I first met Peter Kaprelian when I was tabling at KICx 2024, a small indie comics show in Kingston, NY, a town about 90 miles upriver from New York City. It was the show’s first year and sales came fast, so it was a couple of hours before I could check out the scene. I looked across the crowd and took in a pleasant mix of teenagers away from their parents, pink-haired small business owners, and aging-punk dads looking to buff up their collection. However, there was one person who stood out even in that crowd of fashionable weirdos and self-proclaimed obscurophiles. Thin as a rake, bushy grey mane sticking high above the rest of the crowd, jean jacket. I clocked him as a rockstar at first, somewhat in the John Fogerty model. Then I had another customer, and he went out of my mind.
That is, until some point later when I looked down the aisle and saw him making his way to any open table, sticking big bristol board sheets into the tabler’s hands, and gesticulating frantically. I brushed off the tattooed couple who were flipping through my comics in hopes my table would be open when he came by. I reappraised his rockstar image as he approached. While his jeans and jean jacket perfectly complemented his lanky frame, they had more than one stain and more than one hole. Though his tangled grey hair had as much lift and volume as, say, Slash, it was much less maintained, and one side of his beard was noticeably bigger than the other. He put his duffel bag down beside my table. “Peter Kaprelian,” he said, “I have some comics to show you.”
As we discussed his art, it became clear that Peter stood out from the crowd in another crucial way. See, all of us there, the tablers and probably a good part of the crowd, loved comics more than anything. We filled all our free time with comics, based our friendships on comics, lived, breathed, shat comics. But ultimately, for most of us, myself included, it came in second place to living a normal life. Which meant spending the majority of our time doing something non-comics related. Peter, on the other hand, literally couldn’t do anything else. In fact, it seemed he was so consumed with the great, grand vision in his head that he barely had bothered to get the volumes of work he had made out into the world. He had never widely distributed the work he was showing me, now three decades old, and had been making new work daily since. It was plain this singular vision took a toll on the rest of his life, but that was the thing: in comics, borderline obsession is the only way to build up a significant body of work. I was jealous in a way. I also thought it was unfair that I and the other tablers there, who hadn’t committed everything to comics, were the ones getting our work out there that day. I knew I had to help him get at least a few of these pages published.
Peter’s obsession showed in his pages: rich black and white, drawn with intensity and immediacy, done masterfully in a number of different media. Some were extremely refined, some drawn quickly with whatever material was at hand, just to get the idea down on paper. All were chock-full of perverse situations, psychedelic dreamscapes, eyes popping out of heads, and tongues popping out of mouths. The pages, however, were all jumbled up. Not only were many of the originals covered in coffee stains, but the pages were often out of order, the paper on which it was drawn sometimes changed size in the mid-story, and a few had random switches to color that served no obvious narrative or design purpose. I pointed a few of these idiosyncrasies out, and Peter gave me an explanation, veering from his creative process to his personal life. He mentioned his mom more than once, showing me a panel where she appeared in a story, seemingly with barbed wire around her face. Yet I was still left with more questions than answers. What was his life story? Had he ever done a book? What had he been doing since he drew the comics he was currently showing me in the early 90s? Was his writing and storytelling as accomplished as his draftsmanship? Just how many of these big, beautiful pages were in that duffel bag, anyway?
Of course, I had to know more, so we arranged to meet the next time I was upstate, as I travel regionally for work. Only 6 weeks later, I was sent up there for a fairly easy job, which gave me ample time to meet him and make some scans of his art to show a couple of publishers I know. I called him ahead of time and planned to meet him at the Kingston Library, and then spent several minutes trying to determine if he knew how to get there. I couldn’t tell where in town he lived, if he drove, had access to public transportation, or was familiar with the library in question. He said he thought he’d been there but wasn’t sure if the temporary branch was still open or if they were back in their main building, didn’t know which bus route to take and had lost his bus schedule anyway, even tho, I discovered it was located only a block from the site of KICx.
However, despite some initial befuddlement, I did manage to chase him down – literally, in fact. After spending a confounding 15 minutes on the phone with him, I spied him off in the distance, walking in the wrong direction. When I got him back to the library, everybody in there knew his name.
To my delight, Peter was much more organized about his comics that day. He had traded in his duffel bag for a slim tote containing a manila envelope with not too many coffee stains. It contained the original pages for a single issue from the 90s, though he couldn’t tell me if it had ever been published, or indeed if he had ever published anything. On the flipside, it sounded like his output was incredible. The work was 28 pages with no cover and was largely non-linear. He told me it was a dream journal, but the dreams were not presented in any logical order. The first few were strips featuring Konrad, a pajamaed boy stand-in for Peter himself, each 8 or so panels on a half page. Then, without preamble, one strip doesn’t end but turns into a ten-page story about a mad scientist who builds a synthetic woman for Konrad. The next story features a perverted collage, the porn star Peter North, the Konrad character finally taking off his pajamas, and, of course, the ominous presence of the artist’s mother. Yet despite such abrupt and baffling choices, the reader can still follow a clear narrative arc. The Konrad character is stuck at his mother’s house, adrift in a sea of unemployment, empty pleasure seeking, and chronic masturbation. Unable to find direction in life, he slips so easily into sleep that he can hardly tell dream from reality. The removal of the pajamas is the symbolic crux of the story, wherein Konrad sheds his dreamskin and heads out into the “real” world. As I scanned these pages, I asked more questions and finally began to piece together a picture of his life.
