Classic connections: Kazazis '04 shares common heritage with his work

Like most cartoonists, Alex Kazazis '04 can't keep his hands still. They're constantly doodling — on scratch paper, napkins, paper tablecloths at restaurants, in notebook margins. "You get lost in the depths of how hard you're working," he says. "You never notice two, three, eight hours go by." His illustrations and comic strips, featured in Tiger Magazine and The Daily Princetonian, are the fruits of these hours of endeavor.

The drawing bug bit Kazazis early. "As a kid, I drew mainly people," he recalls. "That is to say — some of the 'people' were actually monkeys, or dogs, or rainclouds with human expressions." Google-eyed rainclouds notwithstanding, he has always been partial to drawing homo sapiens. At age eight, he drew his first comic strips, featuring casts of squabbling brothers, pirates, and knights. Aside from some brief formal training with still lifes, nude models, and architectural drawing, he is self-taught.

Kazazis is not an avid reader of mainstream comic books — "at least not the ones of people ripping limbs off each other," he says. "I'm definitely more into 'cartooning' per se: less violence, more humor. I also love verbosity — those cartoons that turn everything into a discussion."

His tastes range from the acerbic political satire of Tom Tomorrow's "This Modern World" and Ruben Bolling's "Tom the Dancing Bug" to "Beavis and Butthead." "I love the fact that it has heroes who are pathetic . . . not to mention visually hideous."

But his favorite is, unsurprisingly, "Calvin and Hobbes." He deeply admires the creator, Bill Watterson, also a self-taught artist: "It was so original for him to use the fantasy perspective — making the fantasy [of Spaceman Spiff or Tracer Bullet] look real, then deflating it in the last panel. It was a trademark of his. No cartoonist had ever used it before."

Kazazis occasionally turned to magic realism while working on his own major project: an autobiographical comic strip in Greek, which he drew from the ages of twelve to nineteen. Over the course of six hundred six-panel strips, Kazazis, who was born and raised in Greece, chronicled adolescence and the rigors of the Greek education system, where students take fifteen classes at a time and spend much of their time in a scholastically induced haze.

"It's a system that is extremely rigorous and oppressive," he says. Accordingly, much of the material lampooned the anxieties of Greek students. In the cartoon's world, teachers were transformed into walking skeletons and juggling clowns, and classes such as Ancient Greek were reimagined as fantastical executions.

Kazazis sketched and wrote dialogue constantly, often instead of doing homework. "It was a very verbose strip," he says. "I'd like to think some of the experiences it characterized were universal."

When Kazazis came to Princeton, the strip came with him; the culture shock of the transition from Greece provided ample raw material. Kazazis poked fun at American mores until he began to feel his own perspective changing: "I was gradually becoming more American myself." He discontinued the strip after a year here, although he plans eventually to publish it.

Meanwhile, he has embarked on other projects, illustrating the editorial page of The 'Prince' and drawing the strips "Adventures of Rockman" and "Inspector Proctor" for the Tiger. One other aspect of college proved a minor annoyance: In Greece, Kazazis had been accustomed to drawing in his textbooks. "And then I came to Princeton . . . and there were no more pictures in my textbooks. No more people to turn into vampires."

As we talk, he scribbles swiftly on a napkin, producing what appears to be a giant nose sitting at a bar. "See his posture, the inclination of the head, the position of his arm? Can you see the outline of the man?" Suddenly, I do. "That's all you need to have an expressive cartoon. Cartooning is all about fooling around and making art simpler . . . less is often better. A drawing like this is obviously not the equivalent of high art, but in a twisted and warped way it actually is."

"Ultimately," says Kazazis, "all aesthetic art has its roots in the ancient world."

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However remote the relationship, ancient Greek art is the ancestor of the Greek cartoon. The genealogy is clear: The art of antiquity inspired the sculpture, drawing and painting of the Renaissance, and cartooning itself evolved from the Renaissance sketching tradition, as artists abstracted selected elements from traditional art, simplifying and streamlining images. Kazazis calls cartooning "the runaway child of traditional art." His own published illustrations parodying ancient Greek vase paintings are just one example of the impudence of this youthful art form.

Kazazis is set on a career in art, whether in cartooning, advertising, book illustrating, or computer and video game animation: "There's a beautiful, glorious escapism in that particular art form which has been going on since cave paintings."

However, his first love remains drawing by hand — in ink, in microscopic detail, carefully delineating human features. "Humans are where it's at," he says, handing me a folder of drawings featuring minutely detailed sketches of freckled policemen, gangly physicians, medieval maidens feeding turtledoves, nerds, devils, men in flowing wigs, satyrs in waistcoats, William Shakespeare, Russell Crowe, and a quartet of wizened fiends in hoods.