From fans who watched in awe as he defeated opponent after opponent in the ring to those who knew him on a personal level, stories about Andre the Giant are as abundant as his enormous frame was. But despite the legend this real-life giant has left behind, an accurate and entertaining story that goes beyond his wrestling career hadn’t been told until the recent release of Andre the Giant: Life and Legend, a graphic novel that ventures into Andre‘s childhood, his hardships, his triumphs and everything in between. While you might expect Andre’s story to be best told by someone from within the wrestling industry, an award-winning cartoonist named Box Brown, previously known for quirky comics such as Bellen! and Love Is a Peculiar Type of Thing, is the one who has been able to portray the always-interesting life of a world-traveling giant with the unbiased poignancy and celebration deserving of such a unique creature. Before his appearance at the AJC Decatur Book Festival Aug. 29-31, Brown talks to Wrestling with Pop Culture about his attraction to professional wrestling and how he ended up being the one to tell Andre’s tall tale.
According to the bio in the back of the book, you’re a lifelong professional wrestling fan. What was it that initially attracted you to wrestling?
The way I first started getting into it was a friend of mine, when I was a little kid in fourth grade, used to bring his copies of WWF Magazine and Pro Wrestling Illustrated to school and we’d always read those. The first event I remember seeing was WrestleMania VI, Hulk Hogan vs. Ultimate Warrior. Something profoundly struck me watching that pay-per-view and from that moment on I was hooked.
That’s still probably my favorite WrestleMania match and one of my favorite matches of all time.
It was so good! Warrior was so big at the time and just watching Hulk Hogan lose – my friend was a bigger fan than I was at the time and he was so upset that Hulk Hogan lost. I think he locked himself in the bathroom and cried for a little while.
Do you think there are any kids that saw this year’s SummerSlam and reacted that way when Brock Lesnar defeated John Cena?
I don’t know. I wonder. It was such a devastating beating. Hogan almost won, but with Cena it was a total squash. If a majority of Cena’s fan base is 5, I would imagine they were pretty upset watching him get destroyed like that.
Was Andre the Giant still involved in wrestling when you started watching it?
Yeah. Actually, WrestleMania VI was kind of his last WrestleMania moment when he turned back to babyface. We went into WrestleMania VI as a Tag Team Champion with Haku, the Colossal Connection. They lost to Demolition and at the end Andre turned on Bobby Heenan and the crowd cheered and he left on the motorized cart.
Was that the first time you had seen him wrestle?
No. I guess I had been following wrestling on TV up to that moment. So I’d seen him and Haku as the Tag Team Champions. This was in 1990 and I would always rent wrestling VHS tapes from the video store. So I was catching up on WrestleMania III, WrestleMania IV and all these things that had come out on VHS before my time.
Oh, I rented a lot of wrestling tapes as a kid, too.
I think a lot of people’s experiences were similar. I would go to the supermarket with my mom once a week and I would always run straight to the magazine area and read all the Pro Wrestling Illustrateds and all the wrestling magazines. I’d flip through every one and beg my mom to let me get one of them.
The book begins with you explaining how wrestling works, then it concludes with a glossary of wrestling terminology. When did you become aware of all these insider terms and wrestling’s inner workings?
When the Internet came around is when people started getting clued in on some of the pro wrestling terms. It wasn’t until a lot of these pro wrestling shoot interviews started being released that you started really hearing the way the wrestlers used these terms and how they would apply them to regular life. I always find that to be super interesting when wrestlers use the wrestling terms outside of the framework of professional wrestling. I remember watching this one interview and Scott Hall and Kevin Nash – or maybe it was X-Pac – were talking about Austin Powers and they referred to Dr. Evil as “the top heel” in Austin Powers. I always thought that was so funny. It’s a language, really. In a way, there are things that can only be expressed in wrestling language, and there are things that exist outside of pro wrestling, but there’s no way to describe them. There’s no way to describe kayfabe, even though kayfabe exists outside of pro wrestling in a million different ways. But it’s only through pro wrestling that we get that language.
You’re telling Andre’s story within a medium in which it is acceptable to, for lack of a better way to put it, keep kayfabe. Why did you choose to clue people in to how wrestling works and reveal all those aspects of the story rather than keeping it somewhat fantasy based?
There was an Andre biography that WWE put out and it was the least interesting book I ever read. All it does is describe the things we saw on TV, which are better experienced via watching them on TV. I didn’t want to do that at all. The thing that was interesting to me and what really got me into the idea of doing a book about wrestling was watching shoot interviews and hearing these stories about the things that went on behind the curtain. The nature of pro wrestling is to have something hidden from the audience. That, by nature, is interesting because you’re like, “What is this thing? What are they not showing me?” So the fact that all these people were coming out with these stories and breaking this years-old tradition of never cluing in the audience was really fascinating to me. And everybody has a story about Andre, so there was a lot of material.
