Today, Alex Dueben interviews Jeet Heer, mostly about the recent Walt Before Skeezix collection, but also touching on his book on Françoise Mouly, independent comics scholarship, and other topics. Here's a short bit:
How did you first get involved in this project?
Drawn & Quarterly had this yearly anthology in book form and they had reprinted fifty pages of the color strips along with Chris Ware doing the cover of the book doing an homage to Frank King. I reviewed that for the National Post where I was doing other writing on comics. Through that Chris Oliveros became aware of my work and I met Chris Ware when he was on tour for Jimmy Corrigan. We knew each other and hit it off so when the time came to do the book it all came together.
There’s an earlier pre-history of all this where a big figure is Bill Blackbeard who in the 1970s had co-edited The Smithsonian Book of Newspaper Comics. That book was very influential in reviving Frank King because it included six of the Sunday strips, very well selected and reproduced, which was not common in 1970s books. Chris Ware, Joe Matt, and I all read the Smithsonian book growing up and those six pages really sparked in all of us an interest in Frank King. Joe Matt is the real unsung hero of this. He started collecting Frank King dailies and Sundays and amassed a huge collection. Chris Ware had his own collection. I know that Bill Blackbeard died a few years ago but I always want to mention his name because he really planted the seeds that made the Walt and Skeezix books possible. Not just those books, but the whole age of reprinting comics that we’re going through is really a product of Bill Blackbeard.
What was the thinking behind collecting the daily strips but not the Sundays?
That’s Chris Ware’s intervention. When we first started doing it I thought we were going to do the Sundays. Chris and Joe Matt were more aware of the dailies than I was and those guys had an understanding that King’s genius was in the dailies, in the accumulation of stories and having the characters age in real time. That was something I was only vaguely cognizant of, but thanks to Chris and Joe we made the right decision.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Reviews & Commentary. Etelka Lehoczky at NPR reviews John Porcellino's Hospital Suite. Rob Clough writes about the new documentary about Porcellino, Root Hog or Die. Nicole Rudick talks about John McNaught's Dockwood.
—Misc. Speaking of Porcellino, Tom Devlin shares some memories of his long friendship with the artist.
Sean Howe shares (and provides some context) for some video from Marvel creator Mark Gruenwald's old public-access television show.
