Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

Morrison Beyond Supergods

October 23, 2011

The Invisibles‘ Sir Miles makes for a convincing Number 2.

Seems that half the pleasure of my recent reading has been the unplanned parallels between consecutive books, a side effect of getting most of them from the library, where I have limited control over the order in which they become available. This is currently manifesting in the shared theme of memory loss between the novel I’ve just finished, Alice LaPlante’s Turn of Mind, and the one I’m about to begin, Nicole Krauss’s Man Walks Into Room. Right before that it was the similar perspectives of Grant Morrison in Supergods and Simon Pegg in Nerd Do Well, each writing about the influence of primarily American popular culture on their own work and their entry in turn into the American cultural consciousness from the UK.

Thinking about both books and their different scopes—Morrison’s is focused, laser-like, on superhero comics, mainly American, and by the time he reaches the 2000s, mainly Marvel and DC, while Pegg’s broadly surveys “geek” culture generally—around the same time I finished watching the 1960s British TV show The Prisoner made me realize how odd Morrison’s emphasis on superhero books is.

True, superheroes have few, if any, more ardent or more articulate defenders than Morrison, so it’s no surprise that he would write a book seriously engaging the genre. However, the more I think about it, the stranger it seems that Morrison, arguably the superhero writer of his popularity level who most reaches outside of the superhero genre for inspiration, would write a book that so thoroughly wraps up his own autobiography with the history of superheroes. Finishing The Prisoner contributed to this sense, as I began to recognize references to it in so much of the other fiction I’ve enjoyed, including several places in Morrison’s work.

Among the many odd contortions that Supergods makes in order to present Morrison’s own history while limiting the fiction discussed almost exclusively to superhero comics is its inclusion of Morrison’s The Invisibles into the superhero tradition without addressing many of the other cultural influences that shaped it. Entire books have been written on the connections between The Invisibles and other works of fiction, but what’s fresh in my mind is The Prisoner, which can be seen throughout the series’ tone, themes, and even specific visuals.

Another place that visuals from The Prisoner are explicitly referenced is in Morrison’s wonderful Seaguy, where the first two minor characters we encounter are dressed as members of the Village.


Is Seaguy set in the Disney version of the Village?

Of course, the visual of playing chess with Death simultaneously recalls one of the most enduring images of age-old struggle between man and the universe/gods, famously the central motif of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Here, Death’s ineptitude at the game and his complaint that the rules seem so “arbitrary” tip us off that a reversal of the natural order is at play here. In the funhouse world Seaguy lives in, everything is artificial and the natural world is out of place. Death has no meaning or power in the realm of Mickey Eye (nor in comics or other corporately owned fictions, in which characters and ideas are never truly allowed to die). That he is dressed as an extra from The Prisoner places the locale in the tradition of the Village, but we quickly learn that its modern iteration is a mindless theme park rather than a quiet resort.

This panoply of diverse influences is common in Morrison’s writing, and I discovered recently that this diversity can be felt even when a reader doesn’t catch the specific references. For a long time I was perplexed by my enjoyment of Morrison’s run on the series of Batman titles he shepherded up until DC’s recent relaunch. After all, it seemed so insular, really only concerning Batman himself in its resurrection of old continuity, its efforts to reconcile the character’s entire publishing history, and yet another plot involving a new enemy using that history against Batman. On the surface, it’s exactly the kind of comics-about-comics that I usually have no patience for. And yet, I found myself continually thrilled by Morrison’s take.

I can’t say for certain that I’ve solved the mystery, but a big clue fell into my lap when I got the hardcover edition of Batman & Robin vol. 3: Batman & Robin Must Die!, which includes a section of notes on the genesis of many of the new villains introduced in Batman & Robin (for all the dot connecting Morrison has done with old stories, his Batman run was also deeply generous with character creation). The section references the behavioral science experiments of Drs. Harry Harlow and John B. Calhoun, the classical demons of the Goetia of the Lemegeton, and even the history of the banana peel pratfall. The point being that even where I didn’t recognize the specific references, they still introduced a different flavor than would have come from so many superhero comics that are primarily influenced by other superhero comics, which have an inbred, stale quality to them. Morrison’s promiscuous use of cultural and sociological touchstones bring a freshness to his work, even when the story itself concerns a possible ancestor of Bruce Wayne posing as Wayne’s father and using knowledge of his history against him.

