Today we bring you Aug Stone's interview with the Dutch artist Hanco Kolk.
“So we were at a great secondhand bookshop by Pier 7 and Peter [de Wit] hands me Al Hirschfeld’s Show Business Is No Business. And I said, ‘Woah, I’ve never seen this before!’ I immediately fell in love with his lines, his fluidity. I wanted to master the same simplicity, the seemingly simple drawings. I did my own version and worked on it with a brush until I got that line. Years later I saw a Hirschfeld original and it appears that he didn’t do fluid lines at all! He made them little by little with his pen. But he got me to find this line that I have and it’s served me well.”
Served him well it has. Kolk has forty books to his name, a handful of album covers, and his long-running daily strip S1ngle was even turned into a television show. This year he’ll be releasing The Man Of The Moment as well as a new S1ngle book, drawing his version of Spirou (“I was really proud they asked me”), and making the posters for the Stripdagen festival in Haarlem. Comics, it seems, was always in the cards for Kolk.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Interviews & Profiles. There is too much Ta-Nehisi Coates hype to keep track of right now, (I haven't read Black Panther #1 yet but I would be amazed if it lives up to a fraction of the hoopla -- and I am a Coates fan) but a couple of items that stand out include Evan Narcisse's profile at Kotaku and J.A. Micheline's interview at Vice.
At Comics Alliance, Caleb Mozzocco interviews James Sturm for the 10th anniversary of First Second.
—Commentary. Bill Boichel talks about Jackie Ormes.
—Misc. The University of Chicago Library is currently showing an exhibit of Daniel Clowes's creative process, and many of the images are online.
Gabe Fowler isn't sure whether or not there will be a CAB festival in New York this year.
Tom Kaczynski appeared in a Levi's 501 ad in the early '90s. "Tom, he's cool."
Julia Wertz has been evicted from her NYC apartment, and is selling lots of stuff (art, books, etc.) before her move.
Today is the last day to vote for the Eisner Hall of Fame awards.
