I goofed and forgot to blog yesterday, but here I am now. So, today pretend it's, uh, earlier! Yesterday Joe McCulloch bestowed upon you his week in comics. Today we bring to you George Elkind's interview with Dash Shaw, who is responsible for about 75% of the best comics of 2014. Cosplayers 2 and 3, along with Doctors, were stunning achievements and yet casual and unflashy in their brilliance. No other cartoonist in the world published this much strong work last year. Here's a bit of the interview:
I want to ask a little about Cosplayers in terms of structure. I see each issue of Cosplayersas (among other things) a chance for you to play with the structure of a comics issue in different ways—with “pin-ups,” interstitial materials, and different kinds of story structures. So I see a connection to that notion of comics as collage there, but can you talk more about how that idea or premise plays out within those stories? I think of page design most immediately, but I really mean on any level.
It’ll be most explicit in the next issue, which has cut-up comic collages inside of it, but, I can try to come up with an answer, sure. One way to answer is that I drew the first story and kept adding stories, without a plan. I didn’t envision a pamphlet at the beginning. First I had one story, then those characters asked for a second story, then I drew pin-ups of cosplayers. I came up with some one-panel gags and collaged them over the pin-ups. The content/subject matter asked to take the form of a pamphlet comic. Then, the idea of doing a second issue that takes place entirely at an anime convention was a no-brainer. It grew organically, piece by piece.
Drawing a cosplayer is interesting because you’re drawing Wolverine and you’re inking him with a brush and it’s computer-colored like how real Wolverine comics are, but we know it’s a cosplayer. It doesn’t look like Jim Lee’s Wolverine. I wanted them to look like real cosplayers. A guy will dress up like Batman but he won’t look like Christian Bale’s Batman, you know? Maybe he got the bat sign a bit wonky, or he doesn’t have Batman’s body type. That’s part of what I love about cosplay. Fandom is wider and more inclusive and humanistic than most of the stories/characters that the fans are fans of.
Different people like cosplay for different reasons, so these decisions obviously just reflect what I personally like about it.
I’m cosplaying too, in a way, by dressing in this format and inking and coloring in a way that I’m not natural at. I’m like the guy wearing the Batman suit realizing he’s not the real thing, but embracing who he is, play-acting, and strutting out there. So it’s sort of like I’m collaging myself onto the spinner rack next to the real Batman. It’s a merging of the unreal with the real which, also, is part of what cosplay means to me.
Of course there are a lot of cosplayers now who combine different characters to make their own, like the Boba Fett/Snow White creation, but that isn’t in my comic.
And conventions are collage-like environments, in that you have Link from Legend of Zelda talking to Rick Grimes from The Walking Dead and all of these pop culture characters are occupying the same physical space. It’s like the Werner Herzog quote that I put on the back of the Tezukon issue: “the collective dreams all in one place.” It’s similar to the Philip José Farmer series Riverworld, where everyone who has ever lived is resurrected alongside the same river and they’re all the same age. It’s an excuse to have all of these people he’s interested in interacting with each other, like the girl who inspiredAlice in Wonderland talking to Jack London. Gary Panter’s Dal Tokyo is another story where characters/things that the author is interested in are all put together in the same sandbox. I reference those creators not to compare myself to them, but to illustrate a way of looking at comic conventions. A person’s mind is filled with these things… It’s natural to throw a party and invite them all to meet each other.
Elsewhere:
Charlie Hebdo: An app has been launched by the magazine. The Hooded Utilitarian has a year's worth of covers.
Gil Roth interviews the great Jim Woodring.
I've haven't anything like this in a while: A partially completed set of Landon Course of Cartooning.
Not Comics: Finely decorated Grateful Dead mailorder ticket envelopes.
