To engage in a rare-bit of self-promotion, I finally posted an interview I did for the new Oni Press book YOU HAVE KILLED ME by Jamie S. Rich and Joelle Jones. We did the interview last summer, but the book was delayed and the next issue of ODESSA STEPS was delayed. And here we are. YOU HAVE KILLED ME will debut at San Diego next week. In it, we talk about the new book, some old books and our mutual love/obsession with the Criterion Collection.

And that art, by Joelle Jones, will eventually be the cover of the next issue of the magazine, hopefully debuting at Baltimore this year. (Of course, we said that last year too.)

Posted by mark coale

§ GUTSVILLE was one of the highest concept comics ever, a Hawthorne-esque melodrama of a society that lives inside some giant beast. Written by Si Spurrier with art by Frazer Irving, the first issue came out in May 2007, to good reviews, and two issues eked out over the next two years. But it seems to have run aground. Now Rich Johnston quizzes Spurrier on What Ever Happened to Gutsville and the answer isn’t the happy one we’d want, as Irving can’t fit the last three issues into his schedule:

Bleeding Cool: So what happens now? In a Marvelman style do you bring Alan Davis on board?

Spurrier: Heh. That would be nice… I dunno: it’s fucking tricky. I mean… You go riiiight back to the beginning and || the setup was gloriously efficient. Fraze had had a run of good work and was flush enough to be able to take || 6 months out to do something which paid fuck-all along the way. He loved the Gutsville pitch and that was that. || …and to start with it worked perfectly. He’s super-quick at top speed. The first ep took 20 days, and looks amazing. || So do I want to finish it with someone else? Not really, because I’ve had a taste of how amazing it *could* be || For whatever reason Fraze slowed down then stopped. I don’t want to farm it out to anyone else if there’s the slightest || chance he can get going again.

Can’t we all raid our penny jars and gather a fund to get Irving started on finishing this? Please?

§ Graphic NYC has what they bill as “Carmine Infantino’s final interview.” The artistic giant and former DC publisher finds himself much concerned with his legacy:

“Let me ask you a question,” Carmine Infantino says at the end of our interview. His voice normally reaches the lows of a mumble, except when he has a point.

Like now.

“Where do you think I fit in the whole picture of comics?” he asks with an air of sincerity, as if he were asking if the sky was really blue. “Be honest. A lot of people don’t like what I did as editor, but some did.”

As part of the festivities leading up to this weekend’s Toronto Comics Arts Festival, the Toronto National Post is running a HUGE series of charming interviews with cartoonists who are attending, with questions involving pen nibs, Rubik’s Cubes, aliens, and other stuff you don’t usually read about on the regular news sites . It’s too much for one sitting but dipping in here and there presents a pretty good cross section of what cartoonists are reading and thinking about — and they mostly come across as so affable, it’s kind of scary:
Mariko Tamaki
Antoine Dodé
Arthur Dela Cruz
Sparkplug’s Shannon O’Leary
Brian Evinou
Tom Neely
Joey Comeau and Emily Horne
Cecil Castellucci
Eric Kim
Florrent Ruppert
Jason Kieffer
Scott Campbell
Tara McPherson
Ryan North
Michael Cho
Graham Annable
John Malloy
Tim Fish
Tom Humberstone
Steve MacIsaac
Paul Rivoche
Willow Dawson
Erika Moen (above)
J. Torres
Jose Villarrubia
Troy Little
Jeff Lemire

Everyone is talking about this career-spanning interview with writer/BOOM! EIC Mark Waid at AICN. In a comics media drowning in promotional interviews, the long, in-depth interview is a thing of the past (or a TwoMorrows publication) but this one pulls out the stops, and Waid spells out his version of some of the most colorful comics incidents of the past decade, like…Crossgen:

[Mark Alessi’s] idea of creative guidance was to; quite literally, scream until he was red in the face that there wasn’t enough detail on the page and that he wanted to see every single blade of grass, Goddamnit! He’d punish guys who drew perfectly well without his help by focusing on some detail or another on one of 22 pages–some face that somehow wasn’t exactly what he saw in his head, whatever the hell that was–by berating them at the top of his lungs and then sending them home for the day, “and don’t come back until you can draw it right!” That, people, is art directing at its finest. Despite his inappropriate behavior, which was deservedly notorious, there were some damn good Crossgen books put out–but I swear to you, none of them were issued by Crossgen so much as escaped FROM Crossgen.

