The morning after watching him perform his signature stage show of his music mixed with stories of all things Gothic and Sci Fi (not as weird a combo as you would think), we caught up with Voltaire and managed to pull him away from his booth where he was hawking his wares and pleasing fans with photos, autographs and what I am sure was idle chatter regarding such things as bats and necrophilia, just long enough to ask him a few questions.

Interview written and conducted by j. ward
Transcribed by Luz and j. ward.
Photos by Jen Ward.

[COMA] It appears you finally revealed your name on Ooky Spooky.

[Voltaire] Wrong! Haha!
No, I just like saying wrong. Please continue with the question.

[COMA] Okay. Why decided to reveal it now after all these years of adamantly refusing.

[Voltaire] That's a very good question. I'm not gonna answer it but It's a very good question. I'm kidding. I've always joked around. Now, obviously, you know Voltaire. That is a one word name. There's gotta be more to it than that so, clearly, there must be more to it, but I've in the past just gone with Voltaire, I always felt it's good enough for me, it's gotta be good enough for you and that's all there is to it. However, I've always joked around in that when I turn 40 I would kill Voltaire, and last January on the 25th I turned 40 and I thought, "Well it's time to kill Voltaire" and then I realized I've accumulated 20 years of equity behind this name. I've been an animator as Voltaire, a musician as Voltaire, a comic book creator and a toy creator, etcetera and I thought I can't really kill off Voltaire because then I'd be killing off all the equity I've built up. So I decided to use my whole name which is Aurelio Voltaire Hernandez you've killed my father prepare to die. So that's that. It's like that John Cougar Mellencamp kinda situation. Yeah, that's right.

[COMA] So, how did you connected up with cartoon network to have "Brains" and "Land of the Dead" included in Billy and Mandy?

[Voltaire] Many years ago, I was performing a show in Los Angeles and there was a man who approached me after my show. He was wearing a flaming red zoot suit and he had bleached white hair and I remember him being seven feet tall and I'm not sure why but he had this giant bolero hat. He came up to me and he said, "Hi, I'm a big fan, and I'd really like to commission you to write a song for my show." And now, it's LA and everyone in LA thinks they have a show whether they do or not so I look at him and say, "What's the name of your show?" and he said, "It's Grim and Evil" and I said, "I've never heard of it." He said, "It's on cartoon network." and I say, "Alright, well, I'll go and check it out." He said, "Well it's not on the air yet." and I thought, "Well, oh God, here we go, ok, right." So anyways, obviously, this guy is jerking me off, so I try to pawn "When you're evil" off on him. I said "Well I got a song called 'When you're evil', use that." and he said, "No, no, I want you to write a song for the show." I gave him my email address. I said, "If you're serious, contact me and we'll make it work" and sure enough, Maxwell Adams sent me an email a week later and he mailed me like the first three episodes of the show and he was quite clearly legit, and so we worked together in writing a song for the show called "Brains" and a couple years later, we've stayed in touch, become friends and when I go out to LA, we go drinking, when he comes to New York, in sharp contrast, we go drinking and subsequently, he invited me to write another song for the show and that's how I did "Land of the dead".

[COMA] So whatever happened with Circus of Night, did that ever come out?

[Voltaire] Wow, Circus of night that's a good one. Even I've forgotten about circus of night. I was contacted many years ago, I think I'd say year 2000 or so, by this young lady who was a choreographer of circuses. She had an idea to make a circus called Circus of Night which would be a dark spooky circus and she was in contact with Neil Gaiman to write a story and she asked me to write the music and quite frankly, I was very excited to do that. It was a challenge, what you may not know, is that at that time I was breaking up with my ex-girlfriend of twelve years and I was living in New York and I was very confused and my life was in a great deal of turmoil and when the circus thing came up, I would have to go to Seattle and live there for about six months and the thought of running away with a circus, specifically a dark one, sounded like a really great idea but then at the eleventh hour, there was some funding issues and the entire thing went away and I was very much looking forward to working with Neil Gaiman and it took many years until I did get to work with him on my book Deady the Evil Teddy, for which he wrote a story that I illustrated.

[COMA] Now we'll take time to go through some of your various ventures here. Have you been working on your next CD yet?

