By Thom Fowler
October 17, 2003
Rob Regar Takes a Crack at Understanding his Frankenstein Monster, Emily the Strange
In Emily’s world, you are the intruder – the enemy of light, shattering the peaceful dark of her secret inner world. Her only friends are her four black cats. Emily is, of course, 13 years old. The strange little girl first appeared in San Francisco in the late `90s and has grown way past her original line of t-shirts to a whole world of, as they say in the business, product. But as a fan, I like to say, “More opportunities to spend time with the girl that doesn’t want to spend time with anybody.”
The Emily iconography (as I am now calling it) appeals to my own reformed Goth iconoclastic aesthetic but she’s leapt the subcultural divide and landed in malls, attracted the attention of the popular press and mainstream entertainment companies and she’s even insinuated herself into Japanese pop culture.
She’s a bad-ass whut don’t take no lip from you. Outside of the sheer aesthetic value of Emily’s look, she also comes with a message of rebellion and iconoclasm as an important and necessary part of life. She’s on her own trip and she don’t need you butting in to ruin it for her. She’s trapped in her 13-year-old world and she doesn’t like what she sees. In some ways, she’s like Lydia, Winona Ryder’s character in BEETLEJUICE and heroine to goth girls everywhere.
If art imitated life, art would be kinda boring, convoluted, messy, and incoherent. Art, like religion, reaches from “out there” to give us humans a vision to aspire to and our attempts to imitate that art have added a rich texture to the human experience. Emily is a template for the saturnine aspects of our personalities that are repressed by a culture that asks everyone to be smiley, happy people. Emily gives me an outlet for my own surliness when it’s not appropriate to inflict that surliness on others. Professionalism is a soul-killer but oh so necessary.
I hate being a grown up.
The Emily The Strange website is more than just an online catalog and virtual store – it’s loaded with Emily-themed fun and games that have their own entertainment value. While Rob Reger, the creator of Emily and founder of the company Cosmic Debris, which also puts out Oopsy Daisy, Yum Pop and Bon Bon, has to pay the rent, he’s keeping it all about the love. Rob is definitely a point in the matrix of my ideal social fabric and we talked about art and commerce, growing up and starting a business and together we tried to crack the mystery of Emily.
Thom: How did Emily the Strange start?
Rob Reger: Originally it was a skateboard design that my friend Nathan did and I asked him if I could print a shirt of it and then I started doing more shirts based on that. It all started out in Santa Cruz, California.
Thom: How did you end up in Oakland?
Rob: I went to San Francisco to get my MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. I met my key artist Brian Brooks at the Art Institute.
Thom: Is he the one that came up with the Emily iconography?
Rob: We worked in tandem. We worked on five or ten shirts together and then I asked Brian to come out from Boston to work on Emily full time.
Thom: Is it just the two of you who come up with all the designs?
Rob: Nowadays it’s quite a big team. We have a primary Emily illustrator, this girl, Grace Fontaine. She draws almost all the Emily figures. It’s primarily Grace, Brian and I that do the concepting for the t-shirt designs. As far as web graphics, I have another illustrator, Buzz Parker.
For the second book, it was pretty much all me and Buzz, it was all my concept and then I hired Buzz to do a lot of the illustration. I did some and then Grace and other people did a bit also. The first book was a compilation of everything we had done to date. And I just put it into a book form. Buzz does all the web graphics as well. All the really crazy background bedroom scenes and stuff, the really intricate stuff, that’s all Buzz.
Thom: Who did the photo comic strip?
Rob: That was the idea of a film director, Rodney Asher. It was his concept. As far as the art direction and lay out and stuff, that was all me.
Thom: So you were like the producer?
Rob: Yeah, He was the director, and I was the producer. Rodney actually storyboarded his ideas first and he took the photographs. And then I made the book from that.
Thom: Are you hands on with the creative aspects of the company?
Rob: Absolutely, every little bit. I have my two cents or more in there.
Thom: Is Emily an extension of your personality? How did she develop as a character for you?
Rob: That’s how it pretty much molded itself in the beginning. The very beginning, I didn’t see it as anything more than some cool t-shirts. I didn’t identify with the character so much as I was making a character that girls identified with. When me and Brian started working together and we were able to break her out of the frame border and add the little sentences about her that we started putting punk rock band influences and art aesthetics that we grew up loving from looking at punk rock records. We started infusing all that in. When she started becoming known as a character and we could built little stories around her, that’s when it really started taking on all the stuff I’ve been into since I was a kid.
A lot of us had similar isolated upbringings where we had our own little worlds we create and stuff.