So while it comes as no surprise that Morrison wrote a book about superheroes, this is more because the genre is currently his preferred subject, not that it is his sole influence. If Morrison’s been bitten by the nonfiction bug, here’s hoping his next book has more to do with comics’ interaction with other media and the world, coupled with a more thorough look at his outside interests. He’s a great defender of superheroes, but his own work can’t be understood solely through that lens.

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Simon Pegg writes about spinning childhood obsessions into nerd gold

October 17, 2011
Nerd Do Well: A Small Boy’s Journey to
Becoming a Big Kid
Gotham Books – hardcover, $27.50
By Simon Pegg

This was an interesting read immediately after Grant Morrison’s Supergods, as both examine largely American popular culture from a UK point of view and delve into its influence beyond American shores and on the authors specifically. Of course, whereas Morrison limits his discussion to superhero comic books, Pegg’s interest is in popular culture broadly, though with a focus on those types of films, television, books, and even comics (a little) that engender in a certain type of viewer/reader a desire to obsessively re-watch or endlessly discuss nuances with others of the faithful. In other words, the popular culture that appeals to nerds. The importance of these works to Pegg’s biography is hard to overstate, as his career as actor and writer from the television show Spaced to movies like Hot Fuzz and Paul is built on extended riffs on such material.

Nerd Do Well is, on one level, Pegg’s memoir of growing up and developing his comic voice, spanning his childhood and young adulthood, up through the filming and release of Shaun of the Dead, the film that brought him to semi-prominence to American audiences. However, with the exception of a few passages describing the formulation of early jokes and an acknowledgment of his creative debt to writing partners Jessica Hynes and Edgar Wright, Pegg delves very little into the process of writing or shooting the television and movies that he’s been involved in. Indeed, while the book is a work of autobiography, Pegg repeatedly expresses reservations about discussing his life, and outside of a few comic anecdotes, he plays the book’s biographical elements close to the vest.

That’s fine, as the real purpose and value of Nerd Do Well is as a book-length answer to the question, “What are your influences?” Where the story of Pegg’s early childhood is amusing but largely unremarkable and disjointed (another quality the book shares with Supergods is a tendency to reveal details out of order, following a narrative thread across a few years, moving onto a new topic, and then finally returning to where he left off a few chapters later), he brings enormous passion to the discovery and discussion of the films and television that formed his artistic sensibility.

Here Pegg is generous and eloquent, and the book comes to life when he describes the experience of seeing Star Wars for the first time. Having studied film in college, Pegg is fluent in critical theory and expounds at entertaining length on his theories as to the resonance of popular franchises with audiences. Star Wars, he speculates, came out at a moment when America was ready to guiltily reevaluate its position as global empire, and he notes similarities between the United States and the Galactic Empire, which peaks when the Empire is defeated in a jungle environment by a vastly outgunned militia of local inhabitants in Return of the Jedi. Of course, he never loses sight of the surface elements that attract young viewers and is an equally astute observer of the less macro emotional levels that these films work on, mentioning on more than one occasion that E.T. brought him to tears as a child.

Later, Pegg turns the same critical lens on his own work, bringing a refreshing self-awareness to a description of the Oedipal issues at play in Shaun of the Dead, an analysis of the consequences of two possible interpretations of the film’s ending and the male wish-fulfillment aspect of the female lead implied by one of them. The feeling is not unlike that of watching a film with audio commentary more concerned with emotional honesty than on-set hijinx.

