david lives: 


a studio visit 
with james romberger



by Walter Robinson






0n a snowy day in March (March!), I made 

my way past the drug dealers and wackos 

on Manhattan's scenic Avenue B to visit 

the legendary Lower East Side cartoonist

James Romberger. He's done strips for WW3

and shown at Borgenicht Gallery (which 

closed last year with the retirement of

Grace Borgenicht). Right now he's working 

on a show coming up probably next fall 

at Tibor de Nagy and preparing to 

celebrate the imminent publication of his

new comic, Seven Miles a Second, a 

collaboration with the late artist David 

Wojnarowicz (RIP 1992), whose 

autobiography provides the storyline, and 

with artist Marguerite Van Cook, who was 

the book's colorist (she's also his wife). 

"It's very high-key," James notes. 

"Retinal burn."Seven Miles is put out by 

Vertigo, DC's "literary" line. It costs $7.95 

and should be on sale in comics stores by 

the end of March. 


James is sitting at his tiny drawing desk

in his tiny cluttered tenement apartment, 

nursing a broken foot. He fell down the 

stairs. "I was sober as a judge," he 

claims, saying that he has to say that to 

everyone since "they all assume I was 

drunk. The stairs are rounded, actually, 

they're dangerous." James is boyishly 

handsome, with long sandy hair, and talks 

with eagerness and humor. Looming over him 

is a huge branch, painted with colored 

bands and starry scenes of outer space, a 

work Wojnarowicz had made for a show at 

the Paladium nightclub. He shares the 

apartment with Marguerite and their kid 

Crosby, who is 10 and obsessed with 

Goosebumps, this line of kid horror-

books by R.L. Stine. "Marguerite," James 

asks, "are you going to go down to the 

bodega and get me some cigarettes?" 


Speaking as someone who has totally lost

interest in comics but has a substantial 

collection of 15-year-old X-Men and Conan 

the Barbarian titles in boxes somewhere, I 

can call this a great piece of work. The 

art is perfect and the story is the truth 

that gives it a rare power. It features 

true stories from David's youth--he was nine 

when he first had sex--and some of the 

kind of political rabble-rousing that got 

him in trouble as an AIDS activist. For 

those of you that came in late,

Wojnarowicz became the focus of 

controversy over an NEA grant for the 

catalogue to a 1988 show at Artists' Space 

in New York, in which he attacked the 

Catholic Church for its position on 

homosexuality; he subsequently sued Rev. 

Donald Wildmon and the American Family 

Association for its unauthorized use of

his work in an anti-gay pamphlet. After a 

headline-grabbing court battle, 

Wojnarowicz won a $1 punitive award. "I 

remember David saying how happy he was 

that NEA gave him this money," James said. 

"He had a picture of Christ and Sgt. Rock 

banging it up. He kenw he was going to get 

in trouble."


Looking at Seven Miles, which includes a 

few pictures of David himself, I say I miss

him. "We keep trying to bring him back to 

life for Pat Buchanan, now that he's running 

for president" James says. "Buchanan used 

to attack David in his Post column all the

time." 


"There's a possiblility of some controversy 

in the Bible Belt," he hazards, noting that a 

comic shop in Florida had been busted for 

selling a DC comic that showed how to use 

a rubber by picturing it on a banana. In 

Seven Miles there's a story in which 

a middle-class businessman picks David up

at the Times Square Nathan's and takes him 

to a hotel room and gives him a blowjob. 

It's discreet, hidden with his hand--"in my 

understanding of porno," James says, "it's 

about that inch of flesh"--but the idea 

should be enough to blow a gasket. 


"Actually David said how the bald guy in the

comic helped him out, took him to museums

and taught him about art. Meanwhile he was 

a full pedophile," James said. "I remember

when Father Bruce Ritter was in the news 

(forced to resign as head of Covenant House 

in a scandal over homosexual liaisons with 

young runaways), David said, he was a good 

guy. But the book's not supposed to be 

prurient, or defending what happens in the 

stories. It's about abuse. Nathan's is closed, 

finally, after all those years. It was a dump," 

said James, who went there with David and 

took some snapshots for reference when they 

were working on the comic together. 

"Downstairs was like hell...it was a filter

for abuse."


What are you doing now, I ask. "Gallery stuff. 

And waiting for DC to give us more work." If 

Seven Miles sells more than 15,000 

copies he gets a royalty. Romberger had been 

drawing a second book, called Jezebel's 

Virtues, written by former X-Men 

editor Ann Nocenti, about a prostitute. But 

it was cancelled by DC after he had worked 

his ass off for 70 pages. "There was a big 

comic book war after DC killed off 

Superman. A couple months ago," James 

explains. "Marvel fired half their people, DC 

cut back. They called up with good news and 

bad news--and the bad news is very bad. 

Come in and pick up your check, but it's the 

last one. It was a tremendous amount of work 

to go to waste--they spent about $25,000 on 

the project."


Now it's work on "gallery stuff." He

showed three times at Borgenicht since 

1988; his last show at Grace's was about 

the Gulf War mess. "Borgenicht did right by 

me. Even when they weren't selling they

gave me money. And when she went out of 

business, she took drawings for the money I 

owed her and gave them to museums. I have 

work all over now, at the Met, the Brooklyn

Museum, the Parrish." Now he's working for a 

show at Tibor de Nagy--"East Village Scene, 

landscapey stuff, tropical looking rubble.

And pictures of the Crusties." Crusties are 

the hippies of the `90s, East Village 

style--those white beggars with the 

piercings and dreadlocks who combine an 

advanced sense of style with a pronounced 

dirtiness. "Perfect for me," James says, 

"I'm really good at drawing dirty things." 

They beg for money, Marguerite says, and 

then when they have a few dollars go buy a 

big shake from Ray's for the sugar rush.

"You think they're stoned," she says, "but 

they're just strung out on sugar."


We used to wonder what he'd do with the 

money David earned hustling, James said, so 

I asked him. "He'd hang around with his 

buddy, when they had enough money from 

hustling they'd get on a bus and go to the 

country for the day.