Today on the site, Keenan Keller, of The Humans and Galactic Breakdown, interviews Benjamin Marra, whose most recent book, American Blood, is out now. Here's a bit:
Sex is also a key component to a lot of your work and just like your use of violence, you use it to various effects from sexy renderings of the human form, to titillating hardcore pounding, to the absurdly awkward, verging on disturbing… Is it a send-up of the genres you’re satirizing or are you trying to say more with these depictions of sex?
Yes, it is a send-up of the way sex is handled in genre and American visual storytelling. It makes me think about the power images hold. If my work were prose and I were writing about sex I don’t think it would get the same kind of attention, but because the sex is depicted it somehow becomes more significant. I think sex is a very human act but for some reason it’s largely missing from a lot of visual stories in the U.S. In television that appears to be changing. Television is a lot more daring these days with the themes it explores. It’s obvious to state, but in many feature films graphic violence is accepted where sex is not. One theme is about the destruction of life, what tears us apart as humans. The other is about creation, feeling alive, and what we share as humans. It’s strange, but also a very human fault to be obsessed with doom rather than salvation.
Elsewhere:
Well folks, if you're in NYC you might be going to CAB this weekend. Here's a preview of what awaits you.
I liked this "lost" Mothers News interview by Brian Nicholson.
The Comic Art Museum in San Francisco has a new home.
The movie version of Wilson, by Daniel Clowes, has a trailer out and it looks promising.
