Troy Little: “The counterculture anti-heroes were just awful people”
Comic book artist and illustrator Troy Little joined us for a chat about all things Hunter S. Thompson, with his own brush with the late journalist coming in the form of an adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Hear from Little on our previous Death by Adaptation podcast episode, where he, host Nicoló Grasso and Ewan Gleadow sat down to chew the fat over The Rum Diary. You can find more of Troy’s work on his website, Pegamoose and Patreon account.
Ewan: What was it about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that attracted you to adapting his work to the visual medium?
Troy: I've been a fan of the book forever, I just love the book. I was a fan of the movie and I think I read the book first. I'd seen the movie when it came out. I'd listen to the audiobook and I just kind of got wrapped up in the Hunter S. Thompson universe for a good while.
When I was starting to work in comics full time, I did a lot of work in television, animation, and storyboarding. When I started working in comics for unlicensed projects, the first project I worked on was a Powerpuff Girls and I was working as a writer/artist on that series for a while when out of the blue, one day I get an email from my editors saying, “You know, looking good, everything's going great. By the way, would you be interested in pitching for a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas adaptation?”
It was like, the most out of left field, abstract idea, to drop the guy who draws Powerpuff Girls. And hell, yeah, I was a huge fan, but also at the same time, I'm like, “Well, why me? I'm only going to screw it up like, I can't do that.” Like, I love that book. Anything I do is going to bring it down. So I debated for about two weeks whether or not I wanted to do it or not, just on the simple merits of I didn't think I was going to be up for it, like up to it, you know, because I hold that book at a lot of reverence. I realised at one point that if I don't do it, somebody else is going to do it, and at least I care about it this much. So maybe I won't, you know, make the best book ever. I don't know, you know, but I'm going to give it my best shot.
So my editor came and he said: “Look, I need to let them know if you're going to pitch something or not.”. And I said, “give me a deadline.” And they said “Monday”, and this is on Friday. “It's done. I'll send you a page on Monday of something, just an idea” This is kind of how I would do it. And I sent a scene, how I imagined I would kind of interpret a scene from the book visually. And it was the hitchhiker scene, one of the other pages from that. And reading over again is just like, “OK, what do I see here?”
I hadn't seen the movie in a lot of years and I didn't want to kind of go back and reference the film. I wanted to go straight from the source text and kind of use my animation, background and stuff like this. I thought, “Well, what I'm getting out of this is a lot of that manic energy and a lot of comedy.” So that's kind of how I angled my pitch, which is exaggeration and stuff, which seemed to suit it in a way and give it a bit of a cartoony, like manic energy. Two days later, they said: “You're off Powerpuff Girls and you're going to be spending the next year and a half adapting Fear and Loathing Las Vegas.” She blew my mind. I was like, “OK, I guess I'm in.”
E: You have a really good feel for the energy that Thompson had in the original book. It's the scene where they check into the hotel and they could see the spiral start to happen, quite literally, as the text moves around. That sort of adaptation really won me over because it's taking really strong writing and making them visually powerful. Because I think for me, the book is visually it's like, you know, Thompson knows how to paint a picture through text. Did that make it easier or harder to adapt to that sort of clear-cut vision that Hunter Thompson had?
T: It's a really great book to adapt because it is very heavy on the visual side of things. He describes the scene and sets the tone. You can imagine it. So for me, it was like, “Well, what's the best way to kind of draw that scene?”. I'd never been to Vegas. I'm the guy on the east coast of Canada who's never been to Vegas and just live vicariously through movies and books and stuff like that. What it must be like. But Ralph Steadman did this kind of, and I knew I was going to get compared to that a lot coming into it and so one of our first talks with the publisher 90W and TopShelf was, “How are we going to do this properly?” Because Tete A Tete Adams was the publisher at RTW. He was a huge, huge Hunter Thompson fan. This is his dream project, so he wanted to see it done right and we agreed, first of all, that any and all texts from the book are going to be straight out of the novel.
I was 100% on board with that because for me, when I see a book that I really love adapted to some other medium, I know there's some translation that has to happen when they start writing scenes that never existed in the book. Things have always irritated me. Yeah, so the idea of Hunter's words as the absolute gold. You don't mess with that stuff. So when we decided we're going to use straight text straight from the novel, I'm just going to add my visual side to it. So if you hate the book, you know, it's only because you hate the visuals, because the writing, I didn't actually mess with that at all.
You know, we don't want to try to do a Ralph Steadman kind of take of it because I don't draw like that. You just look like a, you know, poor man's Ralph Steadman trying to do that because he's just, you can't replicate that. There were other artists I thought would do a great job, people who have that kind of Ralph Steadman influence, very energetic and splattering and stuff. But anyway, they went with me, so far be it from me to try and pull the wool out from under my own feet or whatever the rug out from under me, sabotage myself to suggest that there are people that who could do a better job with this.