Thom: And then somehow you all also discovered punk rock and skateboarding?
Rob: I grew up in the same town as Buzz. Buzz and I have known each since high school in Fullerton, California. It’s an unfortunate little town but there’s some good punk rock that came from there.
Thom: I know where that is. I lived in Anaheim until I was ten and I went to church in Fullerton.
Rob: What’s the name of it?
Thom: I don’t remember – Eastside Christian Church, I think.
Rob: I had to go to this church called First Fullerton Methodist Church or something.
Thom: There’s a lot of distance between me and my youth group past. That’s a whole other conversation.
Rob: That’s all kind of part of this. Emily finds her own religion within her mind and her creativity and creates her own world and her own reality and that’s what I hope to encourage people through this. That’s what I got out of people like Jello Biafra and Ian MacKaye when I was going through my impressionable period. They saved me when I was like 16 and told me I could think for myself.
Thom: There is an interview with Ian MacKaye in this month’s issue of HERBIVORE.
Rob: What’s that?
Thom: It’s a new vegan and vegetarian magazine for alternative culture types.
Rob: Wow, I didn’t know he was vegetarian.
Thom: Now you have to become vegetarian.
Rob: I have been for ten years. Brian and my other main artist is a vegan. Emily, in my mind, is an animal rights kind of girl, but at the same time she’s not afraid to skin a dead cat. Or drink a bowl of blood if she needs to. But she doesn’t like to kill ants if she doesn’t have to.
Thom: She only kills when necessary?
Rob: I guess so. She’s a cat so I guess she’s got to do some other stuff. Lines like that, serious political lines and sexual lines, we don’t even go there. There’s no point to take that stand. We are creating a world where that stuff doesn’t exist.
Thom: At least in the Emily world. And then Emily exists in other people’s worlds where all that stuff goes side by side, Emily included. You do play with a lot of interesting ideas through Emily, though. What are Emily’s core values?
Rob: Think for yourself, do it yourself.
Thom: What does Do It Yourself mean?
Rob: If you have an idea or you want something done, take care of business yourself. Make it yourself. Anything you can do for yourself, do it. Don’t rely solely on others. There is a point, certainly, where you have to ask for help and it’s good to ask for help on things and use other people’s expertise to get something done. But get the thing started yourself. Find your dream and do it. Start your own band. Make your own big wheel or whatever. “Be all you can be” is another phrase that sums it all up.
Thom: What kind of people are fans of Emily?
Rob: Everybody seems to identify with Emily on some strange level. The core of our fans that we make money off of is probably your 13-26 year old female. But I think everyone that works here at Cosmic Debris already knew of Emily and they liked her. They identifed with her in some way. I think it’s primarily female but that’s not to say there aren’t guys who identify with her values or just think that graphically it’s cool.
Thom: I love Emily. And I’m a guy. She’s a rareified version of a general pervasive attitude in my social world. I think it’s interesting that Emily has wide-spread pop appeal.
Rob: Yeah, she’s kind of all over the place and its funny because she represents that person that wouldn’t have that.
Thom: She’s the one that will be the loner and the isolate in high school.
Rob: But she’ll rule them from her dark underworld.
Thom: It’s like she represents the dark power of mystery. I don’t think about Emily this deeply but now that I’m conversation with her creator I’m exploring this a little. Do you think about these things yourself?
Rob: Definitely. Everything you can possibly think of in conjunction with her I’ve thought about and think about every day, twenty-four seven is where it’s at right now.
Thom: There is something unexpressed in our culture that the Emily character triggers in people. Not unexpressed, because Emily is that expression, but she represents the unexpressed and the shadowy saturnine aspects of personality facing the world rather than inward. We are all supposed to be solar personalities, radiating life and beaming happiness out into the world. The pressure to always smile and to always be cheerful is some kind of emotional tyranny, I think.
Rob: One good thing about Emily is that she’s kind of an ideal for me. A lot of times her standards are better than my own. Her way of dealing with something would be how I would deal with it in an ideal world. But I still have to make house payments and shit. Emily is a lot about how she responds to certain situations. We all have to be in certain surroundings. We maybe choose where we are but we can’t choose what’s going on around us all the time and you gotta deal with that stuff. Her way is to escape it by ignoring it or camouflaging it or changing it. She’s having fun fucking up the system.
Thom: Is that cathartic for teenager? When I was a teenager, my Emily was more like Siouxsie Sioux and then everything you project on that screen. So now, teenagers, teenage girls or whatever, have Emily, this icon of the dark, brooding isolate who’s a victim of the circumstances she can’t control. So there are all these other methods she uses for dealing with an environment she can’t step outside or get away from all the annoying people and all the stupid things in the world.