[Voltaire] I have indeed, as you probably know, Ooky Spooky was in the works for five years. The release kept getting pushed back on the website. It said, "Ooky Spooky coming in 2004", "coming in 2005", "coming in 2006". It really took a million years to make that record. That came out in July of 2007, this last July, and I'm now hard at work in writing songs for the next CD which I really hope to have out Halloween, and if I do it, will be amazing because it would be the shortest I've ever taken to release another record but so far, it's been a return to the Devil's Bris. You know, it's less jazzy like Ooky Spooky, sort of has like a big band Cab Calloway feel to it. It will be a return to an old anachronistic old world sound. There'll be lots of pirates on the record and I think a little steam punk perhaps. I don't know what that means but there is a song about the Industrial Revolution and there's never any electricity used in my band so I don't know, we'll see, but yeah let's shoot for Halloween '08.

[COMA] I heard another rumor you might be making another Star Trek CD, any truth to that?

[Voltaire] There's no truth to that. I think at some point at conventions people asked me about Banned on Vulcan and I said that I'd like to do Banned on Vulcan 2. Cause I do have some Star Trek song ideas. I've been wanting to write a song about tribbles for like, five years now and I have no verses, I just have the chorus which is "Half a million tribbles taking up the cargo hold, They're fuzzy and they're cute but I can never find the hole." That's as far that song goes, unfortunately, and then there was a star wars rap I'd been wanting to do for about five years but I just could never find the time, called "Darth Vader Was A Black Man" and it's about how Darth Vader sort of represents white man's fear of the black man, and towards the end, you find out that he's just a herpes-headed babyface, whitey with some wrinkly old white rich guy pulling strings as usual and it's very disappointing and the entire thing would be sung like a Public Enemy-style and I don't think I'd ever release it as myself. I'd release it as Republic Enemy but now I guess I just gave away the whole joke so there's no point in doing it.

[COMA] That's too bad. That would have been great. You should at least do it live.

[Voltaire] Yeah. Maybe. Heh.

[COMA] How much stop animation are you doing these days besides teaching?

[Voltaire] I've not been doing... I've sort of quit the business actually about almost 10 years ago because towards the end of my animation career, I found that I was chasing around commercials I didn't want to work on, because the money's good and because it's what I did for a living and if you don't work, you starve. So there's only so many commercials that I can make for television that involve, you know, gargoyles and skeletons and stuff that I love so I found myself chasing like tampon commercials and beer commercials that I really didn't want to work on, and it was starting to take up my whole life, the business of trying to find the job was taking up more time than animating and I didn't like that. So I quit and became a creator of content which basically means someone who writes songs and someone who writes comic books but that doesn't pay or at least, it didn't at all back then. So it was a hard switch but now I'm getting back into it. I was working with Fangoria for a while and I directed six stop motion spots for their streaming web show and now I'm finally writing my first feature length script so it's live action but I'm slowly working my way back in the film business.

[COMA] How would a stop animation tampon commercial go since you brought it up?

[Voltaire] Oh, bloody hell. I don't know. Well maybe that's how it goes, maybe it's bloody hell.

[COMA] So I take it you're not doing any bumper for MTV, Sci Fi or anything anymore?

[Voltaire] No, like I said, I kind of quit the business almost ten years ago but because I am now very consciously getting back into making films, I think it's sort of inevitable that I will end up doing stuff for people like Sci Fi or MTV but I'm not really pursuing that. I'm getting back into film for the reason I wanted to get into films in the first place which because I felt I had stories to tell, bizarre visions I wanted to put on the screen for other people to see. So that's what my focus is. So i have to tell you that in the next year, you'll start to see shorts of mine popping up at film festivals, shorts I've made fifteen years ago that I've never finished that I'm now finishing so you're gonna see those at horror film festivals and fantasy film festivals and then probably a year later, you're going to see something a little bit more lengthy and then I'm working my way towards this feature length film, which is all I will say is that it's horror, a comedy horror. How's that?

[COMA] Sounds about right for you.

[Voltaire] I guess, like Mallrats meets Evil Dead or Ghostbusters in a forest. I'm not sure.

[COMA] So are you planning on writing any more books?