E: One of the best aspects like you mentioned there is it is the text of Thompson. You've added visuals to that. Was there a process that you had for breaking down the text into what you wanted to show in that particular scene? You've got a few lines of dialogue and quite a vivid description, you know, whether it depicts the outline of Raoul Duke’s skull or swirls around the characters. It's really great visuals like that, I imagine a lot of planning goes into that process. You pick out a line, you can just see it visualised there. Is there anything in particular about one line here or there that was sort of the crux for that part of the novelisation?
T: I was trying to imagine, you know, “what am I reading?”. What am I seeing using my imagination with that and some reference for Vegas locations and trying to have enough stuff around me to inform what I'm drawing. One of the things I did, and I still have it here too, is before I started, I actually built a model of the car so that I had a good turnaround reference for drawing, because drawing cars is hard. Having that handy was a good little thing to pull from at the start when we're kicking things off. I read the novel over and over and over again as I was pulling out chunks for the script because I couldn't draw everything and I was starting to find towards the end, even though I was almost drawing it page for page out of the novel, and it was running out of time and deadline stuff. So I was like, “Well, what? What do I cut that isn't important or as important to the narrative?”, and I just didn't want to cut anything. So I was keeping everything. As much as I could. But just looking at a page and saying, “Okay, this is what I have to draw today,” and thinking how to interpret that, just using just a little thumbnail, trying different ideas and stuff until I get something that I think works. Pages that I could really play with, where they're going into the hotel and acid. I could have at it, so you have to turn the book while you're reading it. You know, those are fun little things to make those little moments stand out. Emphasise what the text was writing in that visual form to add that layer to it.
E: Yeah, absolutely. It was the Mint 400 scene for the shotgun when it goes off and you actually have “kaboom” in the background. It's that visualisation of sound alongside the text that makes it really, really good. Is there one particular scene from the book that you really were keen to adapt? And was there one that was just a real struggle to sort of visualise?
T: Boy, now we're going back a few years, I did this book probably seven years ago. Was it hard to adapt? I mean, there are some parts that were obviously more fun to adapt because there's a lot of stuff going on. I mean, the manic energies of the white rabbit scene, that was probably one of my favourites to draw. I just loved having Dr. Gonzo dripping with green water. When you mentioned that text and the sound effects and stuff, one thing I like to do with a lot of my comic work is hand-lettered stuff, so I found a way to kind of take chunks of narration and also turn some of those narrations into dialogue and find a way to kind of blend that.
So we've got hundreds of narrated pieces and the font that I used in that was the same kind of font that he [Thompson] used in his typewriter. I tried to have those little subtle accuracies as much as I could and find ways to take some of the narration and turn that into dialogue, but definitely using the dialogue as visuals and meshing it in with the art. To me, instead of having it stuck over the top of it like you see in a lot of comic books where it feels like there's art and then it's pasted dialogue, I want it to be one image where that design works together like this is a cohesive whole.
E: It's clear in the visualisation that that is the effect. I did want to ask quite a broad question. It was the first question I wrote down. I was going to ask you was what is what does Thompson mean to you? What is he to you?
T: A very interesting person with a very interesting life in a very interesting time. I really liked Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It had this wonderful energy to it. The writing had such a great spark to it. It's a crazy adventure. But it also had so much to say about the early 1970s, about the death of the American Dream. It's a pretty heavy book when you get to the wave sequence, you know, where he's sitting down and actually has this lucid moment talking about the high watermark. Right? That was a really great sequence to illustrate in the book where you had like kind of the zeitgeist of what's going on.
You've got [Richard] Nixon, you've got [Jimi] Hendrix, all these kind of things that put you in the moment of that late, late 1960s, early 70s America. I don't know. I find him a fascinating character because he created a character for himself and a caricature of himself that he kind of got locked into in a really tragic way. I've never seen videos where he'd be interviewed or people come to the shows and they're just awful. Like, they just wanted to smoke drugs and make drug talk, and he couldn't even be a journalist anymore. He couldn't do his job properly. Fear and Loathing almost ruined him in a way, he was always chasing that thing. That high he had in the 1970s. It's kind of tragic in so many ways.
E: Yes, it shows in his later work as well. The Gonzo Diaries, particularly the latter moments of it. You see those sparks every now and then, like the Richard Nixon obituary article or the work he was doing later down the line, like on The Curse of Lono. It's kind of tragic, like you said, yeah, it's someone so great that boomed so quickly and burnt himself out entirely. Is it worth it to have Fear and Loathing and then burn out?
T: You see it a lot, and you guys [on the Death by Adaptation podcast] mentioned it as well with Jack Kerouac and stuff. As a big fan of the beat writers, it just seemed Neil Cassidy and Kerouac and Thompson and always the counterculture anti-heroes were just awful people. Terrible people. You wouldn't want to know them in real life. But reading their adventures is great. But the mayhem that they left in their wake is kind of reprehensible.