Peter had gone to SVA in 1989 and studied under Spiegelman, lived in Brooklyn for a time afterward until, unable to make any money cartooning, he moved back Upstate with his mother, got drunk, got sober, and eventually moved to the town of Kingston where he found section 8 housing on his own. I surmised he had finished at least three other “floppy” length stories like the one I was scanning and one graphic novel, which he said was about a white rapper and written entirely in rhyme.(which, upon hearing about, I tugged ever so gently at my collar but figured, who was I to judge someone who spent at least the last 25 years living on the fringes of society?). I finished up the scans and made my farewell, telling Peter I’d see him at KICx 2025 at the latest. I spent the next couple of weeks showing cleaned up files to publishers. Before long, a friend of mine agreed to put one of the dream stories into their upcoming anthology: Purgatory Comics Press Vol. 1: Sowing and Reaping (out now: Purgatory Comics Press). I figured if nothing else, Peter would have that in his belt and, maybe, when I came up to Kingston the following year, I’d get a sneak peek at the rest of his work. I’d call him every once in a while with updates on the anthology, usually catching him just as he was sitting down to some movie. He’d call me to talk about Jack Kirby or Peter Bagge and leave long rambling voicemails when he didn’t get through. Sometimes, I’d let a few weeks go by without calling him back. Then, last December, I got an email from the KICx showrunner, and the subject line simply read “Peter.”
An article linked in the email told me that he had been missing for a week and his body had just been found in the woods outside of New Paltz, about 25 miles from his residence. The article had scant information, but by tracking down his brother, I managed to piece together the last days of Peter’s life. While out collecting money for the Salvation Army during the lead up to Christmas, he had wandered into the woods, become disoriented, become lost, and eventually succumbed to the elements.
According to his brother, Matt Kaprelian, Peter regularly worked for the Salvation Army, which had been a source of community in his life. He seemed to have been at a good stable point lately since their mother’s death and his being hooked up with housing in the city of Kingston. However, it seems that due to his eccentricity, many people who knew him may have missed signs that he was beginning to have cognitive lapses. His own brother was somewhat nonplussed when I inquired whether Peter had ever had a formal diagnosis, a response I genuinely hadn’t been expecting. To me, Peter showed clear signs of being neuro-atypical. Later in our conversation, Matt mentioned to me that he had bought art supplies for his brother a few months earlier. “Peter told me about that,” I replied, “But he had said it was his brother-in-law!.” Matt paused, “Going way back, I don’t remember him having lapses like that but, now that you mention it, there were a few times recently he was acting a little odd.” It all begged the question: Was Peter always like this or had he been undergoing some rapid cognitive decline?
My best guess is that it’s not an either-or situation. Besides Matt’s recollections, there was just no way of knowing. When I met him, Peter seemed to suffer from some sort of permanent befuddlement. He just couldn’t maintain a linear train of thought. Whether this was a longstanding feature of his brain, a recent rapid decline, or the product of whatever he was sober from is impossible to tell. The only record was his artwork, the majority of which I still hadn’t seen. Fortunately, Matt had been the one to clear out Peter’s apartment, and he knew how important his brother’s art was.
“I saved everything that was made by Peter,” he told me, “Any scrap of paper that had anything written or drawn by Peter’s hand.” We had agreed to meet at the Shrub Oak Branch Library, a spot roughly halfway between us, which was also in the town where the Kaprelians grew up. Three tubs full of artwork sat beside us in our corner of the library. This was it. The contents of the duffel bag and so much more. I can only estimate how many individual pieces there were. Certainly thousands. The biggest pieces were on 20×30 bristol board, rendered in impeccable black and white, dripping with soul and neurosis. There were enough of these to fill a hardcover book and a 100-page graphic novel (the aforementioned white rapper one), drawn on smaller paper but no less gorgeously rendered. Some of the smallest and least thought-out drawings seemed to be quick and utterly naive portraits of women from the Sears or JC Penny catalogues. There were hundreds of these scattered throughout all three tubs, along with dozens of black composition books filled front to back with furious scribblings. Indeed, there was a strong element of compulsion behind a lot of the material at hand. He kept volumes of diary comics, largely undated and largely absent of references to current events. Each diary comic is four panels long and each panel is a head-on shot of Peter Kaprelian, sometimes turned this way or that, sometimes closer or further from the picture plane. Upon closer inspection, I found that each and every panel in his comics made from a certain point in his life onward had the faintest penciled in pentagram, drawn so delicately as to never be picked up by the photocopier. On many others was written, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” on the paper’s bottom margin. In other areas, Peter had begun ruling out a lettering guide or a simple perspective and gotten carried away, repeating the pattern over and over across the entire page. Yet despite Peter’s severe graphomania, his pages are remarkably readable, often photocopying to a crisp black and white, obsessively ruled lines turned invisible. His stories, while dreamlike and disjointed, always carry a thread from beginning to end, and if his jokes come out of left field, his punchlines do too. Whatever state of permanent befuddlement Peter was in didn’t stop him from planning and executing ambitious, well-drawn, zany, off-the-wall comics. In fact, it probably helped him. The pages I saw at the library that day were dripping with psychological torment. His character’s faces are often obscured – several by masks, one by a wound to the forehead, and another by what can only be described as a cross between black-face and a gimp mask. Another has a Z painted across her face. To me, this is a clear example of how he was able to channel his neurosis into iconic and memorable characters.
