Comixology interview Super Spy’s Matt Kindt: “I LOVE spies. I grew up watching all of the James Bond movies and reading the Ian Fleming books. But the funny thing about reading the Fleming books — those are more like travelogues that happen to have some crazy spy plot in them. And that’s why I really like those books — armchair travel. So it’s the same thing with me and any genre really. Super Spy is really just about characters trapped in horrible jobs they want to quit and then trying to get out. It could just as easily be set in a modern day city. It just happens to have gadgets and gun and stuff blowing up.” {via Daily Cross Hatch} + In the current Bookforum, J Hoberman on Kirby: King of Comics and Chris Ware on Father of the Comic Strip: “In the winter of 1831, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, creator and appreciator of all things Kunst, was feeling blue. His loyal attendants, sympathetic to the great man’s depression, had heard of a taciturn Genevan educator who, in his spare time, wrote and drew farcical picture-stories to amuse himself and his students. So Frédéric Soret, tutor to the Duke of Weimar’s children and translator of one of Goethe’s scientific works, obtained one of these illustrated manuscripts and, placing it into Goethe’s hands, stepped aside. Thankfully, the gamble paid off: Goethe found the book “very amusing,” and it gave him “extraordinary pleasure,” though he chose to take this pleasure in small doses, so as not to suffer “an indigestion of ideas.” Soret also noted that Goethe thought the Genevan sparkled “with talent and wit,” and “if he . . . did not have such an insignificant text [i.e., scenario] before him, he would invent things which would surpass all our expectations.” The Genevan in question was Rodolphe Töpffer—the inventor of the comic strip.” + Who’s Afraid of Noir? An interview with Richard McGuire [and Chris Ware on McGuire: “Every once in a while an artist comes along who takes the accrued potential of his or her discipline and recasts it into a brand-new way of seeing or feeling. Cézanne did it with music, Joyce with writing - and Richard McGuire, I think, did it with comics.”] {via Comics Reporter} + du9 talk to Charles Burns: “We’re moving on a little bit, this takes place during the punk — the advent of the punk era. I was in the Bay area, around San Francisco, from 1979. So it’s around the era when the whole punk movement was all beginning in San Francisco. There’s a relationship there to that. It’s my story about that time period in my life — partly. It’s also about … mortality. Not immortality, but mortality … and opiate. And William Burroughs. William Burroughs meets Hergé.” {via Journalista!}
Words without Borders runs a translation of Phiippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian’s Lisa + Persepolis is banned in Lebanon + Trains are Mint’s Oliver East has a new column on British Comics in TDCH: “Small press in the States can include D+Q and Fantagraphics. In the UK, the term usually means self-published stuff, which I love. I love the idea of someone beavering away in their studio/bedroom/kitchen table to produce something they hope strangers will like. There are a few boutique publishers and people with beards keeping the dream alive over here, but the comics that we like aren’t appreciated in the same way as over on your side.” + Molly Flatt just loves graphic novels + Popcandy’s Comics Crash Course: 25’s of essential graphic novels, family-friendly titles, must-see series and personal favourites + The full-length interview with Tim Hensley from MOME 6:“I think the real thing that happened was that I had a band going at the time, and Daniel Clowes did the cover for the album I had done. I had just seen Lloyd Llewellyn, and I had ended up becoming friends with him through the mail. And as a result of that, I ended up discovering all the other comics that were around then too, like Love and Rockets, American Splendor, and everything, which I was sort of aware of already.” + Gary Panter on working on Omega the Unknown: “My friend Jonathan Lethem asked me to do a short section of the OMEGA comic series he is doing with [artist] Farel [Dalrymple] and I had to say yes. Jonathan is a very respected novelist and super-smart nice art guy, and that is one of the things I look for in life—to work with people I respect and admire.” {via ComicM!x} + PopMatters talk to Rocco Versaci, author of This Book Contains Graphic Language: “one of the points I try to make in my book is that comics and graphic novels have the potential to be politically subversive because they do lie on the margins of respectability. I do believe that there’s something about the form, its history, and its dominant genres that will prevent comics from ever being taken completely seriously. For whatever reason, we can accept that the medium of film (or prose, for that matter) is artistic even though there are some really shitty films, but the same understanding is not extended to the medium of comics. I think that’s both good news and bad news. I want more people to read and appreciate this form, on the other hand, I like their “outsider” status. It’s that status, I believe, that problematizes “literature” and the “canon.””
CBR talk to James Kochalka: People who know you best for Superf*ckers might be a little aghast by the new book and how much it’s directed at younger readers. Are there any similarities? “When you get right down to it, the same sorts of themes are dealt with in all the books, just in different ways. A lot of them are about sort of inter-personal relationships. That’s what Superf*ckers is about. That’s what Johnny Boo is about. That’s not a Hollywood synopsis or anything. “This is about inter-personal relationships!” Really, Johnny Boo is about a little ghost and his pet ghost Squiggle. It’s about their relationship and their bumbling nemesis.” + Paul Gravett looks at more comics for children: “It’s easy to blame the plethora of today’s entertainment and technology choices competing for that precious pocket money for this problem, but Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer prize-winning novelist raised on Superman and Spider-Man, sees such excuses as ‘a cop out’. In his keynote speech for the Will Eisner Awards ceremony, the profession’s Oscars, held at the 2004 San Diego Comic-Con, he warned, “Children did not abandon comics; comics, in their drive to attain respect and artistic accomplishment, abandoned children.” Chabon has a point. The last twenty years in particular have seen authors and publishers strive so hard to make comics, formerly misunderstood as being solely juvenile, ‘grow up’ into graphic novels aimed mainly at adults, there is a risk that the medium will leave behind the children and youngsters and lose that essential next generation of readers.” + Art Scatter on graphic non-fiction [Joe Sacco, Guy Deslisle, Craig Thompson] {via Journalista!} + Fabrice Parme on working with Lewis Trondheim + A profile of Alan Moore, and a primer + A first look at Watchemen + Frank Miller is keeping a production blog for his directorial debut, Will Eisner’s The Spirit {via Comics Reporter} + “Sexually explicit comics account for a sizeable chunk of Japan’s 500bn yen manga market. Many feature schoolgirls or childlike adults being raped or engaging in sadomasochism. Manga belonging to the popular “lolicon” - Japanese slang for Lolita complex - genre are likely to escape the ban, as MPs are concerned that outlawing them could infringe on freedom of expression and drive men who use them as an outlet for their sexual urges to commit more serious offences. Other critics of a far-reaching ban say the characters depicted in scores of lolicon titles are fictional and so are not being harmed.” + Comics212 and Mecha Mecha Media on PiQ #1, the “chronicle of otaku culture” and replacement for Newtype USA {via Journalista!}
[Images: Matt Kindt’s prints of James Bond, Sam Spade & The Shadow]
First posted: Sunday, March 23rd, 2008.
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