Box Brown gets comfy in the Talkie Hutt for a chat about James Kochalka's The Cute Manifesto and Jason Little's BORB.
It is funny to think about what a stir Kochalka's infamous "Craft is the Enemy" position caused, because for the most part nowadays it seems like a pretty accepted way of thinking about making comics. As I'm sure will be frustrating to some listeners, neither Box nor I had all of our facts lined up to talk about the genesis of this pre-Internet-era kerfuffle, remembering only that Kochalka sent it in a letter to a print issue of The Comics Journal, and that the battle was pitched back and forth mostly in issues of the magazine. That's hard to fathom. How do you have a heated flame-war when you have to wait for months in-between retorts? Terms like "Sea-Lioning" didn't even exist back then. It must have been like trying to fly blind.
Thankfully, on this very site, the most memorable missives fired have been collected and archived and arranged in a readable format, HERE. I remembered that a notable cartoonist had told Kochalka to "Wish it into the cornfield, Jimmy," but couldn't recall who exactly that had been. Turns out it was Jim Woodring!