And…the Jemas Years at Marvel:

(more…)

* Did Dr. Manhattan shoot his load the first weekend?

Depending on whom you talked to this week, the opening weekend box office for WATCHMEN was great or underwhelming. Things look a little clearer after the first night of weekend number two.

From Variety:

Warner Bros./Paramount’s comic book epic “Watchmen” fell 78% from its opening day landing third Friday with an estimated $5.4 million from 3,611 theaters. Pic’s eight-day cume currently stands at $73.3 million.

Did all the fanboys decide they didn’t need a second viewing? Was word-of-mouth outside the nerd bubble not great? Were people scared off by Dr. Manhattan’s package?

* In other nerd news

Time.com’s Nerdworld blog interviews annotator extraordinaire Jess Nevins. (Disclaimer: Jess and I went to grad school together and his work has appeared in my magazine.)

9. Have you, as an annotator, ever gone down in defeat? Are there things in the LoEG books that you just can’t solve?

Oh, heavens, yes. When Moore & O’Neill get into areas which I don’t know anything about and which are ill-represented online and in print–1950s British comic book science fiction, for example–I’m at a complete loss, and some of their references stump even the collective brains of the people who contribute to the annotations. In the Black Dossier, for example, Kevin O’Neill drew in spaceships from various British Fifties sf comics, and if he hadn’t identified them for the print version of the annotations, they would have remained a mystery to us all.

Moore sometimes jokes about trying to stump me. I feel a pain in my head when he says that, because if/when he ever tries to do that, I’m not just stumped, I’m uprooted and thrown into a woodchipper.

*Since there was no Lost column this week…

A week without a new Lost means an extra week for people to scrutinize the most recent episode looking for clues about the statue or how to put all the various time traveling threads together. The coolest thing I read (don’t remember where) was that the hieroglyphs that showed up on the countdown clock are on the Ajira airline tickets.

*A non-comic note for all you people who hate non-comics news here.

Sad news this morning for the pro wrestling business as word broke that Andrew Martin passed away at the age of 33. For those who watched during the “Attitude Era,” Martin worked for the WWE as Test, a beefy mid-carder best remembered for being coupled with a young Stephanie McMahon and feuding with her brother Shane. While not the best in-ring performer, many people raved about the match between Test and McMahon at Summerslam 1999. Once removed from the McMahon family soap opera, he slowly drifted down the card until being released a few years ago from the WWE after failing a drug test. Recently, he had been working on shows in Europe and Japan.

Posted by Mark Coale

Kiel Phegley posts his entire interview with Sammy Harkham, editor of the epic KRAMERS ERGOT #7:

KP: So I was wondering to start, for you is there any kind of guiding editorial principal behind the book beyond “these are cartoonists I love,” or did you just want a forum to bring artists you knew under one banner?

SH: It is pretty much that. It’s comics that I love. And a lot of it is work that isn’t coming out regularly from other places and to do something which presents the work in as great a way as possible. For me, that means giving artists space. If they want to do something in color, they can do it in color. The average issue is slightly larger than a comic book. Just wanting to present the work in a way that’s really unobtrusive…respectful but also making it so it has the energy of comics. I don’t have introductions to each cartoonist. I don’t have an editor’s forward or any of that stuff. I don’t even have page numbers because I want to whole to have a very visceral kind of punch the same way picking up comics when you’re younger has – of discovering something amazing whether it’s Faust or X-Men or Dan Clowes. There’s that energy of picking something up that you respond to that you’ve never seen before and just having your eyeballs melt. I didn’t really feel like there was an anthology like that. And so the goals of each issue slightly change, but I’d say the foundation of it is always that.