The tone will be familiar and welcome to many readers in its down-to-earth perspective and genuine humbled excitement at the accomplishments and opportunities Pegg has had. The book’s structuring element is the ESTB—electro-static time ball—which Pegg imagines using to visit a younger self who has just fallen in love with a particular film or television show to announce that his grown-up self has just gotten to contribute to the genre in question or work with the director in question. It’s a disarming technique, although it becomes overused toward the end, when the book devolves into a a series of encounters with famous actors and directors and the ESTB metaphor seems to get pulled out on every page. The enthusiasm for meeting these people feels genuine—it doesn’t seem like namedropping in the sense of trying to impress the reader—but Pegg’s pleasure at meeting yet another beloved filmmaker becomes tryingly repetitive.

One more device that overstays its welcome is the fictional story that opens each chapter, depicting a superheroic version of Pegg on a mission to save the world. Early on it plays a counterpoint to Pegg’s discomfort with sharing the details of his life by giving him something else to write about, and the beginning is amusing, particularly in how the over-the-top description of Pegg’s prowess, both crime-fighting and sexual, makes Pegg himself the butt of the joke without resorting to self-depricatoin. But as the main narrative becomes more pleasurable, the superhero story becomes an unwelcome interruption, though individual installments remain brief. It’s a minor issue, but the inclusion of this element feels distracting.

Nerd Do Well is not the greatest work of pop culture critical analysis you’ll read this year, but it is a clear-eyed and enjoyabe look at how a nerd-culture figure like Pegg has transformed the fictions of is childhood and young adulthood into nostalgic yet fresh-feeling stories today. He includes a wide range of influences from Raiders of the Lost Ark to 2000AD and presents a clear path from experiencing the work to absorbing it to synthesizing it with his comedic style and a few autobiographical touches (though very few of those are explored, the primary one being the influence of a recent breakup with a pseudonymed woman on Spaced. Channeling his heartbreak over the terribleness of The Phantom Menace falls into a weird middle ground) to create his comedy and film writing. Though a flawed and incomplete portrait of Pegg’s creative process, for most of its pages Nerd Do Well is a fun and genial tour through the pop culture of the 1980s through the 2000s and how much they mean to one of their more eloquent admirers, like a long, funny chat over drinks with one of your smarter, nerdier friends.

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I went to Wordstock to look at Pictures

October 12, 2009

Not entirely true. I did book things at Wordstock, too. But I took pictures of the comics stuff.


The main convention hall

Wordstock, for those not in Portland, is an annual literary festival held at the Oregon Convention Center and sponsored by, among others, Portland landmark Powell’s Books, the largest independent bookstore in the United States. Last year, the graphic novel was among the main themes of the show, and the Stumptown Foundation established the Graphic Novel Garden as a miniature Stumptown Comics Fest within Wordstock.

(more…)

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Mainstream Media: “Comics is easy!”

April 26, 2009

NEW PET PEEVE:

 

It’s not exactly news that when covering comics mainstream media and literary outlets often focus on writers to the exclusion of artists. Articles about DC/Vertigo’s line of original graphic novels written by well-known novelists, like Incognegro (written by Mat Johnson and illustrated by Warren Pleece) and The Alcoholic (written by Jonathan Ames and illustrated by Dean Haspiel) generally profiled the writers and the novelty of their comics debuts, while making passing reference to the veteran cartoonists they worked with (though Vertigo’s own marketing and book design likely deserve some of the blame). Not surprising considering that such pieces are written by people who make some or all of their living writing and probably do not draw.

Notoriously, when the graphic novel Skim was nominated for the Canadian Governor General’s Literary Awards, writer Mariko Tamaki was named in the nomination, while artist Jillian Tamaki was not. Complaints throughout the comics world and an open letter signed by several prominent Canadian and American cartoonists were to no effect.

The latest thing to catch my eye in this area is a blurb on the back of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s wonderful A Drifting Life. The quotation, which comes from Publishers Weekly‘s 7/7/08 review of Tatsumi’s Good-Bye, reads,

“Masterful . . . reads as if Haruki Murakami decided to try his hand at manga.”

