Michel Faber is quite taken with Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls, just released in the UK: “In one of the most lushly rendered sequences, ‘The Twister’, 15-year-old Dorothy, convinced she will die as her house is buffeted by a tornado, decides that she can “do what the heck I liked”, and frigs herself to a climax that’s surreally mingled with the twister’s impact. Post-orgasm, Dorothy’s world looks forever changed, an Oz of rainbow sexuality, as if she’d been “put down someplace else in some whole other country”. Similarly, the ‘Come Away, Come Away’ chapter ends with a wickedly charming vision of Peter, Wendy and her wanking brothers flying high above the rooftops of Edwardian London. Seldom since the advent of mass-market porn has so much aesthetic energy been expended on masturbation.” + To celebrate its publication, Paul Gravett runs the complete transcript of an interview he did with Alan Moore from 2006: “To tell the truth, neither me nor Melinda know very much about contemporary pornography. We’re not on the internet, so personally I can appreciate some of the great erotic photographers, though I don’t find their stuff particularly sexy…For me, it’s those Taschen collections of erotic art, and a very few paperbacks, mostly from the Victorian period, from the 1890s. There are one or two noble exceptions, but nothing much since 1970 or thereabouts. The state of pornography is pretty grim. Of course, there are still giants like Robert Crumb, whop has always had a really healthy, direct, honest relationship with his own sexual imagination and who has been rightly applauded for sticking to his guns.” + Not everyone shares Gravett and Faber’s enthusiasm, though: “Sandra Affleck, a historian who leads [J.M.] Barrie themed tours in his hometown of Kirriemuir, was appalled by the idea of a pornographic Peter Pan. She said: “This book sounds horrific. It is the complete antithesis of what Barrie thought and put on paper. Barrie’s work is all about the magic of childhood and this new book is a pollution of that. I would support any measures which would stop it appearing on shelves.”
The Believer celebrate their 50th issue by talking to Charles Burns , who’s been illustrating the covers from the start: “There was a certain line quality that I was always really attracted to—this very thick-to-thin line that is a result of using a brush. There was just some kind of solidity to it, or a kind of richness…. I don’t know, just a feeling to it that I really liked. So I started out trying to emulate the look of that kind of line, and took it to an extreme, I guess. Because if you compare the work that I do with the work that inspired it—more traditional comic-book stuff—mine looks much tighter and much more precise in a certain way. Not more mechanical, but more extreme.” + Mother Jones talk to Adrian Tomine: “There’s a part of me that feels like it gets really frustrating to keep working in the manner that I made the book Shortcomings, where everything is pretty accurate to the real world. It gets kind of obsessive, and there’s a part of me that’s like, gosh, it must be really fun for these guys who just draw wizards and trolls running around forests, where it’s all made up and nothing matters.” [Journalista!] + du9 speak to The Arrival’s Shaun Tan: “The question of style was probably the most difficult problem. It’s interesting that you say that a simpler style has greater impact (and possibly flexibility of interpretation or identification with protagonists), as this was exactly what I had also concluded from my own reading of many graphic novels. I was particularly drawn to the style of Raymond Brigg’s simplified characters with rounded forms and dot-eyes, which were still able to possess the gravity of real people in real situations.” + The first instalment of Chris Ware’s Jordan W. Lint can be found in the Winter Virginia Quarterly Review, sadly not available on-line.
“What would make Spider-Man relatable again isn’t turning him back into a loser: it’s giving him witty, realistic, three-dimensional, up-to-date thoughts and dialogue - a very rare thing in superhero comics.” Ned Beauman on Spidey. + Douglas Wolk on Jewish superheroes: “Superheroes are loaded with subtext—that’s sort of the point of them—and Simcha Weinstein and Danny Fingeroth have both recently published books arguing that most of the best-known superhero characters are expressions of their creators’ Jewish heritage. Weinstein’s Up, Up, and Oy Vey! How Jewish History, Culture, and Values Shaped the Comic Book Superhero and Fingeroth’s Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero both recount the Jewish origins of the superhero tradition. Both authors pick out Jewish themes and allusions in seventy years’ worth of brightly colored comic books, but neither accounts for the possibility that superheroes might mean as much as they do not because their themes are Jewish but because their themes are universal—and neither has much to say about what the connections he draws might imply about superheroes, Judaism, or American culture in general.” + Jeff VanderMeer finds out what the best manga of all time is, and also talks to Robin Brenner of No Flying No Tights: ” To my mind manga cannot be separated from their country and culture of origin. Everything about them, from the way creators tell stories to the symbols and gestures involved are created with a Japanese audience in mind. Those outside Japan can learn all of the sound effects and references, but most readers will not instinctively understand every joke or implied meaning simply because the story comes from an environment we didn’t grow up in.” + When the Funnies were funny [Comics Reporter] + Marjane Satrapi: “I’m no Dostoevsky, so it’s my way of expressing myself. Drawing is the first language of human beings. Before writing. Before speaking. We have an immediate relationship and reaction with a drawing that we don’t have with any other medium.” [LHB] + What draws bestselling novelists to comics?: ” The size of the influx is startling. Stephen King, one of the world’s bestselling authors, has recently overseen the first in a series of comic adaptations from his Dark Tower novels. Ian Rankin, having retired the bibulous Inspector Rebus from print, has turned his attention to John Constantine, the hard-bitten Chandlerian sorcerer of Vertigo’s Hellblazer comics. Michael Chabon has published several issues of The Escapist, a superhero created by the fictional protagonists of his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, while his contemporary Jonathan Lethem is halfway through a run on Omega the Unknown, a timely resurrection for one of the most philosophically baffling superheroes.”
First posted: Monday, January 21st, 2008.
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“The first instalment of Chris Ware’s Jordan W. Lint can be found in the Winter Virginia Quarterly Review, sadly not available on-line.”
Actually, part of it is available online. (Actually, all of it is, but only to subscribers.) Chris graciously allowed us to make the first couple of pages available online to non-subscribers. See ‘em here, and click to embiggen. The pages will enlarge to fill your browser, so the bigger you open your window, the more Warey goodness you’ll get.
Man, I wish there were a better to to display comics online.
/ Posted by Waldo Jaquith on January 22nd, 2008 at 2:08 pm / Permalink /