Even though his work clearly stems from a dark, tormented place and he’s picked up a host of racial and psycho-sexual hangups along the way, I genuinely enjoy reading it on its own terms. I did eventually read The Rhyme Virus, Peter’s graphic novel about the white rapper. I don’t know much about poetry, much less “the poetry of the streets” but despite the cringe inducing premise, I found it to be quite good, even downright lyrical. In one passage, our hero, Billy Blackson, lights a cigarette for a snake. The smoke forms a snake, which needs its cigarette lit, and its smoke forms another snake. As the tower of smoking snakes grows, the conversation between them, all in rhyme, grows more philosophical.
The snake asks:
“What is your reason for living?”
“The one the sun has for light-giving.
Ax the Hudson River why it keeps rivving.
We are! There’s no time to twitter.
We’re too busy existing”
“But you have a choice, human.”
“Who you calling human?
I’m the eighth wonder of the third planet
from the closest star. Zoom in!
I’m the elemental eco-scheme between
alcohol and benzadrine. That’s me!
Alfred E. Nu-Man.”
And that’s just one page of 108, all in rhyme, taking our hero from the streets of Brooklyn to the sand dunes of Arizona, through an alien portal to a warehouse rap battle. However, the story never really ends. At a certain point, Peter’s graphomania seems to take over. Billy still bounces between wacky adventures and his rhymes are still fresh, but there’s nothing approaching a narrative arc, no main freestyle competitor, no love interest, no cure for the rhyme virus. Instead, the pages become denser with Crowlian references and obsessively detailed drawings. When he was still alive, Peter told me The Rhyme Virus was still unfinished. Would it ever have been finished? Or did he just have to write another page, the same as he had to draw a pentagram on each panel?
Seeing all his work that day, how it changed over the years, the countless hours of work that had gone into each page, I couldn’t help but think of an alternate path for Peter. Would it have been easier to finish The Rhyme Virus if his previous 3 floppy comics had achieved any kind of commercial success? Would his neuroses have progressed to such an extent if he’d been afforded a more comfortable life? Perhaps, with stability, comics could be a pathway to navigating those neuroses. As it stood in the few years before his death, he was spending more and more time lounging around, watching old movies and talking to folks around town, but the desire to eat, breathe, shit comics was still his primary motivator.
Peter did have a job, at one point, doing paste-up for the local paper, but got fired for drawing a caricature of the boss. In Brooklyn, he worked at a copy/print place, but could never make ends meet. Ultimately, all he wanted to do was make comics, and then, as now, comics just weren’t lucrative enough for even the very talented to earn a living. To someone with a little more emotional stability than Peter, or someone with a larger monetary safety-net, or someone whose work was a little less out there, it might be easy to keep it up on the side while supporting oneself another way, but Peter’s vision was always so singular, the only way he would see the comics he wanted to make made was if he dedicated every minute of his life to making them himself. Unfortunately though, 75% of the work of being a self-published cartoonist is away from the drawing table – mailing, scanning, reviewing paper stock and print costs – but Peter was getting busier and busier ruling out grid lines on every bit of each page. I know he did make it to the copy shop sometimes, but, while his work reproduces beautifully, the scans were not in any kind of shape to show to a publisher. In the one staple-bound booklet I do have, not one of the 28 pages aligns with the next.
In the end, there are still a lot more questions than answers about him. However, he almost certainly produced some finished books at some point, and surely some are still floating around out there. There’s also a goodly trove of surviving works just waiting for a publisher.
However, I didn’t write this article just to get Peter attention, but to say that it shouldn’t have been so hard for someone like Peter to make comics. Not the creative part, which is hard but he mastered nonetheless, but to make even the smallest fraction of a living off of that hard-earned mastery, was nearly impossible. If he had had more money and more stability, if he’d had working relationships with printers and bookstores, more of a purpose in life, worsening cognitive decline or not, I don’t think he would have died the way he did.
More work by Peter:
Matthew Kaprelian is the executor of his brother Peter’s estate. If you would like to learn more about his life or artwork you can reach his brother directly at mhkap@hotmail.com.
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