We know we just plugged Peter Sanderson, but his column this week has an interesting discussion of Dave Cockrum’s memorial panel and how the vagaries of taste effect creators:
The Dave Cockrum panel reminds me of another panel discussion I recently heard about another important comics artist of the mid-1970s who passed away in the month following the convention. This was Marshall Rogers, whom I mentioned last week, whose work ranged from Don McGregor’s Detectives, Inc. to Chris Claremont’s Daughters of the Dragon to his many collaborations with Steve Englehart, including Batman, Silver Surfer, Mister Miracle, and his alternative strips for the early independent comics publisher Eclipse, Captain Quick and a Foozle, Coyote, and Scorpio Rose.
In Comic Zone’s Internet radio tribute to Marshall Rogers, his contemporary, inker Terry Austin, talked about how when they were breaking into the comics business, certain unnamed people in authority at DC Comics would castigate both them and their work. According to these people in power. Marshall and Terry were doing their art all wrong. The Comic Zone interviewer sounds clearly astonished by this. How could anyone not recognize the talents of Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin?
Meanwhile, the Independent profiles Neil Gaiman who has busy days we can only imagine:
Parisian fanarchists, meanwhile, want to talk about his novel Neverwhere, which takes place in a subterranean shadow-London. “They use it as a kind of ur-text,” he says, “because there is another Paris below ground. People go catacombing; they offer to take me down there. They steal keys, they can get anywhere in Paris at night, but their whole thing is about leaving things the way you find them. So they took over an old Victorian swimming pool and brought in a film projector, and they all got into the pool and watched films projected on the side of the wall at 4 o’clock in the morning, and then it was all just cleaning the place up afterwards, leaving it, disappearing.”
Gaiman’s famous dark shock of hair (there’s even a website devoted to it) is unbowed by today’s ordeal, waving gently about him as he smiles, signs, doodles, trades stories and shakes hands with acolytes and readers. This is after a morning during which, in addition to this interview, he’s risen early to meet the novelist Joe Hill (author of Heart-Shaped Box), done a spot for the BBC, worked on a story for a Chatto anthology that “isn’t quite cooked yet”, run it by his daughter Holly, learnt that a story from his latest book is up for a Hugo award, blogged about that… You find yourself wishing a holiday on the man.
