Interviews: Harkham, Wood, Wilson

KP: So I was wondering to start, for you is there any kind of guiding editorial principal behind the book beyond “these are cartoonists I love,” or did you just want a forum to bring artists you knew under one banner?

SH: It is pretty much that. It’s comics that I love. And a lot of it is work that isn’t coming out regularly from other places and to do something which presents the work in as great a way as possible. For me, that means giving artists space. If they want to do something in color, they can do it in color. The average issue is slightly larger than a comic book. Just wanting to present the work in a way that’s really unobtrusive…respectful but also making it so it has the energy of comics. I don’t have introductions to each cartoonist. I don’t have an editor’s forward or any of that stuff. I don’t even have page numbers because I want to whole to have a very visceral kind of punch the same way picking up comics when you’re younger has – of discovering something amazing whether it’s Faust or X-Men or Dan Clowes. There’s that energy of picking something up that you respond to that you’ve never seen before and just having your eyeballs melt. I didn’t really feel like there was an anthology like that. And so the goals of each issue slightly change, but I’d say the foundation of it is always that.

BW: Back to the thing of ongoing books being slightly out of control… I found that very quickly into a series I was deviating from the plan as it was laid out in the pitch, so that by the end of the first year the book was already something very different.. it had kind of taken on a life of its own and as I was writing it I was getting new ideas, better ideas, or seeing flaws in the pitch that I was forced to adapt to fix. I’ve heard other writers, like Brian K. Vaughn and Brian Azzarello say the same thing. It’s only natural. Are you there yet with Air?

GWW: Yes and no. The book looks and feels roughly how I imagined it. But the further I go, the more I realize how massive the storylines and themes I’ve saddled myself with really are, and that’s pretty freaky. That’s the freight train element. The more you put out there, the more you have to resolve. Air is the most literary comic I’ve written so far, and that poses problems. I use a lot of images that are meant as visual metaphors, but I end up getting asked “So is this really happening or not? Where is this place in terms of dimensions and reality? Why can this element or object do X but not Y?” Most comics– Sandman is an exception, and so was Animal Man–are very literal-minded. Air isn’t.