[Voltaire] I am planning on writing more books. I have my third book which was supposed to be delivered a year and a half ago but I generally tend to take on more than I can really do, so it's very far behind. It's called How to Pick up Goth Chick: The Dating Guide of the Damned and it's sort of a gothic dating guide, and to be perfectly honest with you, just as I was about to... I finished Ooky Spooky and I finished Deady Big in Japan, the graphic novel, and it was third on the list and I was just about to start writing it and I fell in love and the thought of sitting down and writing all these fabulous tricks on how to fool women into having sex with you just seems the furthest thing from my mind right now. So it's been a little hard to wrap my brain around it, but it needs to get done so it will get done.

[COMA] So what's new or coming up in your toy line?

[Voltaire] The most exciting thing for me right now is I'm doing a hot wheel set for the Japanese market. It's a two car set that will be exclusive to a hot wheel show in Osaka, Japan that I will be attending in November and one of the cars is a Chi Chian worm wrangler truck which means its a big delivery with Chi Chian art all over it and if you don't know what Chi Chian is you should look it up. I'm sure you'll be kind enough to include a link for your readers and the other one is a Deady hearse and I posted those images up on my MySpace page so people can check those out. So I'm doing that and I'm working on pocket goth series two. It is a plush toy line that is not available in stores. You can only get them at amusement parks and claw machines at places like Walmart. We're at Screamfest and directly across the street is a restaurant called, it starts with a P, it's like a Denny's kind of place, Perkins! That's it, and there's presently, as we speak, there is one of my pocket goths in their claw machine across the street. So I'm working on series two of that and then I kind of took a break from the urban vinyl thing for a year so I haven't put any vinyl toys this year so 2008 is going to be a big year for urban vinyl. I feel like I kind of disappeared off the map and I don't like that. So I'm most likely putting out a line of mimobots and they are flash drives. You know, two gig flash drives that you could use in your computer. It would be like an assortment of Deady and other characters of mine and then there's talk of doing a Deady and Friends fifteen character figure set with toy 2 r who makes the qee bears so it's always up in the air with those folks, but I think if it happens I would be very excited about that and there's other urban vinyl stuff going on.

[COMA] Well since you mentioned Chi Chian, has there been any mention of reviving the full length feature?

[Voltaire] There was, once upon a time I signed an option agreement with a company in Hollywood. They were shopping Chi Chian around as feature length live action film and three years later, you know, basically I got what pretty much everybody gets when you sign an option agreement which was nothing and the film never happened, but the rights reverted back to me which was the nicest thing that came out of that, because at least I can do stuff with it. So I am, as you know making a Chi Chian hot wheels car, but most recently I've teamed up with Mezco Toys and together we're sort of developing a film. So I have a lot of content and ideas and Mezco has a lot of contacts. They do the toys for Hellboy and King Kong, you know big Hollywood licenses, so you know, sometime within the next few months we're gonna go Hollywood and take some meetings about Chi Chian and see if we can do something and then November, I will be in Japan so I'll be pimping a hell out of Chi Chian over there.

[COMA] Any more comics coming out? Any more Deady or anything else?

[Voltaire] Another Deady graphic novel is inevitable and it's something I'd really like to do. But I really have to honor some of the responsibilities that I presently have, you know, get some of these projects that needs finishing finished before I can take on a Deady book because Deady books take me like six months to make and it really doesn't pay, so it's a very challenging thing to do scheduling-wise and financially but I love it so much that I continue to do it. But you know, inevitably, there'll be another Deady book. I would love to see Lady Death and Deady get together, I talked to Brian Pulido about making that happen and that looks like a good possibility. I still want to see Deady meets Vampirella. Although, I've been working on that for six years and I still haven't made it happen with those folks and I'd love to see Johnny the Homicidal Maniac take on Deady. I don't know if Jhonen (Vasquez) would be up to that, but you know, there's so many things I still want to see happen with Deady so it's inevitable. It's just a question of when.

[COMA] Are you aware that Amazon.com makes no differentiation between you and the other Voltaire as authors?