And Brian Wood and G. Willow Wilson interview each other about the life of the modern-day comics writer:

BW: Back to the thing of ongoing books being slightly out of control… I found that very quickly into a series I was deviating from the plan as it was laid out in the pitch, so that by the end of the first year the book was already something very different.. it had kind of taken on a life of its own and as I was writing it I was getting new ideas, better ideas, or seeing flaws in the pitch that I was forced to adapt to fix. I’ve heard other writers, like Brian K. Vaughn and Brian Azzarello say the same thing. It’s only natural. Are you there yet with Air?

GWW: Yes and no. The book looks and feels roughly how I imagined it. But the further I go, the more I realize how massive the storylines and themes I’ve saddled myself with really are, and that’s pretty freaky. That’s the freight train element. The more you put out there, the more you have to resolve. Air is the most literary comic I’ve written so far, and that poses problems. I use a lot of images that are meant as visual metaphors, but I end up getting asked “So is this really happening or not? Where is this place in terms of dimensions and reality? Why can this element or object do X but not Y?” Most comics– Sandman is an exception, and so was Animal Man–are very literal-minded. Air isn’t.

Along with Joe Quesada, former Marvel publisher Bill Jemas was one of the principle architects of the revitalization of the House of Ideas back at the turn of the century. His tenure led the way to some big successes — like the Ultimate line–and some big flops — remember Marville? He certainly made a strong impression. After leaving Marvel he started his own branding/marketing company 360eps, but what is he up to now? Well, believe it or not, he’s translating the Bible:

Each morning before sunrise, for the last three years, the Rutgers and Harvard Law School graduate has labored over the Bible, specifically the Book of Genesis in Hebrew, the language in which it was first written.

His goal is to write an English translation of Genesis that is truer to the Hebrew text than are widely used English translations like the famed King James Version. He already has completed the first chapter, available online and in his book “Genesis Rejuvenated.”

By presenting alternative English definitions for Hebrew words to those chosen by KJV translators in 1611, he hopes that his internet-accessible “Freeware Bible,” as he calls his translation, will show readers that widely accepted Bible translations are inherently imperfect.

You can read Mr. Jemas’s Bible translation here. The article goes on to state that although his work is controversial among Bible scholars (given his lack of background in the field) some are finding it worthwhile.

What do today’s cartoonists think about when they sit down to draw or plan out a graphic novel? We’re always fascinated to learn what makes an artist tick, and not surprisingly, many of them have massively different creative agendas…

“It was really my first character-driven book, so I was thinking about that and how to use scenes and character designs. I figured more people would like it, since people tend to like character-driven stories. If you have characters, you can get away with a lot. But, honestly, I don’t feel particularly attached to making character-driven comics.“

-Dash Shaw, on his acclaimed book BOTTOMLESS BELLY BUTTON, from an interview with USA Today.

…

“I interviewed quite a few of the old scenesters over beers or coffee, plumbing them for details, trying to nail the vibe of the place. It’s not historically accurate, but I wanted to get it right, because very little survives from the Akron scene, outside of the records. CBGBs was in the media capital of the world, so there were dozens of photogs and filmmakers documenting what was going on there. That’s not how it was in Akron. Most of the surviving photos look like they were taken with a cheap Kodak Insta-matic. There’s only a few minutes of film. A few scratchy tapes of live shows. I wanted to create the definitive portrait of what it was like.“

-Derf, talking to Newsarama about his new graphic novel PUNK ROCK AND TRAILER PARKS, set in Akron, Ohio, considered “new Liverpool” in the late ’70s.

…

“I’m trying to make him more than just a big strong guy. I want to give him a bit more personality in his face, so he looks more ethnic. And in this story he’s dealing with a broken heart and trying to get over it so I’m trying to capture his personality by what he’s going through in the story. But at the same time he is Colossus. He turns into a massive metallic guy, which is really fun to draw. I’m messing around with ways of conveying the metal in his form. Any time you deal with conveying different metals in a two dimensional medium like this, it’s a lot of fun to figure out what really works and makes things look cool.”

-Terry Dodson discusses his work drawing UNCANNY X-MEN for Marvel Comics with CBR.

Whitney Matheson interviews one of the Top 100 people of 2008, Dash Shaw. This is a long quote, but it’s a good one:

What do you like about publishing online?

