Today on the site, we present a new episode of Mike Dawson's TCJ Talkies podcast. This time around, cartoonist/publisher Austin English and editor/scholar Bill Kartalopoulos discuss Daniel Clowes's Patience, but they do it the long way around, via a 1963 issue of Superboy, and a reprint of Blutch's Peplum.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Interviews & Profiles. Daniel Clowes is all over the internet these days, including a profile by TCJ.com alum Sean T. Collins at The Observer.
“I haven’t been in a fight in a long time, but as a young man…” He pauses. “I can’t say I was ‘in a fight,’ but I got the shit beaten out of me several times. I remember the feeling of when you get hit in the head, and it flashes to white and you’re just like—” He makes a sound like a zombie in the process of being brained. “It’s just this jarring shock: Boom, there it is, and then it’s over and you’re sort of lost afterwards. I really wanted to capture that.
Jessica Gross interviewed him, too.
There’s also something about saying the names of your own characters that is really embarrassing, I’ve found. I was talking to another cartoonist about this and we realized we never say the names of our characters unless we have to. You just say, “the guy in the story.” There’s something deeply embarrassing about thinking, I just made up this character and now we’re talking about him.
Tripwire talks to Howard Chaykin:
Whereas Gil [Kane] demonstrated, albeit with a skepticism borne out of having spent his entire adult life in the field, that a career in comics could be at least somewhat rewarding, [Wally Wood] was so profoundly self loathing and self destructive that by the time I met him he was a ghost, a feeble echo of the towering talent he’d been throughout the fifties and early sixties. He was still breathtakingly proficient with a brush, however – able to transform my barely creditable effort, not to mention the work of at least one non-artist who simply traced stuff, into his own recognizable style.
So I wanted to be Gil Kane when I grew up, but I lived in terror of ending up like Wallace Wood.
—Commentary. Artist Matt Jones writes about six things he learned putting together his recent book, Ronald Searle's America.
Searle’s prolific output was driven by a genuine love of drawing and a rigid work ethic. He kept a meticulous deadline chart on his studio wall detailing the multiple assignments he was juggling at any given time. Art directors attested to his unfailing ability to meet deadlines and thorough exploration of the brief. He often submitted multiple finished variations on a theme for them to choose from. Even in his late-eighties he continued to work diligently. His wife, Monica, complained that she never saw him as he spent up to 11 hours a day in his studio.