Now, it’s entirely possible that I’m simply reading too much into this. What the reviewer seems to be trying to say is that Tatsumi’s work in Good-Bye is as good as Murakami’s writing, but the phrasing comes across as dismissive of the artistic side of comics. Setting aside the question of whether writing comics requires different skills than writing prose, it is taken for granted that Murakami’s manga would be as good as Tatsumi’s because, well, the writing’s the hard part, but the drawing’s probably easy. Forget all the work that goes into learning to draw—the use of the words “decided” and “try his hand” make it sound as though Murakami could make great comics on a lark. This phrasing most of all, and the picture it paints of Murakami idly picking up a brush one day and creating a masterpiece, was what raised my eyebrow.

I’m sure none of this is what the writer intends, and there is actually a single line in the review mentioning Tatsumi’s artwork, but that crucial sentence comparing Tatsumi to Murakami completely elides the biggest single difference between the forms they work in. It reveals an approach to comics that focuses on story to the detriment of the visual aspect of comics, essentially taking the art for granted without thinking very hard about the challenges of that part of the medium. The writer could just as easily have argued that Good-Bye reads as if Tatsumi had collaborated with Murakami, or like the kind of manga Murakami would make if he could draw (though even this has problems—would similar writing styles guarantee similar art styles? Are their writing styles similar?).

Murakami is an acclaimed novelist, and writing that Tatsumi’s work is as good as his is high praise (presumably—I confess I’ve not read any of his work), so Drawn and Quarterly can hardly be blamed for using this blurb on the book. However, it’s hopefully not too much to ask that as comics receive more and more coverage from mainstream media and literary outlets that those outlets recognize that comics are not simply illustrated prose, and that the art in comics deserves the same critical attention as the writing.

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Sherman Alexie, now with pictures!

March 3, 2008
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
By Sherman Alexie
Illustrations by Ellen Forney
Little, Brown – hardcover, $16.99

I’ve been a Sherman Alexie fan since seeing Smoke Signals––for which he wrote the screenplay––in 1998 and reading its source material, Alexie’s short story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. I’ve been lucky enough to see him speak several times, both at bookstore readings and at the Portland premiere of his film directorial debut, The Business of Fancydancing. His work is always equal parts funny and sad; modern, but with a mournful sense of history. Needless to say, I was excited when he published not one, but two new novels last year.

Admittedly, none of that is comics, but the second of those two new novels, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, has as its main character an aspiring cartoonist, a reservation kid named Junior (or Arnold, depending on whether he’s on the clock as an Indian or not). Additionally, it features frequent cartoons and spot illustrations by Ellen Forney, a Seattle-based cartoonist whose new book, Lust, seems to be all over the Internet at the moment. More on her in a few paragraphs.

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The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a young adult novel centering on Junior’s split existence as a dirt-poor Spokane Indian living in Wellpinit, Washington, and a student in a white high school 22 miles away in Reardan. A nerdy kid angry at the way life on the reservation has trapped everyone he knows in either stasis or downward spirals, Junior decides early in the book to go to school in Reardan because it may well be the only way he’ll ever get off the rez. This puts him in the position of being considered an outsider both at home, where he’s considered a traitor, and at school, where he is the only student without white skin or an iPod.

Maybe I just don’t remember well what I read when I was younger, but I think that lots of acclaimed novelists trying their hands at young adult novels is a recent phenomenon. Incidentally, I read True Diary back-to-back with Nick Hornby’s recent foray into the young adult world, Slam, and the results are very different. While Hornby undergoes a partially successful change of subject matter and character (it’s hard to imagine Slam’s protagonist growing up to hang out with Rob from High Fidelity), Alexie manages to simplify his themes and style for the young adult audience without condescending, so that True Diary would make a great introduction to Alexie’s catalogue.

True Diary authentically captures the voice and emotions of a teenaged boy, helped no doubt by the fact that the story is a fictionalized autobiography. Alexie did in fact grow up on a reservation and attend a white school in the next town, like Junior was born with “water on the brain” (Hydrocephalus), and was a basketball star in high school. Like all of Alexie’s work, True Diary is emotional and strongly felt. Junior’s voice is strong and has the enthusiasm in describing everything that a precocious, curious kid would have. The enthusiasm extends to his love of fried chicken, the beauty of one of the girls in his class, and the power of cartooning, his main outlet for expression and escape from the reservation where everyone lives within a mile or two of where they were born: “I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats.”