Immediacy. Most of the print comics you read are reacting to the climate of the world and life of the cartoonist about a year or longer ago. I started drawing Bottomless Belly Button in March 2005 and finished it a couple years later, and it was published a year after that. I don’t even feel like the same person who drew that book. I feel like the world and I are changing so quickly. I’m finishing BodyWorld in January 2009 and it will be in print in 2010 — will this even be relevant in 2010? I’m sure I’ll start feeling ashamed of it in mid-to-late 2009. With a webcomic I can draw it, scan it — done! I didn’t have to wait on anyone! It has the potential to be totally connected to the current times/self. I can’t recall the last print comic I read that actually felt of-the-moment. So far, comics have always existed in a weird, slightly disconnected time loop.

I like it that in webcomics I don’t have to think about the page, page spreads or page registers. It’s very freeing. I can just tell the story in the little boxes. I like it that there’s no art object. There’s a fetishization of older print formats that exist in the alternative comics community, and webcomics are outside of that. Webcomics and iPhone comics aren’t like print comics, and they shouldn’t try to be. They’re some new thing, and if they’re approached with intelligence and creativity, I think they can be done well. Most webcomics look like print comics to me, just given wider distribution.

For many people, The Perry Bible Fellowship was a webcomic first, and they bought the book because they wanted the webcomic in print form. What I’m saying is this: Webcomics don’t have to constrict themselves to outdated print formats. Print formats now have to accommodate new web formats. I’m not saying that webcomics should replace print, or that every print cartoonist should move to the web. I’m just speaking as a cartoonist who’s worked in both print and web, and found that the web has a lot to offer. I also hope that newer/younger cartoonists who (understandably) don’t want to deal with the publishing game (sending excerpts, e-mailing editors) view the web as a respectable alternative.

§ Austin English asks Zak Sally (SAMMY THE MOUSE) 20 questions:

4. do you compose the page as a whole or do you focus more on individual panel composition?

well, with the bass ackwards way i’m working now, it seems like i end up spending a LOT of time on just…composing the actual panel BORDERS, as weird as that sounds; i’m thinking about what’s gonna go IN them, of course, but it seems to me like that’s this skeleton of how i’m attempting to lead the reader (and myself) through the page and the story…seems like i spend a lot of time making slight shifts and balances, a little bigger, a litle smaller, to the left, etc etc.
and then there’s always all this tweaking of the compositions within the panels as you go, and…i’m sure any cartoonist will say they try to work the overall page as a design while they work, but… it’s always a balance: try to “design” your pages TOO MUCH, and the storytelling can suffer at the design’s expense. don’t pay enough attenton to the overall design of your page and it can look like unbalanced crud.
i just realized that i should be cartooning instead of writing about it.
too late now; it appears that i’m on a roll.

§ Vice Magazine interviews those COMICS COMICS rascals, Tim Hodler and Frank Santoro:

Oh, OK then. What happened to turn comix around again? Or has it? Is this notion of a “revolution” stale, or just impossible?
Frank: I think it has just become another “acceptable” form of expression. Personally, I’m against comics gaining respectability. That’s always THE END. Look at Film. Everyone is a Filmmaker now with a capital F. No one just makes a fucking movie for a laugh. Think John Waters. As soon as he became co-opted by Hollywood his movies—while brilliant by mainstream standards—went south in my view. Same with Art, same with Comics. The avant-garde is generally at its best when it’s making fun of the establishment and a lot of “alt comix” guys who used to make fun of the “establishment” in Comics are becoming the establishment.

§ The Walrus has a massive, sparkling interview with Lynda Barry conducted by Sean Rogers, and it’s full of things you didn’t know but you needed to know:

They’ve done MRI stuff on hoarders—on people who have that thing where they can’t throw away anything. They do these MRIs to see what part of the brain is getting blood flow, and they had this woman who had a really big hoarding problem. She had coupons that had expired ten years earlier and what they wanted to do was measure her blood flow as they put the coupon that had expired ten years earlier through a shredder. And it was the blood flow exactly as if she herself had been attacked. My husband is also a hoarder—we love garbage—and this wish to transform garbage into something valuable, it’s sort of a feeling about yourself as well. The hoarding thing is really interesting. I do think it’s a defence. Also, my mom was very neat, so I know as long as there’s stuff on the floor she’s nowhere around [laughs]. If things are a mess, that woman is not ever around. So I made my ring of trash to keep her away. And then I used a lot of glitter…

Part II is here. Both are a must, not just for learning about Barry but her extraordinary way of teaching creativity.

