Hello people, today we have Annie Mok's interview with Michael DeForge on the occasion of the cartoonist's latest book, Big Kids.
DEFORGE: I frequently have a hard time organizing my memories, or certainly from key parts of my life, and particularly traumatic parts. A lot of the way I circle the same themes and topics… I would have a hard time writing something overtly autobiographical, but by having all these different fictional parts of me, or fictional vantage points of certain moments or thoughts… it’s the only way I’ve been able to maybe objectively… or not objectively, but come close to objectively, looking at what it was that happened, or what I was thinking, or the mental state I was in. I found my memory has been fairly unreliable, and it’s taken a lot of parsing. It took me awhile to feel like my life had a linear narrative. And I know, logically it actually doesn’t. But it’s easier to think of it that way than as a bunch of unrelated pieces of information. So I worked pretty hard to try to piece something together with what did seem sort of like a lot of loose change. My stories are pretty meandering, and sometimes possibly even arcless. That’s sometimes how I look back on how events actually unfold.
And Jen Lee's diary continues with Day 4.
Elsewhere:
What you and I have always wanted: An oral history of the Garbage Pail Kids, featuring copious images, to boot.
Former (and perhaps future?) comics editor Marc Weidenbaum recalls his days in the strip trenches.
Pal Anne Ishii interviews Japanese artist Rokudenashiko, whose controversial fortcoming book Ishii has packaged for Koyama Press.
A surprisingly in depth profile of groundbreaking female manga artist Keiko Takemiya over at the BBC.
