Today on the site we have Marc Bell in conversation with Joe Hale:
Marc: We discussed how it might be important to provide a little context for this book. Can you talk a little about when and where this work was made?
Joe: I made this work between the ages 19 and 22, mostly in Montreal, some of it in Toronto. I was an enthusiast of the underground comic medium and wanted to contribute to the practice. In the 90’s Montreal had a flourishing underground comics culture, so I positioned myself there to create this material.
M: Also, I was wondering if you could describe the point of view of the material. You have said to me that these comics are not autobiographical but did you intend or enjoy the fact that these might appear to somebody as autobiographical material?
J: I wanted to satirize the autobiographical format, and present a character named Joe Hale who came from a world of unimaginable dysfunction. The formula for the humor in this collection is very dark, which is objective, my natural humor is much less offensive and more zany than morbid. I also wanted to portray the human character as extremely ugly, something not so much worthy of love and forgiveness. For the audience who thought it directly related to my life, well, that was an inside joke. I couldn’t help such an uncritical and undiscerning audience to begin with, so, I guess I didn’t really care.
And we fake posted Matt Seneca's Archie #1 review yesterday, but now here it is FOR REAL.
It’s impossible not to admire Archie Comics, both the books and the brand. If you think superhero nerds are the apex of slavish devotion, you haven’t been checking out the unbridled loyalty that the Andrews-Cooper-Lodge folie a trois has kept boiling in the world’s elementary schoolers since your grandma was prowling the newsstands clutching dimes. Instead of clinging to a single group of ever-aging consumers that grows ever more Nixonian in their reactionary tastes (like superhero comics have for the past 40 years), the good folks at Archie have had the common sense to stick to a single demographic, like comics used to do when they actually sold. Kids from 6 to 11 read Archie now just like they always have, and the seeds of nostalgia those goofy little books implant are so fertile that they’re the only books in the store a large percentage of parents will even attempt to grapple with. Archie is the Pixar of comics, a bona fide multi-generational consumer bauble that pumps out pabulum so smooth and generic that all the captive audience can do is beg for more of the same.
Elsewhere:
True crime and comics: An unbeatable combo.
Kurtzman and Hefner: A beatable combo.
Rob Clough on MarcBell.
