§ Part two of The Daily Cross Hatch interview with Jaime Hernandez:

Were you worried that someone would notice an inaccuracy in your characters’ story, or is it mostly just important to you personally that things stay accurate in the context of that universe?

It’s mostly for me. Hopefully it’s for the fans, too. If they don’t care, that’s okay, too, though. But for me it just puts history in perspective and it just helps me understand my world better, if it’s all in place. If I mess up, I’ll do a whole story to correct it. Sometimes those have been my best stories.

§ Graeme McMillan is enjoying the Image teaser series.

§ Sean T. Collins rounds up Tom Brevoort’s advice for young comics writers. A sample:

Your mission is to tell your story directly, and well. In general, novices love technique, pros love content. Don’t confuse them. Remember, you’re asking readers to drop at least three bucks and twenty minutes of their lives for this experience. Earn it.

foodfall-resized.jpg

§ Rich Kreiner reviews the fine mini-comics of Joseph Lambert.

§ Late link: Warren Ellis » On What Comics Can Do

There’s a page I often cite in these conversations, from the 1974 comic MANHUNTER by Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson. It’s an entire Jason Bourne sequence in a single page. In a Marrakesh alleyway, Damon Nostrand is in a car attempting to run down Paul Kirk and Christine StClair. Kirk pushes StClair to cover, rolls under the speeding car, draws a knife, tears it through the car’s petrol tank as it passes over him, gets clear, lights a match, touches it to the trail of petrol the car leaves, the petrol blazes down the alley to the car, the car explodes, and then they do three or four lines of dialogue while watching Nostrand burn to death about how it’s horrible but really he was a bit of a git and completely deserved it. One page. Employing “camera angles” and compositions that even now the likes of Paul Greengrass would go blind trying to replicate.


§ Dire headline: Tamara Drewe and other graphic-novel girls. They left out Catwoman and Elektra.

§ The endless Michael George murder case drags on, now with a book written by a former Detroit Free Press reporter:

The defense attorney for Michael George — who is accused in the 1990 slaying of his wife in their comic book store — is asking a Macomb County judge for an evidentiary hearing to determine if the prosecution’s key witness gave an interview to a Clinton Township detective after the murder, as reported in a book authored by a former Free Press reporter.

1 COMMENT

  1. “…you’re asking readers to drop at least three bucks and twenty minutes of their lives for this experience.”

    One could suggest that’s a huge part of the problem with today’s comics right there. And to be more accurate, most of today’s decompressed issues can be read in under 10 minutes.

    As for those Image teasers: given the diversity of art styles and (apparently) content, if they’re all for a single project, then surely it must be an anthology, right?

  3. I agree with Tara. Comics are too damn expensive for what you get. A mass market paperback is $8 these days (and no, I’m not counting those stupid slimmed & elongated paperbacks they charge $10 for the same damn story). I’d rather pay $4 for half a paperback and a few hours enjoyment than for 10 minutes with a comic, no matter who it’s written and drawn by.

  7. “This is a field that combines, on the one hand, the novel and the poem and the slogan and the news story, and on the other hand every stop from pointillism to cave painting. Understand comics as the marriage of word and picture, as simple as that, and you’ll get a sense of how broad the medium’s reach really is.” – Warren Ellis

    AMEN!!!!