As that sentence suggests, True Diary is steeped in tragedy, from the death of Junior’s best friend in the second chapter to a series of other deaths and sad events throughout the book, all in the shadow of the larger tragedy of life on the reservation and the history that it is a reminder of. One terrible incident happens mid-sentence in a paragraph that had been about something else. Even in sequences that seem to be unabashedly heroic, like the basketball game in the book’s second half, there is nuance. Junior plays for Reardan and is treated horribly by the reservation kids when his team plays theirs. When, in the second game against them, Junior is the star of the game and the story appears to be heading toward wish fulfillment, Alexie pulls the rug out from under the reader. Junior suddenly remembers that, despite the Wellpinit team’s winning streak that made Reardan seem to be the underdog, Reardan is the school where all the students will be going to college and none of their parents deal drugs or beat them. They’re not the underdogs at all. Junior’s subsequent tears take the sweetness from the victory.

However, Alexie amazingly keeps the story funny all the way through. Junior’s observations of events and the people around him are consistently hilarious, and his cartoons add extra fun to the prose. He’s a smart-ass with the brains to back it up. Everyone is a target of Alexie’s wit: teachers, other students, Junior’s parents, the white kids who don’t realize how much they have and seem foreign to Junior, and those Indians who, through their actions, hold themselves back.

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As for the cartoons, Alexie and Forney balance the use of text and images excellently, sometimes carrying dialogue from the prose into a cartoon and then returning to prose. As in comics, the words and pictures support each other and enhance our ability to see the world through Junior’s eyes. The hybrid is very effective when new characters are introduced, as Junior describes them while caricatures exaggerate the qualities he notices about them.

Forney’s cartoons hit just the right note, not only offering another avenue into Junior’s inner life through their content, but also informing us through their style. The drawings are convincingly rough to be the work of a novice, but show that Junior has real talent, and care is taken to distinguish between his dashed off cartoons and more finished drawings. Most of them appear on crinkled pieces of paper, taped onto the pages, a charming effect. Due to the consistency of voice between the prose and the cartoons, I assume that Alexie actually wrote them. A few are a bit too knowing to be convincing as Junior’s work in the moment, but many are funny and effectively amplify the point in the story they’re attached to. Some of the most effective are the simplest, like this one accompanying the statement, “When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing.”

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a wonderful example of Sherman Alexie’s work and would be a great introduction to him for young adults and grown-ups alike. It’s funny and sad, very smart and excellently written. And all the talk about cartooning makes me wonder what some Alexie-penned comics would read like. As long as it doesn’t take his attention from writing beautiful novels like this one, I’d love to find out.

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“You just keep going. You keep trying to take over the world.”

January 14, 2008
Soon I Will Be Invincible
By Austin Grossman
Pantheon – hardcover, $22.95

IN THE COMIC BOOK WORLD, we tend to think of trying to take over the world pretty literally. If someone has made the hero kneel before him and is having his throne installed in the White House, the Capital or the UN, that’s serious enough business on its own, right? Serious enough that we don’t often stop to think of taking over the world as a metaphor.

In the real world, of course, there are lots of worlds to conquer. We talk of people taking by storm the worlds of science, politics or celebrity stardom. For Soon I Will Be Invincible’s Austin Grossman, taking over the world is an extreme enough endeavor, both as a tangible and existential achievement, that it can serve as a metaphor for any kind of purpose through which people find self-definition. As arch-villain Dr. Impossible muses after one of the many captures that have marked his career, “What does it mean to conquer the world? Do you have to be the richest one, or the smartest one, or to beat everyone in a fight?… Does it mean you get the girl you really wanted? Did CoreFire [Impossible’s nemesis] already conquer the world a long time ago? Did I?”

