Interviews

Interviews with Five Creators at SPX 2010

Xaviar Xerexes

Here's a longer clip of five interviews I did in a row at SPX this past weekend.  These creators' work largely has more of an indy feel and while they all have web presences I think all are a bit more focused on print.  I have reviewed work from J.T. Yost and Sophia Wiedeman before but it was my first time looking at comics from the other three.  Yost had a Xeric Award winner in his book Old Man Winter (reviewed here) and Wiedeman had a Xeric Award winner in her book The Deformitory (reviewed here).

In order I talked to Steve Secks about his comic Life Is Good, Sara Lindo about her comic Carl In Love, Marguerite Dabaie about her comic The Hookah Girl And Other True Stories, Sohia Wiedeman about her comic Lettuce Girl, and J.T. Yost about his two new series — one about dreams and the other about found objects.

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Interviews with Sara Turner and Jerzy Drozd

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I got a chance to do short interviews with Sara Turner and Jerzy Drowd at SPX this past weekend.  

Sara was there to promote her new comic The Ghosts of Pineville.  They also had a print collection of The Replacements, a webcomic that originally ran on GraphicSmash.com that Sara worked on with Jerzy.  Jerzy and Sara put out a lot of their work under their Make Like A Tree banner where you can also find out more about what they're working on.

Jerzy was there to promote a new minicomic, Tiny Hamiltons, that he did with his wife Anne.  He also let slip that he's already written another volume of his webcomic The Front although it sounds like it won't be until next year at the earliest that we'll see it on the web.

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Interview with Chris Impink of Sledge Bunny

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I had a chance to do a quick interview with Chris Impink at Intervention.  Chris is the artist for a new webcomic — Sledge Bunny — his previous project was the webcomic Fragile Gravity.  Sledge Bunny is about roller derby and this is a great point to jump in — a healthy archive has set up the characters and now things are about to happen!  Chris is also one of the founders of Super Art Fight – a live art competition, sort of a combination of WWF and pictionary.  Chris and tag-team partner Jamie Noguchi won their bout last Saturday night (No kidding on the WWF part — opponent Bryan Prindeville picked Jamie up and his tag team partner Kelsey Wailes duct-taped his legs together.  I was half expecting someone to break out a deck chair on someone!)

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Interview: Jim Ottaviani

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[Note: The following interview was conducted in July 2009, but has not previously been published.]

Since the 1997 release of his first graphic novel, Two-Fisted Science, writer, librarian, and one-time nuclear engineer Jim Ottaviani, has been telling compelling stories about the lives and work of scientists.  He’s written about everything from J. Robert Oppenheimer’s work on the atomic bomb (Fallout, 2001), to Hedy Lamarr’s invention of an early “frequency hopping” communication sytem (Dignifying Science, 2003), to  Harry Harlow’s investigations into the necessity of love (Wire Mothers, 2007).  Along the way, he’s worked with more than two dozen artists, including Donna Barr, Roberta Gregory, Roger Langridge, Steve Lieber, Dylan Meconis, Linda Medley, and many others.

His eighth and most recent book, T-Minus: The Race to the Moon, illustrated by Zander Cannon and Kevin Cannon, relates the dual stories of the US and Soviet space programs through the late 1950s and 1960s, as they competed to be first to the lunar surface.  But true to form, Ottaviani’s telling of the story focuses less on the astronauts who made the journey than on the engineers and rocket scientists who made the journey possible.

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The Once and Future Cartoonist: An Interview with Caleb Sevcik

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Caleb Sevcik is a fun artist with a wicked sense of humor and a really energetic style.  I first encountered Sevcik while reading Zap Jones, which was a funny steampunk western back in the days of Keenspace.

He's working on a new comic he's planning to debut next month — I'm looking forward to Caleb' Sevcik's new project and you should be too!  Read on for our recent interview:

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Bellen! Is A Peculiar Kind of Comic: An Interview with Brian Brown

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BELLEN! by Brian "Box" Brown is a journal comic about a fictional couple (really!) named Ben and Ellen (hence, "Bellen").  It's one of those comics that has shown great strides as its creator improves over time.  Brown has really come into his own in the last year and Bellen! is a real treat.  It has a lot of the wistfulness of Peanuts in it (there's often something Charlie Brown like about main character Ben) but it's not really similar and the artwork continues to go in interesting directions. Very recently Brown won a Xeric grant for and then self-published a collection of Bellen! based on work he originally did for the Top Shelf 2.0 webcomic portal.  I got a chance to interview him last month over email.

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Nobody’s Business But Ali Graham’s

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Ali Graham is the creator of Nobody's Business, Afterstrife and HOUSD.  I first discovered Graham reading Afterstrife, which follows two characters through their afterlife.   It's kind of like Moonlighting meets Dante.  The more recent Nobody's Business is based on a film Graham worked on over last fall and into this year.  Graham is one of a small but growing group of webcomics creators in the UK.  I got a chance to interview him via email over the last month about his current projects.

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