"It's like a grotesqueness I can't help but find really beautiful," suggests Dave Cooper, the Ottawa artist who created them both in his celebrated comic series Ripple. "The biggest inspiration I get is going to the mall and looking at all the white trash. It just blows my mind."
Dave has been drawing since he was 11. He worked professionally through the 1980s, and finally became a comic legend during the 1990s, when he had his epiphanies at the mall, found his voice and created mini opuses with names like Suckle and Crumple (which was about a helpless young man gradually realising a secret cult of lesbians were about to eliminate the male race).
"Most of the stories I write are very stream-of-consciousness," he tells us over the phone from his Ottawa home. "Most of them are based on dreams or things that have happened to me, but I twist them up, shuffle them around. I tend to make them pretty perverted and graphic."
It was 1999's Weasel series, which recently came to a sticky end with the fifth and final issue, that spewed out Dave's best work. Within in it are three very different little masterpieces. There are the nightmarish, alien adventures of google-eyed oddball Eddy Table, who climbs out from the cleavages of enormous Amazon women and accidentally mutilates a horse. There's the Encyclopedia Nonsensica, an intricately designed manual for imaginary bizarre objects resembling strange body parts and extravagant machines (mostly of a sexual nature).
But the main draw in Weasel is Ripple. Described by Dave as "a tortured psychodrama", it relates the story of Martin the painter, who becomes obsessed with Tina, the aforementioned young lady whom he spots in a street, takes a shine to and asks to model for him. In between scoffing pizza she seduces him, and they begin a fiery relationship in which she definitely wears the trousers. She poses in corsets for him and admonishes his "hoity-toity" compliments ("Even when you talk about porn everything's gotta be all flowers and big fuckin' words. You can't just admit it gives you a big fuckin' boner so you can jerk off!!"). The more obsessed he becomes with her, the more she despises him. It doesn't have a happy ending.
"A lot of people think it's autobiographical, which it isn't," says Dave, although he did base Tina on a girl from high school. "Originally, it was gonna be an autobiographical story about one of my first romantic experiences as a teenager, but it ended up becoming so huge and it didn't have any focus so I dumped it. I ended up writing a more concise story that had twisted all those real elements into weird, more exaggerated versions."
Dave's contemporaries - the likes of Art Spiegelman (Maus), Peter Bagge (Hate) and Mike Mignola (Hellboy) all gush at the mention of his name, and so should you. Dave is now concentrating on painting and gallery shows, and you can see his work in some of the more surreal background landscapes of Matt Groening's Futurama, for which he contributed some designs. For a big Cooper fix, go to http://www.davegraphics.com, and click on the penis springing out from Dave's enormous mechanical brain. You'll feel better for it.
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