§ Geoff Boucher finishes his interview with Neil Gaiman; in part three he talks about his China trip…:

The story is one of the four great Chinese classical stories from the 16th century. And I got to investigate the real-life people that story was based on in the 7th century. I also got to travel across China where I had a variety of strange and wonderful events including bribing an elderly watchman to allow me into a closed-down amusement park filled with dark and dusty monkey statues. The park takes you through a story that ends in hell. This thing was an amusement park inside a warehouse so it was very incredibly dark and it closed down because people simply weren’t coming back. I did this walk where you start out in this fun, lovely, happy monkey story and you walk through that to the end of the warehouse where you are in hell and you watch all these demons crushing people before you stumble out into the daylight. I really can’t imagine any little Chinese kid turning around to their dad and saying, ‘Wow, I can’t wait to come back.’

And…Part Two.

§ For a different kind of interview, check out Jen Contino interviewing Kevin Huizenga. If you thought that Contino’s damn-the-torpedoes interveiw style and Huizenga’s generally reserved nature might make for strange tablemates…you are correct.

THE PULSE: What are the challenges of producing a story where the picture is worth a thousand words? What made you want to make this story have minimal dialogue?

HUIZENGA: Those are the rules of the game. But maybe there will be dialogue in a future strip–or not really a dialogue, though, because there really isn’t a possibility of dialogue in the sense of a true exchange of ideas between the Fighters or Runners, but maybe there will be some words exchanged. We’ll see. I’m already working on the next one and there are no words exchanged in it thus far.

§ If you missed the results of our reader poll, it’s here, allegedly legible.

§ Rob Clough has a report on the big Dash Shaw/Gary Panter event at Duke University (above):

Shaw went on to describe his experiences as a student in Japan, the ways in which manga influenced his storytelling choices in BOTTOMLESS BELLY BUTTON, and how he views autobiographical comics as a genre like any other. Panter said that Shaw was an easy student to work with because of his work ethic, and Shaw thought that many of his classmates at the School of Visual Arts were lazy. Panter bemoaned the fact that many of his students couldn’t even produce a page a week, blaming it in part on distractions like video games and the internet. Shaw gently chided him for that comment, saying “You’re such a dad!”, but Panter was adamant about this point, as well as his view that artists didn’t take advantage of libraries as a set of visual resources and inspirations.

§ Rick Veitch recalls his one collaboration with the late Steve Gerber.

§ John Jakala contemplates manga longevity:

I was cleaning my office over the weekend, trying once again to organize my mess of a comic collection. I definitely need new bookcases to arrange all of my graphic novels, but for now I shoved most of my manga into old diaper boxes just to clear out some of the clutter. I filled five “long boxes” with manga I didn’t think I was likely to reread any time soon and then reorganized the “keeper” manga on my bookshelf. Sifting through my collection like this made me reflect once again on the “re-readability” of various series. Here are several of the manga series I keep coming back to with some comments on what gives each series such ongoing appeal.

§ Speaking of collections, we also missed Tom Spurgeon’s impressive list of “50 Things That Every Great Comics Collection Needs to Have,” which caused us great anxiety, because we have most of them — for instance, we have LOTS AND LOTS of mini-comics, going back to the ’80s—and no place to put them, really. Just how many people need a great comics collection, though? And should they be stored in boxes on shelves vertically or horizontally?

§ Dick Hyacinth has some of the same thoughts:

9. A Suite of Modern Literary Graphic Novels Who doesn’t have this? I mean, who doesn’t have this and is still reading, rather than dismissing the whole endeavor as pointless, so long as Crisis on Infinite Earths isn’t specified as a must-have?

§ Also at the Comics Reporter, David Welsh muses on shojo manga that deals with real stories, in re: Minx’s stated goals:

It’s the last one that really baffles. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against sparkly-eyed, orphan faerie princess. But to suggest that shojo manga doesn’t feature contemporary young women in realistic settings dealing with relatable issues is to willfully ignore a good half of what’s currently available in English from the category.

