So why, then, did I enjoy looking at this?

Could it be because I am a sick person hiding beneath the mask of a sage psychiatrist who spends his weekdays strategically positioned on the "sane" side of a consulting room? No, that would be far too simple and simple-minded an explanation, not to mention I really am mentally healthy! And that would totally miss the creativity and insight the artist brings to bear with his pen and paper, a fearless if neurotic and obsessive working through of intense despair. Although some of the violent images were hard to bear, and the course language seemed a bit much at times, Ivan Brunetti is clever and funny as hell and his avatar, an appealingly hideous bearded man, takes us through some truly profound thoughts, an "ecstatic lucidity that, ironically, only comes in my darkest moments."

In one series the character moves through a string of unflattering actions: straining naked on the toilet; squeezing a pimple on his paisley-shaped nose which we see in a kind of magnified close-up over nine panels; lying anergically under the covers as his wife entreats him to get out of bed; philosophizing about suicide while applying deodorant; getting dressed as he argues with an irreverent Jesus. Cartooning as an art form does not necessarily spring to mind for most people when imagining fine art, profound emotion or the philosophical or existential. But this prejudice I am convinced comes out of blind habit, which fails to consider the raw power embedded within an intrinsically unpretentious, and often shockingly direct form of expression. I was curious to see whether this kind of art was helpful in some way to the artist, or to those who read it.

More recently Mr. Brunetti edited the two-volume An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories (Yale University Press, 2006 and 2008) and his latest incarnation of Schizo, number four, won the 2006 Ignatz award for Outstanding Comic of the Year. He is on the faculty of Columbia College Chicago. What follows is my conversation with Mr. Brunetti on December 1st, 2010.

Jeremy Spiegel: What was going on for you at the time you were creating what became the content of Misery Loves Comedy?

Ivan Brunetti: It was a painful time period. I wanted to get as much on paper as I could. I could never do that again as I had then. Those comics that come out of 1993-1998 and the drawings document that five or six year period of my life. I can't say now I'm problem free. Now life is not so bad, I'm not as angry a person, I'm dealing with my issues, and seen various psychiatrists and therapists since then. My drawings look a lot differently now. I drew the cover for The New Yorker magazine, books, and Schizo the fourth issue came out five years ago. Now I'm still kind of depressed but not as angry, but I'm no longer on any medications for depression.

JS: There are some who might say this guy's depressed so the depression is at work here and somehow deny you the creator of the full credit you deserve for realizing these masterpieces. Would these works be different if you were in different mood states while you made them? Or is that just a naive way of thinking about how this is created?

IB: To say depression created the art is false. It is an act of will, the illness does not cause the art. To make art it is an act of will to fight demons that I'm battling at the time. The depression is not creating anything. It did, though, give me a different perspective. The depression is not a spur to action. It takes a lot of willpower to get through depression to draw or to get creative and it doesn't help to create anything. Although yes, you are maybe more of an observer of life, it depends on what kind of depression you have. It is so debilitating. If you step outside of enough to see what is going on-you need to step outside of the depression, outside of yourself to see. Depression will swallow it all up and so by itself I am not a conduit for the depression to create art. The person has to do it.

JS: In principle as an artist one can say that you have a certain amount of freedom that the rest of us don't and so therefore can express the inexpressible regardless of its content. Id, the shadow self, violence, fear, what we may keep hidden an artist can bring more readily out into the open. But what you bring out into the open-and some of it is really delightfully twisted-seems that has universality, not that most people would readily admit to it. This is why I think the work is remarkable. My role in my profession shapes or can shape-prescribes and proscribes-I might write or say, without say, losing my license or my credibility.

IB: A lot of effort is expended to make sense of what you're going through. Part of the period of time I was manic and then did help me get things done as the anger was fueling me. The work was not consciously planned out. I was just trying in the moment to be honest about what I was experiencing, and trying to have a sense of humor about it.

JS: As you write where does the audience come into play? Are you thinking of them and who are they?

IB: I did not have an audience in mind. In my mind twenty-five people were looking at it-they were my friends. I just felt like making some comics. I never imagined they would get beyond the few people I knew. It was a different world back then. It was a small community of then self-published ‘zines, which have since been replaced by blogs. Twenty years ago you really had to work to find other weirdos. I'd meet a few people and thought I'd Xerox a few copies to a few cartoonists I'd corresponded with. I found a publisher years later who called out of nowhere and I came up with new material for the first issue of Schizo. It was not planned out in advance. Now there was this audience of other people, who read underground comics, but even that freaked me out. People reading it and sending me letters-three thousand people-it was all unexpected. There's about six thousand copies [of Misery Loves Company]. The disturbing images are easily taken at face value. In the work I could wring the last few drops out of my id. I don't want [the book] to have a large distribution.

JS: You described how life has improved since Misery Loves Comedy and you're less depressed and less angry, so I wonder if a kind of working through occurred in the process of creating? And are you aware of a healing benefit for any readers of the book?

IB: People told me it helped them I hear even now in the occasional email or letter. It helped them when they were going through a really depressing time or difficult time. I don't know what it did for them but people got something out of it. Maybe I'm delusional but maybe there's something useful about the work. But there are not a lot of people that would understand this material. This is not an easily analyzed work. I didn't know what was compelling me, but it was some kind of healing process. It was therapeutic for me to make it. Now I can't even look at it at all. I can ‘t ever judge it now. I can't separate the work from my experience at the time. And what I'm still going through. It was torturous and so it's hard to separate from that torturous feeling and look at it aesthetically.