Today at The Journal, we've got a double shot from some new contributors. First you'll find Sara McHenry holding court on Twisted Romance, a recent release from Image Comics featuring not one, but two Journal contributors. It seems to have struck a nerve!
Still, there’s a lot to like here: a goth vampire boy donning his sunglasses and black parasol to interview small-town folks about wendigo murders is extremely charming. A vampire and a hunter falling in love and going to karaoke bars in the American south, where being gay can be as dangerous as being a monster? I’m so here for that. They even have a Chihuahua named Dominique!
And we've also got an interview with Taneka Stotts about her approach to webcomics, seeking a voice outside of editorial, and her history in poetry, courtesy of Ardo Omer!
Do you find that how you receive feedback or how you work with creatives, your current view on both of those things, were because you started out as an editor?
Yes and no. This kind of goes back to slam poetry a little bit. Back in the day, there are things called group pieces [and] also duos which [are] literally when two creative artists or a group of artists sit down, write a poem, kind of like a song, spitting out little words here and there to one another [and] seeing how it flows with the group. Or taking someone’s piece, deconstructing it so that a group can read that piece on stage. So it might’ve already existed, and this poet might have already read it quite a few times, but they’re going to break it down into sections of four so that they can all read it together, give it more emphasis and bang, and then watch it, you know, perform on stage, and how it hits an audience.
ALSO, but elsewhere: The Graphic novel nominations for the Lamda awards are up, and it's nice to see them abandon the tradition of giving a sympathy position to a lousy super-hero comic by a straight dude with an earring just because it features a side character who likes to reminisce about Will & Grace in between poorly drawn fight scenes. It's great that those things exist, because it isn't really progress until everybody gets their own shitty super-hero comic to call their own, but it was consistently annoying how often those things earned some kind of acclaim while there was, you know, absolutely anything else to have as an option.
