T. Edward Bak’s mini-comic, Service Industry, floored me when I read it last year. It was a thoughtful, highly personal comic that showed a maturity and level of craftsmanship that took me unawares.
Now Bodega has released a larger, slightly fancier version of the comic. Tom Spurgeon took the book’s re-release as an opportunity to interview the artist:
SPURGEON: Can you tell me how Service Industry started in terms of the concept involved?
BAK: Originally, the idea came from how I had been working in food service and hospitality since high school, off and on, odd jobs. After FLUKE I finally did land a decent job working in a public library. I was also working nights in a restaurant in downtown Athens. I’d had this idea for many years, that it would be great to have something set in a restaurant, a day to day kind of thing. I wanted to do a strip about this and started working on this idea with this ensemble cast, all these great characters. All these interactions. But none of that actually worked out in the strip. I kept writing this autobiographical stuff over and over. I never had the chance to put these characters in there.It ended up being a monologue with the occasional character popping in and saying something. Then for a while it had an anti-war angle because for the first time since high school I was fired up about what was going on. It was so mind-boggling. I started reacting to that stuff in the comic strip. I wanted to do something more autobiographical, more about me and my life. I started working on this story and wanted to examine some personal stuff. I had nothing to lose, so I could throw everything at it. It was very stressful. When it was finished I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown, actually. But it turned out OK. It enabled me to clear some family cobwebs out, too.