§ Test your ability to understand Grant Morrison! A. David Lewis posts the audio of his interview with the heavily-accented visionary.

§ Quotable Warren Ellis:

Newsarama: Warren, as always it’s good to speak with you. The first book’s worth of FreakAngels episodes have finished and a print edition is on its way and you’ve recently started Book 2. How’s the ride so far?

Warren Ellis: Well, now I understand why all the British comics writers from the 70s and 80s who worked exclusively in weekly comics had those deep lines all over their faces and those eyes that pleaded silently for death.

§ We got to meet Tucker Stone and his fellow-blogger wife Nina in Baltimore, and he’s a nice young fellow, a complete camouflage for the fact that he’s actually a delightfully snarky scamp as this report on a DCU panel shows:

• DC will continue to publish Final Crisis as a mini-series—the recently published third issue will be followed by a fourth.
• The Final Crisis: Rogues’ Revenge mini-series will also be having future issues.
• These will be joined by two new one-shots: Final Crisis: Submit and Final Crisis: Resist.
While this information isn’t exactly surprising or new, it was met with a pretty excited response that was completely out of proportion with the fact that the comics were vaguely referred to as existing in the near future, which everyone knew before they sat down.

§ Time Out New York scores an extremely rare interview with…Spider-Man, on the occasion of its 10th anniversary, as part of a series of interview with 40 important New Yorkers:

Who are your favorite New Yorkers?
Spider-Man: I love anyone who doesn’t publish incredibly slanted editorials in their newspaper about what a menace I am. I also like listening to Joe Benigno on WFAN; he’s the only guy I know who’s more of a lovable loser than me. Let’s go Mets!

What’s the biggest thing that’s happened to the city in the last 13 years?
Spider-Man: The ’05 transit strike. Sure, it was awful for you guys, but I was the first person into work every. single. day. That’s a big change for me.

Oh, wait I’m supposed to say Time Out magazine, right?

§ Nisha Gopalan discovers that Mark Millar thinks Sarah Palin is “Terrifying” and more in a chat at io9:

io9: The posters promoting War Heroes slam Obama, while the tone of the comic is, in kind, fervently patriotic. Is all of this satire or sincerity?
Millar: It’s amazing how many people seem to think this is a neo-con comic. Same thing happened on [Marvel’s] Ultimates, when it was clearly anti-war through and through. I feel like [director Paul] Verhoeven must have felt after Starship Troopers, in the sense that many people are missing the political satire. In my story, America is clearly engineering terror attacks as a means to garner control back home, enslave the population, and send kids with nothing to lose into the Gulf. It’s fake terror to justify an aggressive foreign policy.… There’s nothing duller than some worthy anti-war [commentary]. We know it’s wrong, illegal, and ill-considered. You don’t need me to tell you that. So I’m jumping one step ahead and planning a heist story of sorts in the middle of this bad situation.

ICv2 has a four-part interview with Gonzalo Ferreyra, Viz Media Vice President of Sales and Product Marketing, on many topics:

We’ve heard that there is more attention at both the consumer and trade level to the top manga titles while the middle and bottom titles are losing audience. Viz is blessed to have a lot of titles in that top tier, but between the various titles you offer, do you see that trend?

We’re not seeing it as much. It’s a question of expectation, and we’ve always been rather realistic about understanding the potential of that middle and bottom tier, so to speak. We’ve also done a little bit of housecleaning to manage the list and help us focus our list a bit more. But I wouldn’t say that we’re seeing a dramatic difference in the response to the long tail.

More: Part Two, Part Three, Part Four.

§ The New York Metro talks to novelist Jonathan Ames on THE ALCOHOLIC:

Was it therapeutic to be able to write about some of the ups and downs in your life?

It was good to write about some issues and events which I had not covered in my essays or novels. These were things that artistically I had wanted to address. One of my goals as a writer is to record what I’ve seen and felt - like a caveman scratching things onto a wall - and so in this sense certain parts of the book gave me an artistic catharsis. My other equally important goal is to give people something, to provide them with some entertainment and distraction.

