a friend of his, but using photo images. And it moved and animated and stuff. Crumb asked me if I knew of any other cartoonists in the area -- he knew one named S. Clay Wilson, and he'd already asked him to participate in Zap - and I told him about Victor, and I mentioned it to Victor. Victor seemed interested, so we all just turned in this stuff. I pasted up the cards that I'd done, and I did some actual full-page pen exercises. That was what made it far out, that there wasn't any story. It was just trips, you know? Actually we were typecast for a while: They would think of Griffin and Moscoso as the guys who did all the stuff like that.

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #257.]