The Daily Cross Hatch hits another one out of the park with an interview with Gilbert Hernandez. It starts as he muses about the dense mythology of Palomar, and how the Ignatz book NEW TALES OF OLD PALOMAR started out to be an “entry” book:
Yeah. So I took the traditional Palomar characters and story and just made a simplified, almost a young-people’s version of it. You know, like an Easy Reader version (laughs), and started out that way. As things progress, though, it’ll get a little more complex, a little darker, a little more original.
But then things turn a little melancholy for one of the greatest cartoonists of the last 40 years:
The publishers, you know, are they willing to continue? Because this is a kind of a prestige project, you know? They’re putting a lot of money into it, The original Love and Rockets was really cheaply made, and we were able to get away with that for a long time. But now we have a more expensive package, a more expensive book. It depends on what the returns are and what the publishers feel is worth pursuing. If it works out in a positive sense, then, you know, sure.
Q: Even you, one of the more successful names in alternative comics, have to think about projects that way.
Yeah. It’s the kind of comics that I do, and that my brother does; nobody else really does them. It’s a type of alternative comic that only my brother and I do, for the most part. Everybody else is going over to Pantheon because they’ve got a tragic biography to tell. I’m fine with that, but I’m just trying to do just stories with imagination—just old fashioned stories, you know?
What an asshole!
Why? Because he doesn’t have any desire to to tell a heartbreaking autobiography or because he’s up front about his desire to not do so?
No, because he claims that he and his brother are the only ones doing stories with imagination. That’s an insult to a lot of other good cartoonists. And it is silly to imply that Pantheon, the publisher of Daniel Clowes’s Ice Haven and Charles Burns’s Black Hole, are only interested in “tragic biography”. Beto is a fabulous artist and storyteller, but in this interview excerpt he comes off a bit arrogant.
“No, because he claims that he and his brother are the only ones doing stories with imagination. That’s an insult to a lot of other good cartoonists. And it is silly to imply that Pantheon, the publisher of Daniel Clowes’s Ice Haven and Charles Burns’s Black Hole, are only interested in “tragic biography”. Beto is a fabulous artist and storyteller, but in this interview excerpt he comes off a bit arrogant. ”
Thats what those guys like Clowes do, a bunch of sad stories about sad people and their sad lives.
Hey anon, thanks. I didn’t read it that way. I can see how one could, but I still don’t think it conveyed the kind of arrogance that you think it does. But I’m probably too divorced from the context to know with any real certainty.
“Thats what those guys like Clowes do, a bunch of sad stories about sad people and their sad lives.”
That’s a fair description of much of what Beto does.