§ Tom Spurgeon interviews Gary Panter:
SPURGEON: So a book like this, what can that do for you? Does it help you establish relationships with galleries? Is it just bringing that aspect of your work to the attention of people who follow that art form?
PANTER: I think a book like this makes people happy; it’s like a chance to go through an artist’s drawers. If you care what’s in there.
But, yeah: it’s supposed to connect me up to people in the world that buy paintings that never heard of me before. If I could sell eight paintings a year at a decent price, I could afford to do comics. I can’t afford to do comics. I just do little illustrations one after another, design tennis shoes or whatever, throw the money at the bills. That’s why it takes another eight years for Jimbo to come out.
§ New York Magazine profiles Dash Shaw with a piece titled How Dash Shaw Wrote the Graphic Novel of the Year:
Dash Shaw is tall and thin, with a handsome but sallow face and stringy dark hair. He lives in Bed Stuy, and over lunch, he speaks so quietly he often can’t be heard, and with such care that he sometimes seems paralyzed by the need to find the mot juste. He interrupts himself over and over, asking whether I understand. (“Do you agree with that?” he inquires anxiously after making a fairly simple point.)
He wrote Bottomless Belly Button quickly: The book was scripted, drawn, and revised over two and a half years. Shaw, a School of Visual Arts grad, spent most of that time in his hometown of Richmond, Virginia, living with four roommates, none of whom knew what he was working on. “I didn’t really show it to anyone,” Shaw says.
§ Brian Heater interviews Sarah Glidden for Heeb Magazine
had been really interested in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis for a long time, and I would often get into really heated arguments with family and friends about who was right or wrong. But eventually I realized that even though I keep up with the news, I didn’t know enough about the history of the region to be taking such strong stances and that I should maybe read a little more about it and even actually go there. I couldn’t afford to just go on my own, but at that time it was my last year that I could qualify for a Birthright trip (the age range is 18-27), so I figured that it would be a great opportunity to see Israel’s side of the story at least. I thought that maybe documenting that whole process of re-evaluating one’s political point of view in comic form might be interesting, so from the very beginning that was the plan.
§ And when you are done with all that heavy reading, take this superhero quiz!