Did you ever actually talk to Hulk Hogan or any of the other people that are mentioned in the book?
I never talked to Hogan. His stuff was taken from a 2007 interview that was on TV. I did talk to Blackjack Mulligan and Bill Eadie, who was The Masked Superstar and Ax in Demolition. Those were extremely interesting for me as a pro wrestling fan. Bill Eadie is a really genuine and really cool guy. He was really good about helping me understand the type of guy that Andre was. Bill was really easy to talk to. Blackjack was just crazy, man. It was wild talking to him. He is Blackjack Mulligan and he says whatever he wants and doesn’t care what he’s saying or who he’s offending. Or what he’s even talking about. It was difficult to even get a straight story or answer from him about the fight he had with Andre. But I was basically just confirming stuff and getting a little more background on the story because he’d already talked about it in his interview and written a book about it. So the story’s been out there and described a lot from his perspective.
With a lot of wrestlers, especially guys from that era, you can never quite tell when they’re being real with you or not. I think it comes from them being so embedded in that old-school mentality that they can’t even step outside of that.
I remember reading a story one time about a female wrestler that was famous back in the day. I don’t remember her name, but she went to her deathbed claiming that wrestling was real. She died never once admitting to anyone that it was a show of any kind.
You have to respect that, to some degree.
Yeah. It’s like magicians. A magician never reveals his tricks. And that’s the environment they were brought up in. Things are different now, but I still think there are ways to work the crowd and keep up kayfabe. You just have to do it in this particular environment. It’s a little bit more difficult and you need to be a little bit more nuanced about it. But it’s definitely possible.
I agree. A lot of people think it’s completely exposed now, so why even bother keeping anything hidden. But that takes a lot of the fun out of it when there are still ways to work the audience.
Totally. I mean, TMZ covers this stuff. So they could use TMZ easily. The best guys, I’m sure, are still working the crowd in their own way. I feel like Triple H is pretty good about working the Internet crowd and building a character while maintaining this real persona as an executive with the company.
There’s a scene in your book where Andre, as a teenager, meets Samuel Beckett. You talk about this meeting a little more in the Source Notes section at the end of the book, but I’m curious how you heard about this story and how accurate you think it might be.
I reached out to the person who wrote the first article about it, as far as I could tell. He said he had found it in this book that I couldn’t find a copy of. So I cited his article as a source. I don’t think he made it up. That wouldn’t really make sense. Why would you make that up? I think it’s generally considered to be true. And it would make sense. He lived in the area at the time. Part of the story is that Andre’s father worked on Samuel Beckett’s house. There’s no way we can know what they actually talked about. What they say is that Andre said all they ever talked about was cricket and sports. In the book I made it that they were talking about football or soccer because I feel like that is just as likely that they would talk about that. The other thing was I couldn’t write dialogue about cricket because I just don’t know enough about cricket at all to write any kind of realistic dialogue.
There’s another scene in the book after he starts wrestling where you show the marquee for two different matches. One is against Ivan Koloff and it reads “Sold Out”. The other is against Rick Martel and it reads “Tickets Available”. Was that some sort of comical jab at Martel?
No. I figured he might be around at that time. It was kind of to show that when [Andre] stayed in the same place for too long the spectacle kind of wore off. That’s why they moved him around the country and he would only come to your town once a year, so it was always a fascinating thing.
Speaking of traveling around the country, you will be at the Decatur Book Festival next weekend. What all will you be doing there?
I’ll be doing a presentation and taking questions, and I’ll be doing a signing there. You can listen to me talk about the book and make comments about Andre, then I’ll be signing copies of the book. You can pick it up right there.
Where will you be appearing after that?
I’ll be at the Small Press Expo in September. I’ll be at MICE in Boston, New York Comic Con and the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville in October. In November I’ll be at the Miami Book Fair and Comic Arts Brooklyn. So I have a bunch of stuff coming up in the fall.
What have you been working on since the Andre book was released?
I’ve been working on a series of books that I put out through my publishing company, Retrofit. It’s called Number and issue 2 comes out in a few weeks. I’m currently working on issue 3 of that series. Hopefully I’ll be working on another book soon.
Any plans to do something wrestling related again?
Possibly. I actually have a meeting about that today. But it’s way too early to reveal any details yet.