Rob: Yeah, so we have fun with dealing with that and telling people to get lost and stop bothering me. Keep your annoying self to yourself. It becomes fun and empowering to do that. There certainly wasn’t a clothing line that was saying that before. It just wasn’t the forum for doing that. You had a lot of music doing that before. I never thought you could use a clothing line as a billboard to make your statement and tell people to fuck off.
The philosophy is the heart that drives this thing. Emily is about the art and good graphic design as well. Honing it down to really good balanced layout so we can force people to focus on the issue at hand is all part of it too.
Thom: So the message is as much a part of the over all design as the pure pleasure of looking at the striking visuals?
Rob: They both drive each other. The reason they work is that they go hand in hand. One doesn’t outstretch over the other. It’s not just a shirt saying something, it’s a shirt that is beautiful to look at too.
Thom: The Emily story is told in all these vignettes, like the vignette of the sticker and the vignette of the pin and the vignette of the t-shirt and then you get the web site and there is more story around Emily.
Rob: That’s our outlet for all our new ideas. We are always trying to keep the website as a good entertainment spot for people who are into the character. A lot of stuff formulates there first before it hits anywhere else.
Thom: On the website, there is more of an overt spin on female empowerment. The skateboarding section features all women skateboarders and then there is the picture of Emily ollying on her skateboard. Why is it important for you to represent Emily as an icon of women’s empowerment among all her other attributes.
Rob: I don’t know. I like girls. It’s more fun designing for girls. I tried designing shirts for guys. It was fun stuff, very Cosmic Debris, but I was just selling to stoner guys. It’s probably that it’s just more lucrative focussing on the girls thing. There was a point about five years ago that Emily could have been a total Satan-worshipper girl. None of that stuff was defined yet. Me and Brian sat down and I made a conscious decision to turn what could be a totally negative message into how that message is a positive message.
It’s more fighting for the underdog and the girl, as far as having a voice in the world, has been shown as weaker than the male. It’s more representative of fighting for the underdog, of the person who thinks they can’t do it and instead show them they can.
Thom: How did Emily change your life?
Rob: There was a point in time that it demanded so much of my resources. In the beginning I hired Brian on because I was more interested in painting than doing t-shirt designs. So that’s when I started hiring artist friends of mine who were brilliant artists but they were caught in crummy day jobs. In the beginning I was more interested in the art of Emily than the ideas and I had to make a decision. I’m going to be a painter or now just do my paintings for Emily. The last twenty-five paintings I’ve done have been Emily based paintings.
After Emily established herself it freed me to do other things. At first, we had to be very formulaic about the design and now that it’s caught on we are free to vary the style between artists.
As for how it changed my life, it took over my life.
Thom: Did you think this would be a path to your livelihood?
Rob: When I was 23 I decided I never wanted to work for anyone. I’m not sure if that was the best decision. Now I’m a boss of like 20 people. I always pictured it would pay the bills. I knew I would have rent covered every month. There are always milestones. For the first few years I was eating spaghetti three times a day. Me and Matt my business partner just totally stuck with it.
Thom: How does it feel to be able to take care of all these people with the company?
Rob: It feels good but it’s a responsibility I ultimately don’t like to have. It’s hard enough for me to worry about myself let alone everybody else.
Thom: The health of the business isn’t just your concern anymore. There are all these other people involved. Does that affect business decisions?
Rob: It has.
Thom: Do you ever get a chance to display any of your non-Emily art? Do you have time for that?
Rob: I do still. I’ve let a couple opportunities go by. My last show I showed my bad art collection rather than my true pictorial sensibilities. There are offers for that and I take them up every once in a while. There is a little joint in San Francisco, a total dive bar, called The Rite Spot, where I like to show my work. It’s kind of fun to show there.
On the business side, I have a business partner who has been with me. I was in Santa Cruz and started out in my garage and he joined me very shortly after I moved to San Francisco. As far as the company growing and Emily growing and all the different worlds growing.
Thom: Cosmic Debris has other lines also, right? Like Oopsy Daisy.
Rob: Oopsy, Yum Pop, Bon Bon.
Thom: I didn’t realize Oopsy Daisy was Cosmic Debris. I thought it was some giant corporate clothing company that saw how succesful the Emily brand was and they wanted to get their competitive knock-off into the market place.
