A very thorough and thoughtful response to my posts on comics interviews comes from Steve Wintle. A lot of the piece stems from a misreading of my feelings about the Comics Journal–it’s other people who think the Journal exists to hype Fanta product, certainly not me. (If there’s any Fanta-related bias in the magazine at all, it’s just that both entities ultimately answer to Gary Groth.) Beyond that, though, he makes many useful distinctions between interviewing and journalism, and between politics, entertainment, and business, and between televised and print pieces. However, what it comes down to for Steven is that
Discussions about the survival of the medium, expansion of the Direct Market, exploration of other genres or many other similar topics that are a concern for the discerning comic reader aren’t necessarily for comic companies, even if we believe they should be.
Let us agree to disagree on that one, Mr. Wintle.
Just to prove that I’m not a big party-pooper when it comes to hype, here’s a two-parter from the Pulse about what Brian Bendis is up to. Bendis is back on Daredevil as of this week–boy, is he ever. Great stuff, but from Bendis that’s no surprise.
Speaking of Daredevil, Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada will be writing and drawing a DD miniseries. I think that in terms of the Daredevil character’s recent history, there are two strains of story type. You’ve got Bendis’s dark crime stories, focusing very specifically on how Matt Murdock’s drive to destroy crime affects him as a person; and you’ve got the Smith/Quesada/Mack stories, which rely heavily on religious imagery and emotional operatics (which often take physical and violent flight). They’re both interesting takes, though the contrast between them has been growing ever starker. I’m interested to see where Quesada’s new take on the character comes down, but with a title like Father, my guess is it’ll be in the latter category.
Chris Allen hands in his year-end report cards on several comics publishers, including Marvel, DC, Top Shelf, and Drawn & Quarterly. His focus on PR, press relations, and overall line coherence is a welcome one. These are decisions made by the company itself, and can’t really be pinned on the individual creators. It shows to go you that publishers have an important creative role to play, in a sense, and it’s fascinating to evaluate how they’re doing with it.
From what I can gather, issue 13 of McSweeney’s, the comics-centric issue edited by Chris Ware, will include work by Ware, R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Daniel Clowes, Lynda Barry, Los Bros Hernandez, Adrian Tomine, Julie Doucet, Seth, Joe Matt, Joe Sacco, Chester Brown, David Collier, Debbie Drechsler, Jeffrey Brown, Ron Rege Jr., Gary Panter, Archer Prewitt, Charles Burns, Michael Chabon, Ira Glass, John Updike, and Chip Kidd. To quote Hair, “sheeeeeit.” (Thanks to Egon and ADD for the pertinent links and info.)
Speaking of the comics edition of McSweeney’s, the Comics Journal messboard thread on the subject contains the following howler (well, it would, wouldn’t it?) from poster Scott Grammel:
Between this and the digest thread [discussed by me here–ed.], we’ve pretty much got the two opposite poles of where-should-comics-go-next pretty well bracketed.
Indeed. After all, the McSweeney’s issue will package the work altcomix superstars in a reader-friendly volume that will bypass the direct-market ghetto and find an eager audience in bookstores, while the theoretical manga-digest-sized editions will merely package the work of altcomix superstars in a reader-friendly volume that will bypass the direct-market ghetto and find an eager audience in bookstores.
Wait a minute.
Oh, right, I remember the distinction now: The manga-sized volumes have the potential to appeal to thousands and thousands of manga-reading teenagers, while the McSweeney’s volume have the potential to appeal to art-school graduate students who listen to Belle & Sebastian. Clearly the self-evident philosophical and aesthetic superiority of the latter make it the correct venue for where-comics-should-go-next. I mean, isn’t that obvious to everyone?