Today at the Journal, we'll launch you into the weekend with sex on the brain: courtesy of Niki Smith, who stopped by to talk with Alex Dueben about her new book with Iron Circus Comics, Crossplay.
Have you been able to step back and especially now that you’re hearing from people about the book, think about how you feel about it after all this time?
I’m really proud of how it turned out. I wanted to make a book about queer friends figuring out who they are and who they love. There’s drama, but not trauma, if that makes sense. There are so many queer stories that focus on struggle and tragedy and I wanted to make a book that celebrates us and shows the found families that we can form.
Over at The Nation, you can see some of the comics that got Rob Rogers fired from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette--they're being featured as part of their OppArts series.
Roger Langridge put together a glorious adaptation of a classic Jeeves & Wooster story as a proof of concept, the concept being that he'd like to do a longer PG Wodehouse graphic novel--I still can't really believe this is something I'm just linking to, that was made for free, and that there are 15 pages of it. Go get you some.
Ryan Cecil Smith's most recent men's fashion comic--which he claims is a crowded field, which I believe is a complete lie, albeit an enjoyable on--sees him doing one of my favorite things that an artist can do, which is burrow deeply into the things that fascinate them. It's what Langridge does above, it's what Niki talks about with Alex today, it's the best thing that someone can do. Find that thing, answer that question, scratch that itch. I could not be more impressed.
I got on an elevator yesterday and Brian Hibbs was on that elevator, and neither one of us were in a city we lived in: and I realized it had been a while since I checked on his video interview series, which documents the guests he has for his graphic novel of the month club. Sure enough, there's a new one, featuring Hartley Lin. The graphic novel in conversation is Young Frances, which I thought had some tremendous back-and-forth dialog scenes, images that have stuck with me since I first saw them serialized in Pope Hats, and the interview they posted only made me like the book that much more.