Rob: That’s kind of how it happened. With the success of Emily, Noel and Brian on their own time created their own characters. Bon Bon was Noel’s reaction to the success of Oopsy Daisy and Emily.
Thom: Who is Noel?
Rob: Noel Tolentino. He was the first graphic designer I ever hired. He’s now the art director for Yum Pop. The reason we were able to introduce these other lines was because of what we had learned from the success of Emily.
My job is to keep making up a bunch of rad shit to sell and keep all that looking good and to keep the image of the company looking good and Brian’s job is to make it, sell it and distribute it.
Thom: What have had to learn about building a business?
Rob: Everything. I didn’t know anything. Neither of us did. We’ve been lucky. We’ve been listening to everyone we’ve been working with all along. The first half a dozen serious employees we’ve had we still have. We’ve always kind of worked with the crew.
Thom: At one point did you realize it was time to get a company health plan?
Rob: That’s more Matt’s side of the business. It was more than money. We’d shell out our last penny to get holographic glitter stickers. There were always these things I wanted to do like flocked posters. In the beginning it would be us emptying our bank accounts to do these things. I knew the kitcsch value of it would be cool enough that we’d be able to make our money back. We couldn’t afford to be OSHA compliant on everything.
Thom: Did the company bootstrap its way up or were you able to get loans or financing at some point?
Rob: We’ve never taken a loan for the company. We built it all from the first 50 bucks on a couple gallons of ink. We always invest the profits back into the company each year whether it’s new people, new equipment, new space or whatever.
Thom: That’s amazing.
Rob: We’ve had offers for people who want to be silent partners or acquire us.
Thom: Why have you been reluctant so far to do that.
Rob: Matt and I appreciate the power of approval. It’s hard enough for us to agree on things. To get other voices in there whose opinions are solely based on money and not aesthetics, that starts to become less fun for everybody, when every decision is based on the bottom line.
Thom: Now that you’ve built up a strong brand and a more corporate minded entity comes along and buys up Emily from you, what do you think could happen to the character and everything she represents?
Rob: I think some of the message would die.
Thom: We’re you surprised that were able to balance out the question of money with the aesthetics. Do you always let the aesthetic value lead?
Rob: Certainly not always. We have to pay the bills. We have some pretty serious overhead.
Thom: I’m going to fill out my application for Ghoul School badges.
Rob: That’s the kind of stuff we love. There’s no money in that but it’s just fun. It makes the program more real. We wanted to do some uniform-y clothes for the fashion side of things. I was like, “If we are going to go there, let’s just make it real.” Why not be real. Why not have a real club, rather than fake like you have a club. It’s more than just an interesting way of dressing. The patch means something for the Emily fan.
Thom: That’s what I love. The patches aren’t for sale. You have to actually earn the demerit badge and that changes the whole logic of a capitalist marketplace dynamic.
With Emily there is a focus on real, meaningful, personal cultural concerns that are outside of the pure marketplace logic.
Rob: If you look at what you have to do to get them, they aren’t all that great – Take a picture of yourself in a graveyard. I think it’s cool. If any kid goes to a graveyard you end up thinking about things like your destiny or other people’s. So we force a little bit of that on people. A lot of it is just tongue-in-cheek too.
Thom: You are providing the opportunity for people to have experiences, rather than just make purchases. It’s a way to get the Emily spirit. Like you did it for the love of it.
Rob: We like to keep it there. If that leaves then it might as well just be another Disney thing. We’ve turned them down a number of times. Nickeledeon, all the other big studios have approached us for movie deals and stuff and we didn’t feel comfortable if they weren’t going to treat the character with any kind of integrity so we turned them down.
We’ve been finding some good partners lately, so hopefully we’ll have something in the big real soon.
Thom: With clothes? Or other media?
Rob: Yeah, with entertainment stuff.
Thom: Cartoons?
Rob: Who knows.
Thom: That will be exciting to see what happens.
Thom: What are some of the more unusual things you’ve gotten?
Rob: I’ve got a stack of stuff in front me. Some girl sent us a custom dartboard with a picture of ex-boyfriend in the middle with a hundred darts stuck in it. We got a tombstone rubbing from Jimi Hendrix’s grave, that was pretty cool. Just really creative stuff that people put in a lot of time to make the art.
Thom: Who filters all that and makes the decisions to send the badges or not?
Rob: Mainly our friend Jen in Arcata, California where the website is run. We’ve had thousands and thousands of entries.
Thom: This is a long-ass interview and I want to publish the whole thing so we better wrap before it gets too unweildy. Thanks for taking the time to talk.
Rob: No problem.
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