RGFS.NET: In 1976, you attended the opening year of the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon & Graphic Art Inc. along with fellow artists Steve Bissette, Rick Veitch, and Larry Loc, among others. Your classrooms were in the Mansion; first year, you were on the main floor, and with the arrival of the new class in the fall of 1977 (including John Totleben, Marc Vargas, Tom Marnick, Tom Mandrake, Jan Duursema, and many more), you were moved up to the second floor. I was wondering what your thoughts were of those early days spent living and studying at the renowned Art School, and your thoughts on Joe Kubert and his art school?

GRIMES: "We were all different ages and backgrounds, groping for our little niche and sense of each other. Trying to put on or rustle up artistry, (whatever that was), for our teachers and each other. Or giving them spare with our disgruntlements. Some came in more ready to pull from it all the could. A very few went by the wayside early on, either because they knew it wasn't for them or they saw the 'handwriting' on their wall. It sometimes had it's own organic mayhem, fun and bloodless. Some stepping, deliberately and not, on each others egos - too many cats in the same bag. But, it always felt like something novel was happening. A unique combination of patterns, forces and surroundings not to be repeated.

For me, coming out of high school hunched over like an emotional paralytic, it was an escape to a place where at least a small multitude of creatively-minded others could share something, however awkwardly.

A new place and my first deep snows. A town small enough you could walk all around and, (then), see all the older style houses and buildings. It was exciting that. Fuel for personal myth and story birthings.

You could almost miss it!"

The school building itself:

Drawing boards, but many repainted rooms, mostly empty.
2nd floor: sun porch, seldom used; a room with 'three fold' corner mirrors; a few mattresses for us, early on.
third (top) floor: small, gable windowed rooms; closet doors in sloping ceiling walls; and an empty storage (?) room with planks missing off the dark-green-painted walls, makeshift (?) pullknob drawers added in, here and there! also a small quarters in back with bathroom; dumbwaiter doors sealed shut; and a twist of a servants' 'hidden' staircase back down to the mostly modernised kitchen.
even-less-used, glassed-in side porch with heavy woodwork exterior; short hall between library room and office.
'front' porch with closed in foyer and payphone. Outside it was angled slightly to face high hill on one side; a 'drop-off'.
swimming pool with gazebo to one direction, around back.
in the other direction, long curving driveway back to:

'carriage house' (over double garage) apts.:

divided into two sides, with two narrow staircases running up both sides of dividing wall;
to 'first' and then, again, an even narrower staircase to the top floor - attic rooms under the peak of the roof...
our side covered in thin boarding; Veitch and I cannot stand ('cousin itt' style) up straight except directly under the peak.
necessarily, mattresses without bed frames.
a few small squared-off wood-covered doors with coat hangers inside little 'rooms'.
carpet at your fingertips. nails exposed in certain places.

one window, with view of school, where made up Head Cheese story.

You could almost miss it!" -- (December 22nd, 2008).

RGFS.NET: What do recall about having the legendary cartoonist Hy Eisman as your teacher at the Kubert Art School? (Hy has been a teacher at the school ince 1976, and is the current (as of 2006) writer and artist of the Sunday strips The Katzenjammer Kids and Popeye).

GRIMES: "Hy was always earnest to have us be diverse in comics, to bypass the types of knocks he'd already endured. I wanted to oblige, but it just wasn't in me. I used to put Weird Dick in most of my first year assignments. Probably exasperating.

Ric Estrada probably understood more what I was about. Hy understood my hanging on to one character and that wish alot of us have to come up with something unique. But, he still wanted something else out of me that just wasn't going to happen.

I'm glad he's finally gotten some of the recognition he more than earned, beyond what we know.

I'd still be an anomaly to him." -- (December 22nd, 2008).

Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art: www.kubertsworld.com.