Dan's still gone, so I'm still blogging. Today, we are publishing the first part of my lengthy interview with cartoonist's cartoonist Tim Hensley. Here's a brief exchange from it:
[Tim Hodler:} What were some of your early jobs?
[Tim Hensley:] There was one part-time job I used to have where we used to go and just put check bank statements in envelopes all day, kind of office temp jobs like that. I worked in a place that made safety films for fire departments and stuff and I took care of the paperwork revolving around that. I worked as a proofreader of wedding invitations.
[Laughs.] I didn’t know they had those!
Yeah, [laughs] that was a strange job. It was a place which did thermography, which is this kind of printing that involves raised ink; when you feel it, it kind of like has a tactile sense to it. It’s kind of hard to proofread wedding invitations because they’re all pretty much the same. You know, on this day, so and so meets so and so and gets married on this date or whatever. And we did business cards and there was one guy who would be offended if there was anything vaguely pornographic in the business card and he would just stop work and walk outside if that happened.What would set him off?
I don’t know. I mean, you know when you get into these editor type jobs or like a proofreading position too, sometimes there’s a skewed moral sense that [Hodler laughs] comes into play that transcends whether words are in the correct order. That happened when I was working in closed captioning too, because you’re sort of not supposed to make mistakes. I mean, the general gist of it is, as a proofreader, don’t make any mistakes. We definitely had certain people who had a frame of mind like “I don’t make any mistakes; that’s why I’m here.”
Elsewhere:
—Interviews. Seattle Weekly speaks to Julia Gfrörer.
—News The New York Times has now published an obituary of Gary Arlington. DC's Batman group editor Mike Marts is leaving DC to join Marvel as Executive Editor. The Young Adult Library Services Association has announced its 2014 list of "great graphic novels." (In the current market library sales are a big deal, especially for bookstore-oriented publications.)
—Angoulême Bill Watterson has been awarded the Grand Prix.
Paul Karasik and Jen Vaughn are still reporting from the festival.
The art site Hyperallergic reports further on the Angoulême/SodaStream controversy, including the festival's response. In the meantime, another group of artists have signed the open letter protesting SodaStream's involvement, including Jacques Tardi, Igort, Baru, and Sarah Glidden.
—Misc. Chris Mautner previews six comics he's looking forward to this year. J. Caleb Mozzocco chronicles a DC supervillain from the Golden Age to the New 52.