[Voltaire] There's another Voltaire? I know, I'm kidding. Well, your very first question to me was about my name, another one of the key motivating factors in revealing my whole name was that I never intended to write books. So when I was Voltaire the animator, in the 80s, that was cute but when I became Voltaire, the comic book creator in the mid 90s, that was when cute when I became Voltaire, the musician, that was okay too, but the second I wrote a book and it said by Voltaire I felt weird and I'm sure a lot of other people felt weird too. It's an uncomfortable, unsettling feeling to know that now I have these books out that have the name of another author on them, so I thought it was important to make the differentiation. I should also point out that as we speak, there's some jackass making records as Voltaire. If you go to itunes, you'll see my five records are there and two others by someone else called Voltaire who makes no differentiation between himself and myself and he is causing confusion in the marketplace. When I look at that thing in itunes that says people who bought this record also bought... He makes experimental hip hop, I mean instrumental hip hop and it will say, "people who bought Villains and Mice, the name of one of his records, also bought Boo Hoo, Almost Human, Ooky Spooky, The Devil's Bris and Rasputina", so obviously people are buying this guy's record thinking he's me and that's a bad thing. So I'm guessing there's probably going to be some big, angry, hairy New York City lawyer giving him a call at some point. I just wish I could afford it.

[COMA] Have you gotten any questions about your experimental hip hop?

[Voltaire] I have. People have sent me e-mails saying, "Your new record sucks." and I thought, "Oh my god. How can they hate Ooky Spooky?" But then the next line is, "Why did you choose to make a record using keyboards and not singing at all?" and I was like, "Okay, I think I know what's going on here." So I'm sure whatever he does is perfectly good for what he does, but it is very confusing to people. I mean you can't just take a brand name like that and decide to make it your own, which is ironic of course because there is a dead French guy named Voltaire but he didn't make funny goth music damn it! I think I'm not confusing anybody there.

[COMA] Last one here. Your MySpace page seems to be more up to date than your website. Are you planning on dropping the website eventually in favor of MySpace?

[Voltaire] You need to have a website because you can control a website and you can't control MySpace. Tomorrow, they can just decide that MySpace is going to go away and then it will go away like mp3.com went away. It came back as a different animal but mp3.com was something I relied on that heavily on for getting my songs to people and incidentally they sent me checks. Back in the day, you actually got paid for your songs and now it's a different thing. That could happen with MySpace so it's important to have a website. To answer your question the simple answer is why is the MySpace page updated every single day and my website is updated once or twice a year and the answer is, I don't know HTML. So someone else has to do it. But I can update my MySpace page and I fucking love doing it. I like reading all my messages and I love, you know, talking to people, adding people. I mean, don't get me wrong, I get my fair share of extremely annoying messages on there as well. My favorites are when I send out a bulletin and I say, "Hi. I'm playing in Portland, Oregon tonight." and instead of getting a hundred replies saying, "See you there tonight." I get 2000 replies saying "You should play in here, you should play in New Jersey, you should play in Toronto, you should play.." So yeah, that's a little annoying. The other one that's really bad is when people e-mail me and say... I send out a bulletin that says, "I'm playing at Screamfest in Orlando at the Wyndham resort I go on at midnight. It cost $12.00." and people will email me and say, "How much does it cost? Where is it that you're playing? When is that?" It's like, "Just read the fucking message! It's two sentences long for fucks sake." But by far the worst are the people who message me and ask me to message their friends. You know it's like, just let your fucking friend hit the send message button, like what am I, A dancing monkey or something? Anyway I love MySpace and it's a fantastic way to communicate with people.

[COMA] Well since you say everybody needs a website, how come The Oddz don't have a website? or do they and I haven't found it?

[Voltaire] The Oddz do not have a website because The Oddz barely exist. It's a side project and it's something I feel really strongly about, the songs and if I had a month of free time, I would finish The Oddz records right now but you know, again, unfortunately it's fallen victim to everything, like everything else in my life, it's fallen victim to my schedule and so I can only do it when I have time to do it. So that record's going to get done and I feel really good about the songs but I just can't say when that's gonna happen.

[COMA] To end things here, I know you said you'll go back to Cuba when fidel Castro dies and he has his whole health crisis but he seems to be recovering. how do you feel about that?

[Voltaire] I really like the nutty idea of returning to Cuba when communism falls and buying a cathedral for $25 and painting it black and living there. But it's probably never gonna happen. I should probably stick with my original dream of someday having enough money to buy the steeple of the Chrysler building and raising large bats and living there up to my knees in guano. What a dream! It's the American dream. It's probably the transylvania dream, but whatever. Semantics. Should we leave it at that?

[COMA] That will do it. Thank you for the interview.

[Voltaire] It was my pleasure.

Voltaire's newest album "Ooky Spooky"is out now.
Visit Voltaire's official website at voltaire.net
and by request the link for Chi Chian

Related Content:
Audio Interview
Live Photos