§ Gopalan strikes again as Splash Page talks to an actual comic-book writer, Glenn Eichler on STUFFED:

“‘Stuffed’ has to do with father issues, brother issues, and the history of anthropology,” explained Eichler. But it really has to do with a dead body. His book (out in 2009 from First Second) is about a guy who inherits the contents of his late father’s “Ripley’s Believe It or Not”-type museum. Among the findings: a macaroni-noodle interpretation of “The Last Supper” and…a statue of loin-cloth-wearing, spear-wielding African man.

“It’s the corniest sort of ooga-booga native thing you could imagine,” says Eichler of the politically incorrect curio. “Then it slowly dawns on him—it’s not actually a statue, it’s stuffed human skin.”

Upon this discovery, his pothead half-brother (a.k.a. the disheveled guy in Bertozzi’s sneak peek) returns to town, and the siblings—who must contend with their father’s involvement in such an unsavory practice—disagree about what do with the creepy statue. The protagonist wants to hand it over to a natural-history museum; the hippie brother…doesn’t.

§ Geoff Boucher chats with Alan Moore and makes a shocking discovery…Moore doesn’t think much of the upcoming WATCHMEN film!

“Will the film even be coming out? There are these legal problems now, which I find wonderfully ironic. Perhaps it’s been cursed from afar, from England. And I can tell you that I will also be spitting venom all over it for months to come.”
[snip]
“There are three or four companies now that exist for the sole purpose of creating not comics, but storyboards for films. It may be true that the only reason the comic book industry now exists is for this purpose, to create characters for movies, board games and other types of merchandise. Comics are just a sort of pumpkin patch growing franchises that might be profitable for the ailing movie industry.”

Much more Moore in an excellent piece that covers a lot of territory. It also reminds us that the DVD THE MINDSCAPE OF ALAN MOORE is coming out on the 30th! MTV’s Splash Page even has an exclusive snippet.

Technorati Tags: Alan Moore

[NOTE: An edited version of this ran recently in PWCW, but writer Wil Moss offered to let us run the full transcript.]

BY WIL MOSS
There are lots of well-intentioned, entertaining comics web sites out there, so it’s doubtful many people would have pegged Comicfoundry.com as the online magazine that would break the mold for the comics consumer magazine. But when Comic Foundry made the jump from online to print publication last year, it did just that. The new quarterly publication offers easy access to comics for a new generation of comic readers with great writing, a hip emphasis on lifestyle—from tips on “comic book fashion” to a list of “cute creator couples”—and an editorial embrace of comics of all kinds; from indie and superhero comics to manga and everything in between. They’ve even got an issue on politics coming up.

After initially being turned down for distribution by Diamond Distribution, the dominant distributor in the comics shop market, the savvy editors of the Comic Foundry brought the rejection to the attention of the internet comics community and their support convinced Diamond to relent. Comic Foundry went to full color with its second issue and has seen orders increase with every issue. Next step: breaking into the bookstore and newsstand market. PW Comics Week spoke with Comic Foundry editor-in-chief Tim Leong (he’s also design director at Complex magazine) and CF senior editor Laura Hudson (who also contributes to PW Comics Week) about how to publish a smart, funny and beautifully designed magazine about comics that anyone would like to read.

PW Comics Week: How would you explain the success you’ve had so far?

Tim Leong: I think it really speaks to us filling a niche in the marketplace, because the current magazines that are out there—Wizard, The Comics Journal—I think they service their readers very well with what they do and what they aim to do, but in doing that I feel they’ve left a very wide gap in the marketplace. I think a lot of readers were left out in the cold. I think we’ve helped fill that gap, and I think the readers are really appreciative of that.

Laura Hudson: I also think that one of the reasons that Tim initially came up with Comic Foundry, and one of the reasons why I joined him with such enthusiasm, is that the kind of magazine we wanted to read didn’t exist—so we made it. I feel like there are more different types of people getting into comics now more than ever, and as I’ve heard Tim say a lot of times, he doesn’t just read superhero comics or just indie or just manga, he reads all sorts of stuff and so do I. I think there’s a new reader like that who’s way more open to different kinds of stuff. That’s where we’re coming from, and that resonates with what people are looking for.

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