Today on the site, the great Naomi Fry returns to interview the great Vanessa Davis.
Did you have a fantasy that publication would change everything about your life?
I mean, sure I had that fantasy, but I also couldn’t imagine in what way it would. Nothing really changed. Well, that’s not true. I definitely had a lot more exposure to other cartoonists and I got a lot of really good feedback and I enjoyed being the new pony [laughter] and it was like a party. I got a lot of attention and that was really fun, and that was pretty much it. I didn’t really know how to parlay that into the next thing. And I started dating Trevor [the cartoonist Trevor Alixopulos], my boyfriend, right after the time that Spaniel Rage came out, and so that was also a big disruption, where I was like, “What am I going to do about that?” because he lived in California and I lived in New York. I wasn’t really making ends meet in New York, and I wanted to be more serious about comics, whatever that meant, and I was still so young that I could just see what unfolded. And when I visited Trevor he was living in Santa Rosa, which is—compared to New York—a smaller town, and you could work half-time. And it seemed like you could afford to be an artist there in a way that you couldn’t in New York. And so it was sort of this practical and romantic thing where I was embracing both Trevor and comics: like everything would become more serious by moving out there.
Did your work developed in different ways, because the pressures of making a living in New York and space and so on were now slightly eased?
Yeah, they were definitely eased, but then also moving and having a serious boyfriend and making friends in a new town took up some of the attention that I was giving to working. But then in comics, basically what I was OK with happening was Spaniel Rage got a little attention. And so I got to be in some anthologies; like, in Kramers Ergot they needed something in color, so I was like, “OK, that’s a challenge to attack, how will I do comics in color, in ink?” And then in another anthology I had to do a six-page story, and I had never done that before. So I felt like I was in a position where I was getting to do new projects that would stretch my abilities. So I spent a lot of time in that place. I knew that even though I had this book published, I was new to this form, and kind of didn’t really know what I was doing and was open to seeing where it went. But then, shortly after I moved to California, Alvin and I kind of fell out, and Alvin, to a large extent, was my conduit to fancier, more ambitious projects. And so even though I had a good reputation independently, I has living out in the boonies, publishing-wise, and I had lost my hip publisher contact, so I sort of languished in a really pleasant kind of slow, goalless development for a long time.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, still playing catch-up:
—Reviews & Commentary. Roger Gathman considers superheroes.
American comics generally participate in an ideology which radiates out from a central preoccupation with crime. And not any crime. The two great crimes are jewel robberies and bank robberies. There’s a reason for that: these crimes make the rich the victim.
Kim Jooha's favorite comics of 2016.
The Chester Brown/Dave Sim debates have been ongoing.
I had planned to address a few other things that Dave wrote that Deutsch hadn’t dissected but, having written the above, I’ve decided not to bother. When applied to fictional invention, the extreme nature of Dave's thinking makes for interesting reading. But that extreme nature, when applied to real-world problems, results in opinions that almost no one can take seriously.
—Interviews & Profiles. Tom Spurgeon talks to K. Thor Jensen.
SPURGEON: Can I ask why you self-published this one? I think the last one was one of the last works to squeak from the old Alternative Comics, or at least found purchase with one of the Alternative Comics refugee homes. Correct me if I'm wrong there. But there seem to be a number of small houses; were those an option, or was it self-publishing all the way?
JENSEN: Alternative is still going! Under the fine auspices of Marc Arsenault, who will be handling the Diamond distribution and digital for Cloud Stories because I am bad at that stuff. For me, I just had no idea if anybody on Earth was going to be interested in this book, and Kickstarter seemed like a workable financial model for somebody like me with a fanbase that would be comfortable in ponying up $20 up front. I really like what Spike Trotman -- who has been insanely successful on that platform -- says: if your Kickstarter failed, take that as a blessing because you dodged a bullet not printing something the market didn't want. I was incredibly gratified to see the project funded with lots of small pledges, and then proceeded to deliver the book three years late like an asshole.
The latest guest on the Virtual Memories podcast is the brilliant novelist and occasional comics writer Samuel R. Delany.
My co-editor Dan linked to several of them, but there have been an enormous amount of Daniel Clowes interviews lately, most of them linked to on The Daniel Clowes Reader Tumblr.
—Misc. Tucker Stone.
