§ Jim Lee has posted the pencils for the covers to the next three ALL-STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN THE BOY WONDER covers. This qualifies as newsworthy since the book has been rather titanically late for a while, but now it looks like some issues will be out this summer. Good news!
§ Add novelist Greg Palast to the list of folks fascinated by graphic novels:
WW: Is it true that you have a graphic novel in the works?
Yes. Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys has also produced a spoken-word CD of mine: Live from the Armed Madhouse. That will also include several dance tracks, where stuff is sampled. The graphic novel is important because there’s many ways to reach people. Understand that comic books, that Superman and Captain America were inventions of political, left-wing journalists who were trying to create characters to encourage Americans to take on the Nazis. So, I’m just going back to the original purpose of Marvel Comics, which is to communicate and to empower people with information.
§ Alison Bechdel is the latest to find the regular work vs graphic novel dynamic difficult to navigate as she has cut DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR’s frequency in half so she can work on her second graphic memoir:
The reason I’m doing this is that I have to crank out a new memoir by 2009. I just signed a contract for it. (MLK, thank you for raising the very interesting question a while ago about the difference between writing without a contract, and with one. I’ll get to that in a minute.) As many of you know, Fun Home took me seven years to complete. And most of those were spent quietly and reclusively at home, not galavanting around the country (and beyond) yammering about myself to all and sundry, like I’ve been doing for the past year.
I have more travel coming up soon, for my paperback tour. But even without the time on the road, I need to make some kind of change if I have any hope of getting this new book done on schedule. I don’t want to stop doing Dykes. That doesn’t make any sense. I love doing the strip, and it’s extremely important to me on so many levels that I can’t even enumerate them. Cutting back to one strip per month seems like a good compromise if people are willing to hang in there with me. I can keep the story going, but I can also slow down the crazy juggernaut that my life has become lately, and have some time to think.
§ A nice interview at the Pulse with Josh Neufled about A.D.: After the Deluge, his webcomic about Hurricane Katrina survivors.
NEUFELD: The people we ended up choosing came from multiple sources. Some presented themselves early on. Others came via articles, radio programs, and various personal contacts. We cast a wide net and did tons of legwork. It was only in January (the same month that the first part of the prologue went up) that Larry Smith and I “nailed down” all five main subjects, and got to meet everybody in person on a short trip down to New Orleans. We felt it was important to get a sense of our characters in person, and let them get a sense of us. The amount of information we took in in those meetings was truly intense, and we believe will serve our characters, comic, and readers well. In the end, we’re taking our best guess that this mix works — for us, the reader, and the “characters” themselves who make up the mix.
While I can’t say I have an encyclopedic knowledge of his works, Greg Palast is not a novelist. He is known for his investigative journalism, much of which has been collected into a couple of books. Check out http://www.gregpalast.com/ for details.
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