Here I am working on Rick and Morty now. You get Rick Sanchez, another terrible anti-hero person who is just so flawed, like Thompson. I remember a few years ago I read his son's book. Not having connected with his own father very deeply. In some ways, he's always trying to. It feels like he's trying to tell himself, you know, “this is what I think my father felt” and trying to find the good in him or inside a Hunter Thompson that you just didn't see in the public sphere. He had a hard time, I think, expressing that even in his own personal life too. He's a complex character who, tragically, was super talented in life. Destroyed by his own success in a weird way.
E: It is a tragic sort of thing that happened to someone. The monumental work that he and Kerouac and everyone, the impact they actually approached people with, was unbelievable. We have The Rum Diary and Hells Angels, would you want to adapt one of those?
T: After Fear and Loathing came out, I was very keen to see about doing another book, like a follow-up. They suggested Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72, but I was trying to read over it and thinking, “How am I going to visualise this?” and it's more journalism than it is an adventure story. I don't think it would have held up very well as something that would have been a good read for anyone.
There was so much stuff that was just covering the news, covering the times, that you wouldn't make an interesting comic book. I didn't think that was a good one to adapt. They suggested Hells Angels and somebody else also suggested that the last thing you want to do is adapt Hells Angels and be selling that at a bookstore somewhere, have some kind of biker come in and say: “Hey, you owe me some money for that.”
Again, maybe the one inside the Hells Angels universe. The only one I could have imagined adapting would be The Curse of Lono, because it was very much a mini-throwback to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but with Ralph Steadman as a sort of Dr. Gonzo. It had some illustrations again by Steadman, but it was much more of a colourful little book. It had a lot more. I can visualise the adventure side of it. When it comes to drawing stuff, it would be fun to draw as opposed to a very pedantic kind of literary journalism. In any case, it didn't happen. So I said: “Well, you know what? Good. Quit while you're ahead.”
It did open the doors for a brief period of time where people thought I could do some other things and this was one of them. Here is Breakfast of Champions, but I had a pitch for that. I'd sign the contract and I was ready to start work on it. Three days before that happened, the estate pulled the plug on the project.
Anyway, they went with The Slaughterhouse-Five and the guys who adopted that did a phenomenal job. If you haven't seen that and you like adaptations and I know you do, The Slaughterhouse-Five comic book adaptation is a phenomenal adaptation. It's adapted in a way that is on the nose, the way I would have done that kind of thing. Page by page, but it is an adaptation that really works for the medium. Yeah, so I 100 per cent recommend you check that out.
E: I think the great thing about your visualisation of Thompson's work is that it's fearful of the material, not just by taking the text, but also by adapting it in a way that doesn't change what Thompson was trying to get to the heart of. It was a very difficult time for 1970s Americans. Your work takes all these aspects of that time, throws them onto the page, but it doesn't change the meaning of the text. Was that a hard balance to grasp?
T: My hope was because I know the movie is what brought a lot of people into the world, you know, serving people who hadn't read the book but had probably seen the Johnny Depp film. I was kind of hoping that my book would land somewhere in between there. After the book was published, I actually rented a theatre and screened Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It really surprised me how dark [the film] was. Gilliam really went heavy on the drug aspect of it and missed a lot of the humour. Yeah, it's a pretty funny book in a lot of cases with some heavy moments, like the White Rabbit sequence and stuff, but he really went and angled it in this dark, dangerous manner.
I noticed there was a big contrast between how Gilliam handled the narrative situation and how I handled it. When I first announced that this was going to be a graphic novel, Hunter Thompson fans, as I quickly discovered, are rabid fans. They were not happy. They didn't know who I was, what I do, and they didn't think it should be done. They were furious to hear that there was someone who is going to try to adapt basically their “Holy Grail” novel or book into a comic book, which Hunter Thompson himself would have hated. You know, I said, he is going to haunt me for this. He was not a cartoon fan. Some of the best notes online are like “somebody break his hand, Sony put finance in his eyes,” and “stop this madness.”
When the book came out, the best vindication that I had that I did OK was - and you probably know this, I mean, most people who are journalists, (I say most. I mean, generalising.) got into it because of Hunter Thompson. Every review of my book pretty much started off with that, like “full disclosure, this book means a lot to me. When I became a journalist, it was because I read Hunter Thompson's work.” It was basically a long disclaimer before he got to the review, which was: “But it's actually OK. In fact, it's pretty good.”
If I won over the journalists, then I figured I did a good job because they're the ones who are going to be the most critical about it, and sceptical that it should exist. So the fact that it got pretty good reviews on that and I did OK.
E: What was the extent of the initial reception? Was there a good reception to the book when it first came out
T: I think one of the best compliments is a lot of people, you know, they saw the Gilliam film, and if they were fans of the book first, they might have felt a little cold on it and said that it felt more like the book or the spirit of the book than the Gilliam film. I felt good about that, I mean, it felt like in that sense, I'm using Hunter's words, but I'm capturing a visual side to it that, which hopefully underscores and draws attention to the writing as well, as opposed to detracting from it. Just make something a little bit truer to the book and give it a second life for a new audience in a different format but with there still being a lot of reverence for the source material. People who've read it said that they liked it more than the movie in a lot of cases, which was a great compliment.