We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Johnson Riggs a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Johnson, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you think your parents have had a meaningful impact on you and your journey?
My older brother claims that I was dropped off on the doorstep by gypsies. If this is true, then my fortune-telling birth parents did themselves and me a great kindness by leaving me with a respectable family. You see, I was born under a cursed star. I had an ill-favored look about me. Perhaps it was the Mark of Cain. Still others called it the Sign of the Beast. And some say the freckles on my back form a constellational map pointing to a solar system that contains an unfathomable and lucrative secret.
Despite the esoteric mysticism surrounding my origin and destiny, my parents were above average, and frequently excellent. If I had to award them a surrogacy comp, it would be Jonathan and Martha Kent. They had strong values: the tolerance and courage to raise a strange son. In hindsight, it was humanity-affirming care. They filed down my hooves and horns, shaved my goat legs, and taught me to walk like a man. They didn’t circumcise me, which I thought was weird, but now I’m glad they didn’t.
Here are some things they said that stuck with me:
“Ask good questions.”
“Respectfully challenge your teachers, we’re paying their salary”
“Take all you want, but eat all you take.”
“You can be right or you can be dead right.”
“Write is right.”
But lots of people say a lot of things. In addition to saying stuff, they did stuff. They showed up. This is the Woody Allen/ Pareto Parenting Principle I follow: 80% of success is showing up.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
The genesis of “Pandemonia: A Novel Plague Plague Novel.”
Why did I write a book? I guess it’s because I needed to find out if I had a book in me. I did!
Is it Shakespeare? It is! But that’s only because I am a shameless plagiarist.
“But why did you write a book, you stupid idiot? Nobody reads fiction anymore, especially men.”
That is part of the point. Either:
1) There’s a latent, hidden market out there for men’s fiction
2) This will be one of the last fiction books ever written by a human: The Omega ISBN.
In any event, at least my cyborg children can one day look back at this artifact and say, “Wow dad was insane, but he was right. Dead Right. 01101000 01100001!”
I’ve written stuff before. Cringe poetry in college that I thankfully destroyed. A journal from study abroad that upon reflection, should be destroyed. And 3 years of standup, where I occasionally destroyed. Sometimes the audience, sometimes my liver. Mission accomplished though. My wife told me years later, “If you weren’t funny, I would have dumped you.”
The best creations are borne of adversity. About 5 years ago, I fancied myself a free thinker and a numbers guy, so imagine my surprise when COVID rolled around. The craziness was sort of punctuated by January 6th. This strange scene stewed in my mind for 3 years until the election cycle began again in 2024. I had an insane thought: “Are these people heroes?” Of course, not to everyone, but they were certainly heroes in their own story. And this is true regardless of who designed that story. Whether the villain was the FBI, Russia, Trump, or Pelosi, everyone will choose their own adventure.
A conversation with my brother on the weirdness yielded what was in hindsight, an obvious prompt: what would it look like if Trump was akshually a despotic King? How absurdly could a person rewrite history? Didn’t Dante put his political enemies in Hell? Weren’t some of those people still alive when Dante wrote the Divine Comedy? What if the Corona Virus was a literal demon?
Hey, Gilgamesh is cool too! Did you know that the classics can be tight and punchy without reeking of floral verbosity, impenetrable obscurity, or circumlocutory sesquipedalianism?
This project also arose from the notion that present day conspiracy theories are modern legends. This is not a new idea. But, the main problem I see with conspiracies is there are no heroes. This is the biggest reason to believe that lots of these conspiracies are a psy-op: they insidiously deny human agency. But man, do I love ‘em: Lizard People, the Missing Timeline, Hitler alive in Antarctica, etc… I quickly realized that I am not Jonathan Swift. I’m not even Jonathan Steady! (Zing!)
But if I know anything: it’s low-brow comedy, movies, and videogames. Write what you know, they say, so I did. Then I made up the rest. I also borrowed one of my favorite jokes from National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon.
So let’s bring it all together:
Pandemonia is an action-comedy that conflates conspiracy theories with mythic quests. We’ve inserted a hero: Pickle, badass rockhead, Captain of the Knights of the DAWG Bowl. After an incompetent evil doctor unleashes a demonic plague on the realm of Quagmerica, Pickle is jettisoned from the king’s council and goes on a journey to heal the nation. He’ll be joined by a rogue pilot from North Direa and a crackpot Wizard who can turn urine into beer and back again. On the home front, his super hot wife Melody, a master of magical Opticks, holds down the fort.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
I know this sounds corny and old fashioned, but what gets me out of bed in the morning is the spirit of vengeance.
It all started in the halcyon 1990s, in a small Western town where nothing could possibly go wrong. The two brothers who grew up there decided to seek their fortunes by spending money on University educations in California. Then in 2008, the family farm got blown to smithereens by Wall Street.
One brother took up the sword. The other brother disappeared into hedonism and became a master of business.
Our adventures culminated in the blessing of family, grounding our restless spirits with temperance and justice.
But then something weird happened when we were all on house arrest in 2020. We started asking good questions, only harder. One of these was this: since we spent many of our formative years writing for brownie points, why not do it on our own terms and get paid?
I’ve heard that writing is the most democratic form of art, which kind of makes me resent it. But sculpture is out of fashion these days and have you seen the prices for giant blocks of marble?
The goal for me? Create something, anything. This is penance for consumption.
In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?
Unpopular opinion: I think all government art grants should be eliminated. I know that sounds harsh. But consider this: without CIA funding, we would neve have known about Jackson Pollock. And not a single bureaucrat helped with the Lascaux cave paintings. Creativity pre-dates institutions. It doesn’t need to be a line item in the budget. Also, have you noticed that public art is increasingly ugly? Have the IRS call me when we start funding art-deco again.
One thing Burning Man got right (depending on who you ask) was the ethos of voluntaryism and radical self-reliance. Those values didn’t exclude community. They required it. Sure, there were Silicon Valley Medicis in the background, but anyone with a vision could find a tribe, bootstrap a project, and crowdfund the rest. That’s still possible today: GiveSendGo, Substack, Patreon, or passing the hat.
Money’s only half the issue. The other half is moral. Artists need to engage with each other. That’s cheering each other on, amplifying good work, and offering honest feedback when it’s invited. Not everyone’s a fan of my writing. That’s fine. I’m still a fan of theirs, when it’s warranted.
To put my money where my mouth is: go subscribe to Phil Rot and Daniel Bensen’s Substacks. Support the weirdos. That’s how ecosystems thrive.
Contact Info:
Image Credits
Rachel Haywire for the book cover
Everything else is GPT renderings of passages and characters from my book. I’m not claiming to be a visual artist – these are marketing images since no one reads books anymore. See also: Andy Warhol.