Taking over the world, then, is any kind of endeavor that gives one a sense of meaning when accomplished, or fosters social withdrawal and obsession when failed. At least, as I said, metaphorically. Don’t be fooled by all this talk of themes; Dr. Impossible means it, and as the smartest man alive, he might be able to make it happen. He’s one of Soon I Will Be Invincible’s two narrators, who tell the story of his escape from his twelfth stint in prison and his subsequent thirteenth attempt to conquer the world in alternating chapters. The other is Fatale, a hero who gained special abilities after an accident destroyed much of her body and scientists from the now-defunct Protheon organization rebuilt her, making her strong, fast and deadly.

The two of them are case studies in why some people want to save the world, while others feel deeply alienated from it; Impossible was born with amazing gifts, but for reasons even he admits to not fully understanding, he wants to use them to the detriment of society. Fatale has every reason to feel as alienated as does Impossible after her accident leaves her only half flesh and blood, the rest replaced with metal and plastic, but she joins the good guys. Related to this is each character’s search for purpose, their own manner of conquering their world. Fatale doesn’t know what she was built for. Her teammate in the New Champions, Elfin, doesn’t know why she was left behind when the fairies left earth, given only some vague information about a mission that will become clear hundreds of years hence.

Of course, along with all the introspective moments, they all still find time to hit each other. If all you’re looking for is a ripping yarn, Soon I Will Be Invincible provides the requisite chase, series of fights, maniacal laughter and doomsday device. The reason I bring up its themes and subtext at the outset is that I’ve come across a few reviews that have painted Soon I Will Be Invincible as a standard superhero story like might be found in any of the dozens of hero comics that come out every month, different only in that it is a novel. It’s true that it is no deconstruction of the genre, but it’s hard to see the change in medium as trivial.

The superhero genre has built up such a wealth of visual shorthand and iconography over the years that having things like the characters’ costumes described rather than displayed forces a reevaluation of them. When a woman with wasp wings is simply drawn on the page, the area in question likely not depicted in photorealistic detail, it’s easy to simply accept it without lingering on it. The novelist’s task of making the same detail real without the benefit of a picture cannot help but draw attention to it, and will likely spark an opinion about it, as when Fatale describes Elphin’s fairie physiology: “I don’t like to look at the place where they join her back, where the insect anatomy joins the human, where the whole thing gets touched with horror.”

Details like that touch on the kind of description that is the specialty of novels: the terrain inside characters’ heads. It is somewhat sad to realize that comics, though the only medium to have a formalized method of depicting thought at the same time as speech and action, rarely puts it to any use beyond exposition or reactions to events happening at that moment (I appreciate what Brian Michael Bendis is attempting in Mighty Avengers, but his use of thought balloons generally acts as a supplement to whatever characters are saying at the same time). Very infrequent is the comic that suggests rich inner lives for any of its characters; Concrete is the only one that immediately springs to mind.

Ready access to protagonists’ thoughts also humanizes them far more deeply than the common Tarantino-style shortcut of characters discussing pop culture or fast food. In Soon I Will Be Invincible, humanization comes in the small details of everyday life and simple character moments like the pride that the heroes and even some of the villains take in their work, as in this exchange: Doctor Impossible: “I… I’ve always admired your work.” Baron Ether: “I appreciate that, Doctor Impossible. It’s nice to think of one’s work as admired.” When characters are snide with each other or make stupid mistakes, it doesn’t feel like a parody of the genre, as such incidents might be used in a superhero satire, but simply a human moment. When they are inconsistent in behavior or don’t fit comfortably as either a hero or villain, like the character of Lily, it isn’t necessarily foreshadowing of plot points to come so much as a depiction of someone who doesn’t quite know what she wants from life and behaves inconsistently, as do we all at times.

Many superhero stories fall back on genre familiarity as a shortcut to real world-building, but Grossman succeeds at creating a complete world around his characters. This is important, due to the adjustments already inherent in telling a superhero story in a medium that hasn’t often been used for them, as well as the fact that it will likely have a broader audience than most superhero comics. While there are a few recognizable analogues to popular characters in Soon I Will Be Invincible, Grossman has clearly given thought to the history and internal logic of his superhero universe, which, while vaguely recognizable to those familiar with the genre, is explained clearly within the story (the superhero index and stats in the back seem unnecessary and are one of the few places that the book betrays a compulsion toward the geekiest tendencies of the genre) and doesn’t match up exactly with any existing superhero universe.

