When I learned that Bill Griffith, Kim Deitch, Seth, Charles Burns and Joe Sacco were all scheduled to attend the Small Press Expo 2000, the predatory journalistic instinct kicked into high gear and I knew that I had to exploit this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. After all, this would be like getting Bresson, Bergman, Truffaut, Goddard, and Fellini in a room together for a lively chat on the art of film.

What is so interesting about these five cartoonists, however fortuitously thrown together they were at this event, is that they're radically different from each other in terms of style and subject matter and yet share a number of fundamental traits or perspectives: they are impeccable craftsmen; they see their work as a vocation; their work is firmly rooted in concrete social realities; their work is mature and sui generis; and, at the risk of embarrassing Kim Deitch who is altogether too modest, brimming with inner, as well as outer, life. When one thinks of the best work being done in comics today, these five artists, along with a mere handful of their peers, rank among the top.

My first -- and last -- idea was to get them into a hotel room together with a tape recorder and set a conversation in motion -- which I succeeded at doing on the evening of September 16, 2000. I was most interested in prompting them to dig as deeply as they could into what made the aesthetics of comics tick for each of them, and to explore that rarefied but essential ingredient called taste -- not taste as a capricious set of likes and dislikes but taste as an essential component of who and what they are as artists and how they see the world through their art. Admittedly, the ostensible subject was somewhat abstract, but I think we managed to cover the ground remarkably well. All the more remarkable when you consider that I was suffering from having gotten the worst in a tussle earlier that evening with an aggressive lamppost, which did to me what Dave Sim wants to do to Jeff Smith. The careful reader will notice Kim Deitch's analogy between the creative process and my walking into the thing (pretty clever, Kim!). No, he didn't make this up; and yes, I appear to be in physical jeopardy when in the company of cartoonists (I blew my knee out when I was with Joe Kubert). I only hope readers find me more alert at interviewing than I am at walking.

For the full story, please see Comics Journal #234