Kibbles 'n' Bits

Alt.comix gods interview explosion:

Dan Clowes I with Sean T. Collins:

At a certain point when I was working on the strip, the editor called me up and said, “We’ve had a lot of complaints that this character keeps saying the word ‘Jesus,’ so we’re going to have to ask you to stop doing that. You can’t use that word anymore.’ [Collins laughs] At first I was like, ‘That’s an outrage! How can I do that?’ Then I started writing around the world, and I realized that just added more to the story itself. That just made it all the more restricted. He doesn’t even have the words to express his anger. It made it so much stronger that when I did the book version, where of course I was totally uncensored, I wound up leaving it as it was. using all the swear symbols and all the stuff I had in the New York Times out of necessity.

Dan Clowes II with Alex Deuben:

When I finished the strip and sat down and read them all the way through in the original sequence, I had that feeling you get when you read those old “Terry and the Pirates” collections. There’s this built in delay between the last panel of one strip and the beginning of the next strip. You’re building in the suspense where the reader is anticipating what’s going to happen for an entire week. I wanted to not have that as much as possible in the book version and so I tried to put in things that would create that space but not interrupt the story. That was a big challenge in putting it together in book form and it wound up taking a lot more effort than I would have imagined.

§ Gilbert Hernandez at CBR with Chris Mautner:

I’m not thinking of movies in particular with the Fritz books, just an off-kilter world with violence and a very sexy star involved. Exploitation allows for madness and obsession to be explored more deeply. I’m still surprised at how many adults are intimidated by sex in comics. Many L&R readers and critics don’t know what to make of that kind of material from me, and I tried not to emphasize the movie connection at first. But it seems many readers are interested in the tenuous link to the “Palomar” world. I’m one of the few left making crazy comics, it seems.

Skyscrapers of the Midwest video preview from Available Light on Vimeo.

§ Josh Cotter’s powerful tale of childhood and imagination, SKYSCRAPERS OF THE MIDWEST, has been adapted into a two-hour stage play. [via Comics Alliance] and The Columbus Dispatch has reviewed it:

Set today and in the 1980s in the heartland of America and as much within Cotter’s distinctive imagination, this autobiographical tale perhaps is too episodic and inconclusive for anyone to bend into a completely satisfying drama.

Two central performances help generate the emotional core so vital to such a clever and self-analytical work.

§ 2nd generation of comics: Hayley Campbell (daughter of Eddie) has joined the Comics Journal writing team and starts out reviewing Pinocchio, the tour-de-force by Winshluss.

Not that children wouldn’t like it – it’s bright, cartoony, and incredibly beautiful – it’s just that they probably wouldn’t know what to do with the seven leather-clad dwarves raping the unconscious Snow White, nor the bloody dismemberment of Geppetto’s bored wife after she has sex with Pinocchio’s flame-throwing nose.

§ Michael Cavna handicaps who might win the Cartooning Pulitzer.

§ Evan Dorkin takes a look at The Peeper and what he says about Jack Kirby and supervillains. Let’s face it, we all want to take a look at The Peeper from time to time.

If those names don’t exactly inspire fear, or interest, well, that’s because they shouldn’t. There’s nothing inspired about them. They’re perhaps one step above naming your bad guy, “Bad Guy.” Actually, “Bad Guy” might be better, it sounds like it might be ironic, as opposed to moronic. Don’t get me wrong, I love Kirby, but this is brain-coasting even for him. He clearly wasn’t in any particular mood to dicker around with clever villain names during the ten or fifteen minutes he spent whipping this annual up. “Okay, we got Captain America, we got mutants, and we got Magneto, which is Doctor Doom for mutants. And who I gotta use, because the office told me to. Okay, whatever. But to hell with Magneto’s old gang, they can keep that. I’m not looking that shit up, and I don’t wanna do that same old stuff again, anyway. I’ll make some new guys. Yeah, new guys, I can do that like breathing.”

§ Kyle Baker makes the shocking discovery that Norman Rockwell is a CHEATER! because he used photo references. In a stunning moment of self-revelataion, Baker realizes that he himself uses photo references, like most artists:

My job as an illustrator is to entertain, not to make things up out of my head. It’s not a memory test.

We’ve made it sound kind of silly but Baker has lots of examples that show how the great artists took references and made it way more entertaining.

§ I’m always a bit suspicious of these trend stories, but I happen to like this one, so there. It seems that geek girls are watching more “geek” entertainment and fewer things that are pink and made for them:

Yet a slew of new romcoms fell flat this season. Geek girls who love fantasy and sci-fi say it’s time the networks woke up and started courting them if a hit show is what the networks want.

“It’s wrong to assume that our demo only wants to see hour-long med dramas with cheesy dialogue or romantic comedies,” said Ratcliffe. “(Networks) need to embrace the fact that there is a large female contingency looking for entertainment like ‘Game of Thrones’ with seriously wonderful women.”