Grossman also handles the balance between the action and introspection well, moving the plot along at a satisfying pace while sprinkling well-placed background details. The inter-related origins of Dr. Impossible and CoreFire and the fate of the woman they both love unravels almost as a parallel narrative, with new surprises popping up almost every chapter. Equally compelling is Fatale’s wrestling with the mystery of her own past, much of which was lost in her accident, and her attempt to recreate herself while comparing herself to the world’s greatest heroes, who are suddenly her teammates. The action and set pieces are appropriately grand without being too serious. Overall, it makes for absorbing pop literature. As far as depth goes, Soon I Will Be Invincible falls in roughly the same ballpark as a McSweeney’s genre pastiche: a good story with a little bit more under the surface. It even looks as hip as a McSweeney’s collection, with very cool design by Chip Kidd. Grossman has covered all the bases, creating both a satisfying superhero tale and complete, well-realized work of pop literary fiction.

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A Conversation with Jamie S. Rich and Joëlle Jones, part 2

August 27, 2007

Make sure to read Part one.

Wright Opinion: Joëlle, how was doing San Diego for the first time?

Joëlle Jones: Oh, it was crazy. Crazy fun. I guess everybody kept trying to prepare me for it, but there are actually no words than can express what really goes on there

Jamie S. Rich: Well, even for veterans, it was bigger than it’s ever been.

JJ: Yeah.

JSR: So, we just go every year prepared, steeled towards how much larger will it be this year.

JJ: I was surprised how much not about comic books it was. I think that was the biggest surprise. It was more about movies, video games, the Spike Network wants to have their crazy ass models. I don’t know.

WO: How did you find the fans? Is it a lot more extreme at Comic-Con, or just a whole lot more of them…?

JJ: More of them, for sure. Wouldn’t say they were more extreme. I found them to be really great. I’m really excited when anybody knows that I did a book [laughs], so it was really fun to see people excited about my work and approaching me. Doesn’t happen very often, so I loved it. And I loved the drinking, I love the fact that you can buy liquor at the grocery store in California.

JSR: I love the fact that as the oldest member of our crew, I was the one that was always getting up first and I was the only one that didn’t get super sick, and I drank just as hard as anyone else, so, yes, beat the youngsters.

JJ: I found out that I can sleep in my clothes in a hotel bed just as comfortably as I can in my pajamas.

(more…)

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A Conversation with Jamie S. Rich and Joëlle Jones, part 1

August 23, 2007

Jamie S. Rich is probably best known for his years as editor-in-chief of Oni Press, a post he inherited from Oni co-founder Bob Schreck and held from 1999 until 2004, when he left to pursue a freelance writing career. Since then, Jamie has proven a prolific writer of both prose and comics, completing the trilogy of thematically linked literary romance novels he began while at Oni with the most recent installment, Have You Seen The Horizon Lately? He’s also produced the novella, I Was Someone Dead, the ongoing series Love the Way You Love, which ties into his novels, short stories for books like Four Letter Worlds and the roast issue of Usagi Yojimbo, and the original graphic novel, 12 Reasons Why I Love Her.

12 Reasons was illustrated by newcomer Joëlle Jones, who burst out on the scene in 2006, having previously worked on a six-page story for Dark Horse’s Sexy Chix. Joëlle’s art on 12 Reasons has been a sensation, and has led to contributions to Vertigo’s Fables and Viz’s Shojo Beat, and a nomination for the Russ Manning Award for Most Promising Newcomer. She’s currently illustrating a book for DC’s Minx line for younger girls called Token, as well as another graphic novel written by Jamie, the hard-boiled crime story, You Have Killed Me. The two also have several short stories coming out in different anthologies later this year.

I sat down with Jamie and Joëlle at the New Old Lompoc pub in Northwest Portland on August 14th.

(more…)

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