Today Annie Mok returns with an interview with Jeremy Sorese, whose diary we ran last week to a great response. Jeremy debuted his first graphic novel just two weeks ago at CAB.
MOK: Curveball is set in the future, and its protagonist Avery is pining over Christophe, this sailor boy that they like and used to have some kind of a relationship with. Everyone around Avery is kind of nurse-maiding them. When you talk about this age… it seemed strange to me that everyone was catering to Avery and really checking in on them about their heartbreak, because Avery’s pining. I was like, oh, what age is Avery? Their friends, housemates and coworkers are a little older than them, and they’re concerned that Avery is making a mess of theirself. Can you talk about that place in your life, or in Avery’s life?
SORESE: It’s the first attachment in life, where you don’t have the skill set yet that you build up over time from other relationships to rationalize what you’re going through and what you’re feeling. It’s not teenagery, because it’s a first taste that is more substantial than teenagery, the phase where people are like, “This is my soulmate, this is where we’re going to get married, we’re so lucky, I found someone.” And you’re a tiny baby, but you just have to go through that time in your life, and everybody can tell you that it’s going to get better or easier or you’ll meet someone better, and you won’t even care about this person in five or six years. You can’t know that until you actually do it. Avery knows better, and they’re very aware that that they know better, but they can’t emotionally feel that yet, and they have to go through the paces. So the book is a lesson in that, seeing someone have to painfully drag it out of them and then move on.
Elsewhere:
MASSIVE partner and gay manga expert Graham Kolbeins is profiled.
Sean Michael Robinson excerpts a longer work on Cerebus: Church and State I.
Paul Constant continues the string of interesting reviews of Benjamin Marra's great new book, O.M.W.A.T.
Jared Gardner writes about illness in comics.
Only on Facebook, but Kuti Kuti is re-publishing Jodorowsky's legendary comic strips from the 1960s with an English translation.
