678.X600.Crop.Ft.40Spideysilo(Se§ Time Out New York scores an extremely rare interview with…Spider-Man, on the occasion of its 10th anniversary, as part of a series of interview with 40 important New Yorkers:

Who are your favorite New Yorkers?
Spider-Man: I love anyone who doesn’t publish incredibly slanted editorials in their newspaper about what a menace I am. I also like listening to Joe Benigno on WFAN; he’s the only guy I know who’s more of a lovable loser than me. Let’s go Mets!

What’s the biggest thing that’s happened to the city in the last 13 years?
Spider-Man: The ’05 transit strike. Sure, it was awful for you guys, but I was the first person into work every. single. day. That’s a big change for me.

Oh, wait I’m supposed to say Time Out magazine, right?


§ Nisha Gopalan discovers that Mark Millar thinks Sarah Palin is “Terrifying” and more in a chat at io9:

io9: The posters promoting War Heroes slam Obama, while the tone of the comic is, in kind, fervently patriotic. Is all of this satire or sincerity?
Millar: It’s amazing how many people seem to think this is a neo-con comic. Same thing happened on [Marvel’s] Ultimates, when it was clearly anti-war through and through. I feel like [director Paul] Verhoeven must have felt after Starship Troopers, in the sense that many people are missing the political satire. In my story, America is clearly engineering terror attacks as a means to garner control back home, enslave the population, and send kids with nothing to lose into the Gulf. It’s fake terror to justify an aggressive foreign policy.… There’s nothing duller than some worthy anti-war [commentary]. We know it’s wrong, illegal, and ill-considered. You don’t need me to tell you that. So I’m jumping one step ahead and planning a heist story of sorts in the middle of this bad situation.


ICv2 has a four-part interview with Gonzalo Ferreyra, Viz Media Vice President of Sales and Product Marketing, on many topics:

We’ve heard that there is more attention at both the consumer and trade level to the top manga titles while the middle and bottom titles are losing audience. Viz is blessed to have a lot of titles in that top tier, but between the various titles you offer, do you see that trend?

We’re not seeing it as much. It’s a question of expectation, and we’ve always been rather realistic about understanding the potential of that middle and bottom tier, so to speak. We’ve also done a little bit of housecleaning to manage the list and help us focus our list a bit more. But I wouldn’t say that we’re seeing a dramatic difference in the response to the long tail.


More: Part Two, Part Three, Part Four.

§ The New York Metro talks to novelist Jonathan Ames on THE ALCOHOLIC:

Was it therapeutic to be able to write about some of the ups and downs in your life?

It was good to write about some issues and events which I had not covered in my essays or novels. These were things that artistically I had wanted to address. One of my goals as a writer is to record what I’ve seen and felt – like a caveman scratching things onto a wall – and so in this sense certain parts of the book gave me an artistic catharsis. My other equally important goal is to give people something, to provide them with some entertainment and distraction.


§ Gopalan strikes again as Splash Page talks to an actual comic-book writer, Glenn Eichler on STUFFED:

“‘Stuffed’ has to do with father issues, brother issues, and the history of anthropology,” explained Eichler. But it really has to do with a dead body. His book (out in 2009 from First Second) is about a guy who inherits the contents of his late father’s “Ripley’s Believe It or Not”-type museum. Among the findings: a macaroni-noodle interpretation of “The Last Supper” and…a statue of loin-cloth-wearing, spear-wielding African man.

“It’s the corniest sort of ooga-booga native thing you could imagine,” says Eichler of the politically incorrect curio. “Then it slowly dawns on him—it’s not actually a statue, it’s stuffed human skin.”

Upon this discovery, his pothead half-brother (a.k.a. the disheveled guy in Bertozzi’s sneak peek) returns to town, and the siblings—who must contend with their father’s involvement in such an unsavory practice—disagree about what do with the creepy statue. The protagonist wants to hand it over to a natural-history museum; the hippie brother…doesn’t.

6 COMMENTS

  1. “Spiderman” (ie. the people at Marvel) think that the transit strike is the biggest thing to happen in New York City in the last 13 years?!? That’s pretty clueless, insensitive, disgusting, deplorable. 9/11 anyone?

  2. Something to keep in mind, Craig: Time Out, in all of its various incarnations (I think there are 24, 25, somewhere around there?) is a LIFESTYLE magazine. It’s events listings, chic cosmopolitan happenings, etc. To politely look the other way in regards to 9/11 is consistent with its tone and what it does.

  3. Forgot to mention — I thought this was cute, better than most of the other interviews, and I’m curious about who at Marvel is playing Spidey. My guess would be Steve Wacker. It has the same snarky-but-not-mean tone that’s characterized Wacker’s interviews and the ASM letter column.

  4. Not just in New York, but across the country, too, 9/11 is the biggest thing to happen in the last 13 years.

    For the sake of a snappy line, Marvel is made of FAIL once again.

  5. Why “the last 13 years”? Is there some significance to 1995 that I’m missing?

    Stupid question to ask, anyway. They should just have deleted it when they sent back the questionnaire.

Comments are closed.