Sorry for the scant posting this week, internet friends, but I was in Bellevue, Washington Sunday through Wednesday, getting back home late Wednesday night, and jet lag is still kicking my ass. I would have been all right, I think, but my phone rang an hour after I went to bed early Thursday morning, and it was my nephew calling from Cincinnati, and we talked for seven hours straight. But in the words of our old pal Floyd, fuck all that we've got to get on with the film show.
* Tom Spurgeon notes the importance of interviews in creating a canon of comics industry history. I grew up reading the long, career-covering, sometimes newsmaking and sometimes muckraking interviews in The Comics Journal and they changed the course of my life forever, full stop. They changed the course of my life forever. Sure, I interviewed scores of comics creators, editors, publishers, writers, artists and critics myself over the last fifteen years, most of them collected in a free ebook called Conversations with ADD. But I was interviewing people as a professional broadcast journalist as far back as 1986, and you can bet that my approach to even that was coloured in some way by the deep drilling regularly on display in The Journal (and even its sister publication Amazing Heroes, to an extent). I'll be 48 years old tomorrow, and I am telling you that as sure as I am of that fact, I am even more sure that quality, in-depth interviews of the type Spurgeon is talking about largely have defined my interests and approach both professionally in broadcasting and in my decade-and-a-half parallel second life as a writer about the art form and industry of comics. Interviews matter, as history, as Tom says, but also as inspiration. It is possible to change minds, inform the world and preserve forever the experiences and memories of people that mattered. Just talk to somebody, and write it down.
* Hey, look, it's an interview! Jim Steranko talks to Barry Windsor-Smith in this vintage piece at that blog with the Big Lebowski logo. (I'm just gonna call it the Dudeblog from here on out, okays?) Bonus: Click the page for larger images, including the gorgeous BWS artwork on display. (I've pulled that trick myself a time or two; nice one, Dudeblog.) I think Barry actually gave me a copy of the issue with that interview when I interviewed him back on the next-to-last day of 1999. (That transcript is only maybe a third of our total conversation, as Barry wanted to focus on Opus, and rightly so. We actually had something like six hours of tape recorded, and talked off the record for something like 12 hours including dinner at a nice restaurant near his studio. What a day that was. I'm telling you, journalism can take you to places you never thought you'd go and introduce you to amazing people, if you come to it with passion and good intent.)
* Bob Temuka can't read From Hell anymore, right now. I sympathize. I was singing along with a favourite song on the car radio back in early 1987 when I got pulled over for speeding. I never hear that song that I don't remember the flop sweat and embarrassment of that moment. I'm lucky, though; ruined forever for me was Mike and The Mechanics' All I Need is a Miracle. From Hell is a lot more important in the grand scheme of things. I hope you can separate your pain from that great work someday, Bob.
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