Cartoonist tackles alienation, sex and confusion

Photo: Philip Liborio Gangi

Lev Yilmaz gets back to the old drawing board at his Richmond District home.

by Dmitry Kiper

When Lev Yilmaz applied to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, he had no aspiration to become an artist. He played guitar and sang.

"I wanted to be a musician," said Yilmaz. "All the cool rock stars go to art school first."

But during his second year at the school he lost interest in playing music and decided to pursue art. The school emphasized experience, as opposed to theory. Yilmaz's collection of short animated films, "Tales of Mere Existence," recently finished showing at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival. The series is still available on DVD along with a comic book that bears the same name.

"Tales" is brutally autobiographical. All the comics and cartoons, which vary in length from 30 seconds to three minutes, explore issues of "confusion, sex and alienation." The subject matter lives up to Yilmaz's slogan for the series: "Stuff you think but don't talk about." He greatly admires the "Life in Hell" comic series of Matt Groening, creator of "The Simpsons."

Yilmaz, who is in his yearly 30s, has light azure eyes and hanging black hair. His attitude, like that of The Dude in "The Big Lebowski," is relaxed, and his speech is warm, yet blunt.

"Art is a form of communication," he said. "For me it's never really been about aesthetics."

His technique is pretty simple - filming a sequence of sketches, which he is continuing to draw as he's filming - and costs only $15 an episode to produce. He also uses his deep baritone as the voice for his cartoons.

In one cartoon, he recalls his job as a cashier at a coffee shop. The film describes how Yilmaz and the guy who worked the other cash register would try to time their dealings with customers in order to get the good looking girl waiting in line to come to him and not the other guy.

In another cartoon, titled "Redrum," Yilmaz describes a trip to a local corner-store. He asks the owner for a bottle of Redrum: "A rum that doesn't taste very good, but I buy it anyway because it's got a cool bottle." After two months, he manages to drink only half of the rum. "

Every time I go in there, the guy and all his kids ask, 'No Redrum today sir?'"

Some of Yilmaz's cartoons are very sexual, but mostly in dialogue, since the animation is very simple, almost primitive. In "Jealous," Yilmaz opens with "I try not to think about my ex-girlfriends too much, but when I do, I know that this is what Carol and her boyfriend do." A sequence of a dozen Kama Sutra-like positions grace the screen as Yilmaz continues to name his ex-girlfriends (whose names have been changed).

Generally, writing about cartoons always leaves something out, because so much depends on the voices, timing and facial expressions of the characters.

Yilmaz came to San Francisco in the late '90s. In 2000, the animation company he worked for went belly up, but he decided to stay in the City. A few years later, he began work on "Tales of Mere Existence." He put the cartoons and comics on his Web site and had his cartoons shown at various festivals.

There is, unfortunately, no correlation between festival fame and monetary gain, he said. That's when he got the idea of creating a comic book.

His comics are equal in humor and honesty to his animated shorts. In a comic called "Untitled," the main character says to himself, "I'm a horrible person of no virtue or worth." The reader then sees a series of women complimenting the guy. He says nothing in reply, until a woman says to him: "You're a horrible person of no virtue or worth." He replies. "I love you."

Yilmaz said he is interested in exploring "self-sabotage with a sense of humor."

"I have no interest in cheap laughs," Yilmaz said. "To me, the best humor is based on psychology - people's conflicts between themselves."

At first, "Tales" seemed one-dimensional to him, but he eventually got curious to see "how far I could take it." The first volume of the book and DVD came out in 2003; the second came out a year later. Some of his cartoons premiered on Comedy Central a year ago and have been running late at night ever since. The network is planning to make his cartoons available for the video iPod - an idea that Yilmaz is enthusiastic about.

"My stuff is perfect (to watch on an iPod) for people coming home drunk from a party knowing they're not going to be getting laid."

His burgeoning popularity hit a new high six months ago. The new comic book and DVD, "Tales of Mere Existence II," sold well, and he began to get more freelance work. Also, he began to receive more feedback from fans.

"I get e-mails from a lot of alienated high school kids. I dig that a lot," Yilmaz said.

After posting a cartoon about writing an e-mail to a girl he met at a bar - the cartoon revolves around Yilmaz trying to find the right balance of words in order not to seem too desperate or too uptight - his fans asked him how that went. When asked if he has a style, he said, "Probably," but didn't elaborate as to what he thought it was.

"In some ways, it's bad for an artist to know what their style is. As soon as I come up with a formula, I get bored. In order to keep it interesting, it has to keep evolving."

His new creation, "Tales of Mere Existence III," will be released in March.

For more information on Yilmaz's art or to view his comics and cartoons, go to his Web site at ingredientx.com.