Interviews, schminterviews

“He’ll be presenting a slide show that confronts his critics who accused him of ‘hiding’ his racial identity behind his glasses.” Huh?

“Ha ha! It’s because for a long time when I used to draw autobiographical stories and I used to draw myself as a character, I’d draw myself with glasses that were just sort of opaque, empty and white”, he says. “There was a lot of silly conjecture that I was maybe trying to disguise my own features. So in the slide show I go through a history of that in cartooning, going all the way back to Robert Crumb and even Charles Schultz – when he drew this character Marcie she just had these opaque little round glasses. That’s just a starting point.”

MARK: I think readers will be taken by Aqua Leung and it’s got a wide range of emotion, moods, and tones throughout the work. It’s definitely an action adventure comic in every sense of the word. But also there’s a lot of our own personalities and humor that you can usually expect from us throughout the story. I think it’s okay to just do full on action and let loose. The style and the material is also something that’s very attractive. So I think it will defy all reader expectations in many ways but then satisfy them in many other ways.

What are some of your favorite strips collected in “The Maakies with the Wrinkled Knees?”

Where is that damn book? The thing that’s been happening lately… when I first started doing this shit, I was doing really depressing, nihilistic [things]– drinking just for killing yourself. Since my life’s gotten to be kind of deader, I’ve got a nice house with a garden, so my mind’s not as focused on blowing my brains out. It’s focused more on absurd humor. I sometimes feel that I’m losing it, that I’m not putting enough effort into it, but then I look back and say, wow, I’m improving. The more you do it… after a certain time, it starts to deteriorate. I’m always waiting for that to happen. You have to keep your eye on your work. I see plenty of cartoonists who peak and then got lazy and started drifting off.

You got hit by a car? You weren’t lying in the street, were you?

No. I got knocked off the bike, but I didn’t get hurt. I just realized that if I’m going to be losing my health insurance in five months, it isn’t worth the five dollars an hour.

As someone who does autobiographical strips, are you thinking about how you might spin this into a book?

I don’t know. Everyone keeps saying, “It’s good material, right?” As if I’m going to stick with a shitty job because it’s good material. It’s not good material.

The majority of Bodega’s comics sales “come directly through our website to individual customers, and through our sales guy Tony Shenton who puts us into the super-hip indie-friendly comics shops. Stores can get our books through Diamond as well. We do pretty well through Amazon, too, but that’s more sporadic. We do well enough at the shows.” However, Chang is sympathetic to ComicsPRO’s recent missive chastising publishers for debuting books at conventions.

There’s really no excuse in this day and age not to run entire articles at once unless the article itself truly demands multiple parts, like Chris Butcher’s recent Japan travelogue. I’m convinced that in 90 percent of all cases, it’s stat pumping. Anyone that’s loading this site and its graphics can load an entire article from you.

“We did see a bump [in sales for ‘North Wind’ #4],” Chip Mosher told CBR News. “But let me put this in perspective for you. We usually see a dip of 10% or more between issues #3 and #4 for any of our series. That said, we saw nearly a 20% increase in orders between issue #3 and #4 of ‘North Wind.’ An increase like this has never happened in the history of our company. Never. Bottom line – we are talking about a total 30% increase over the norm.”

As some comics readers may know, orders for issue #4 of a new title are generally submitted by direct market retailers a short time after issue #1 of said series goes on sale. As such, “North Wind” #2 and #3 were ordered before the MySpace promotion was announced and before issue #1 was delivered to stores. The 30% increase reflects the initial orders for “North Wind” #4, not readjustments.