Today on the site Naomi Fry interviews Geneviève Castrée on her book, her process and life, generally.
Yeah, a lot of your earlier work was more metaphorical and fantastical, less realistic.
I feel that I’m done doing more fantastical things. Who knows, maybe in ten years I’ll be singing a different tune. But it’s weird, because as I was making this book based on reality, I’ve encountered people who’ve said, oh, I wish there was more fantastical elements in this. And I personally feel there’s enough fantasy out there, there are enough beautiful landscapes. In the past, I think there were two factors in making those kinds of fantastical comics. The first factor was mainly that I was terrified, because I felt I still was under this impression that whatever happened at my house when I was a kid was nobody’s business but my own. And the second factor was that I was lazy [Laughs.] My default mechanism was to draw landscapes that were more from my imagination, and that’s kind of easy to draw, because you can make your pencil go and not have to look at anything. And for this book, because I wanted it to be as close to reality as possible, I had to find images, and I had to think of what kind of tree there would be in this or that geographical place, and in some cases look at photographs too, and I personally feel a lot more complete now that I’ve done that, as an artist I feel that I can do this! I can pull it off! And I just feel like a grownup about it. Also I care way more than I used to about facts, I think that all stories deserve to be from… even if I’m making stories that are not autobiographical, that are totally coming from my head, I like the idea that there would be these facts that could anchor it to a specific place in the world.
It's a slow news day. Here are a few morsels:
The 2013 Eisner Awards have been announced. We're pleased to be nominated for Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism.
Here's Neil Gaiman on digital publishing.
It's always a good day when a new Stanley Stories post appears. This one on stories published in 1946.
And the under-new-ownership Alternative Comics announced a whole slew of releases centered mostly around the publisher's core cartoonists, a lot of whom really have been missing from the last handful of years of the publishing boom. More news, the best of the day, really: It's Reggie-12.
