The Daily Cross Hatch talk to The Blot creator Tom Neely: “At around high school, I started to get into more fine art stuff, and went to art school to study that. I kept doing comics in my sketchbook, but didn’t really have any exposure to alternative comics or anything other than the average Marvel and DC stuff, until I went to grad school in San Francisco, in ’98. That’s when I first started reading stuff like Chester Brown and Adrian Tomine and Craig Thompson and Love & Rockets. That was the first time that I realized that you could do stuff that wasn’t superheroes.” Neely has started a weekly comic strip on his blog. + Adrian Tomine was a recent guest on NPR’s Fresh Air: “I wanted the work to be judged based on its own qualities, not for an easy message that it sends…For many years I’ve been almost taken to task about sort of avoiding, almost as if I’d been consciously tiptoeing around the issue of race in my work, and I think once I finally decided to attempt that, I wanted to do something that was consistent with the work I’d done in the past and wasn’t all-of-a-sudden me getting up on a soapbox and pontificating about the things I’m sure most of my readers already know.” [via Comics Reporter] + “The story of Ben Tanaka, an insufferable prick who nevertheless is always surrounded by beautiful women. Reviews of this book have praised its addressing of the politics of dating among Asian-Americans, but really, if you’ve been to college in the past twenty years, you’ve heard it all already.” Novelist and musician J Robert Lennon reviews Chris Ware‘s Acme Novelty Library No 18 and Tomine‘s Shortcomings: “What I do like about Tomine is his drawing style–he’s great at depicting the bland details of urban living so that they seem wonderfully alive. His characters are also hugely expressive in their faces and body language–so much so that the best bits of this book are the panels where nobody’s saying anything, and nothing’s going on. This is why I love Tomine’s New Yorker covers–they pack a lot of story into one picture. Special props for the look on Ben’s girlfriend’s face when she discovers his cache of white-girl porno, and he lamely points out that there’s a Latino chick in there somewhere. It’s perfect.”
Brian K Vaughan on his appearance in the Acme Novelty Library. + Fantagraphics share Gary Groth’s full length interview with Paul Hornschemeier [above] from MOME Vol. 1: “I do think the one thing that I’ve certainly noticed is pulling, and I think actually it was either John Pham or Sammy Harkham that was talking about this, really pulling influences from just everywhere; from film; from music; obviously other cartoonists, but modern illustrators, painters, things like that. Me and Jeff [Brown], for instance, I know he’s more influenced by German Expressionism and things like that. I find myself really influenced by British animation from the ’60s and stuff like that, so it’s all over the place.” + Abba versus the Mullahs!, Seattle Weekly review Persepolis: “While Robert Crumb only achieved the big screen as a porno-groovy shadow of himself and Daniel Clowes decamped to live-action, Marjane Satrapi’s made the crossing..” + Katherine Farmar on Phoo Action, the live-action adaptation of Jamie Hewlett‘s Get The Freebies which ran in [the now-defunct] The Face magazine: “Comics adaptations are always a crap shoot, especially live-action adaptations, but to judge from the trailer the producers have preserved the mad, brightly-coloured visuals (including the fact that one of the Freebies has a basketball for a head)”. + Publishers Weekly talk to Bone creator Jeff Smith: “On a more surface level, they’re not very similar. The way I write and draw comics, the way I do panel transitions, that should be all very similar. I have my way of telling a comic book story, the way you can tell a Steven Spielberg movie. But the actual subject matter has been different. Bone was a comedy, but it was also a fantasy. And Shazam! was kind of an adventure of wonderment. And this is going to be pretty dark and world-weary and full of danger, which is very different from anything I’ve done before. I’m kind of excited about it because I’m stepping off an edge and I don’t know really where the bottom is.” [CR]
Jeff VanderMeer shares his favourite graphic novels of last year; but first: “In perusing the somewhat depressing Chris Ware-edited volume of Best American Comics, I saw a lot of gray. Literally and sometimes figuratively, although not in the positive sense of being subtle. Instead, it was more like Ware completely ignored almost anything without a minimalist or mimetic sensibility. (Taken separately, several of these comics would have been interesting, but taken together… an abyss of sameness.) Is this the future of comics, then? That to become legit, you have to jettison all of the energy, drive, and imagination that made comics interesting in the first place?” + Brilliantly drawn girls, Kira Cochrane on “kick-ass heroines”: “When not engrossed in their lover’s laundry, women comic book characters have regularly been subject to horrific violence. [Gail] Simone herself addressed this trend almost a decade ago when she created Women in Refrigerators, an online list of the fates befalling female characters, which posed a simple question: was all this death and destruction affecting women’s interest in the genre?” + Bear Alley on the first British graphic novel, The Adventures of Mr Obadiah Oldbuck, published by Tilt and Bogue in 1841 [via Journalista!] + Finally, go look at the storyboards from the forthcoming Watchmen movie.
