Talking with Tim

There’s no corner of the sequential art industry that gets ignored, thanks to Dirk Deppey. As the linking dynamo behind Journalista, Deppey has built a web presence that is a daily stop for anyone who wants to stay informed about comics. Deppey took time out of his recent vacation to answer a few questions on his role as TCJ.com online editor and his past gig as managing editor of The Comics Journal.

Tim O’Shea: Some people mistakenly assume your responsibility as TCJ.com’s online editor is to do Journalista. What all do you do as online editor?

Dirk Deppey: Journalista’s a big part of it, yes — I mean, it requires anywhere from six to twelve hours a day, depending on what’s out there, so it takes up the overwhelming majority of my time. The other big job is producing the online edition of the print magazine for subscribers, which entails turning the text and images into something Web-friendly, which while not as time-intensive as the blog still takes a significant amount of work. There are also the random online-only goodies, nominal policing of the message board and whatever else rears its ungainly head. I probably put in a good 50-55 hours a week on the website, all told.

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What are the odds that some agent out there is trying to pitch a reality show with Amy Winehouse and Courtney Love, called Do Resuscitate? The closer would be if they would each be assigned a life coach, either Liza Minnelli or Stevie Nicks. Tell me you would not watch it. C’mon.

I’m fairly certain the first time I ran across Gerard Jones was when I picked up an issue of his and Will Jacobs-written comic book, The Trouble with Girls, back in the late 1980s. I also was aware of his work for Marvel and DC in the early 1990s. But Jones’ writing really came to my attention in 2002, when he wrote the nonfiction book, Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Superheroes and Make-Believe Violence. It was then that I interviewed him (for a long defunct website) about the book. His popularity substantially increased with the 2004 release of the Eisner Award-winning nonfiction work, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book. Jacobs and Jones, after a 15-year hiatus, recently started collaborating on comedy writing again–and posting their efforts online. Upon reading about one (of three) of their projects “Million Dollar Ideas, our new humor novel set in ’40s Hollywood (sort of)” [as described by Jones], I took the opportunity to email interview him about his return to fiction and humor.

Tim O’Shea: What prompted you to pursue a return to humor writing and collaborating again with Will Jacobs after a 15-year hiatus?

Gerard Jones: Writing humor with Will is the most fun I’ve ever had as a writer. We both got a little burnt out on the financial and market stresses of it after our struggles to keep The Trouble with Girls alive didn’t work out, but we both always figured we’d come back to it when the time is right. But then we both had kids, mortgages, a need to be a little more practical with our career decisions. I think we finally got to the point that we felt secure enough with our other endeavors to consider writing something fun by high-risk again, and all we needed was the trigger. That trigger turned out to be Checker Books asking to reprint the first 14 issues of Girls a couple of years ago. The rest of that story is told in an entry on http://undressingamerica.blogspot.com (and my Red Room page).

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Last month, after reading Whitney (Pop Candy) Matheson’s review of Robert Schnakenberg’s new book, Secret Lives of Great Authors, I tracked down the author to interview him. In addition to discussing the new book, Schnakenberg took questions about the upcoming release of his revised Encyclopedia Shatnerica (about all things William Shatner, set for an August 2008 release) as well as a new Christopher Walken A-to-Z book (set for October 2008 release). But the bulk of this interview covered the book that answers such questions as “Is it true that J. D. Salinger drank his own urine? Why was Ayn Rand such a big fan of Charlie’s Angels?” My thanks to Schnakenberg for his time.

Tim O’Shea: How often in trying to research facts for Secret Lives did you find out the anecdote was not true?

Robert Schnakenberg: That happened occasionally. Sometimes I’d find a really good anecdote about someone, and then another source would say that it happened to someone else entirely. You know, one book says it happened to Ernest Hemingway, another says it happened to F. Scott Fitzgerald. That happens with quotes a lot. They are always attributed to two or three different people. So you throw those out, or you find the one source that you trust and you go with that. I can’t promise that every anecdote in my book is 100% true—I mean, I wasn’t in the men’s room with Hemingway and Fitzgerald when they compared schlongs—but I can say everything is reliably sourced. Double and triple sourced, in fact, as much as possible.

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I have no crystal ball to predict the fate of newspapers.

But they won’t be the same without Tony Kornheiser. He took the buyout offer from the Washington Post. Sure, he had not written for the paper to any great extent in years. But still, it’s a shame. And as noted by Reuters, Tony is bailing in good company, given that “U.S. political columnist David Broder” has also taken the buyout.

Oh well, at least we’ll still be able to enjoy Tony on the radio and on TV.

How many of you are like me–and find yourself watching bad TV that you sit there, thinking the whole time: “There’s something better that I could be doing with my time.” When I watch these kinds of show, I chalk it up to being a guilty pleasure of mine.

So, when I discovered that Dave Campbell (formerly the guy behind Dave’s Long Box [a great blog about comics]) was writing for ABC.com via Live from L.A.–and in particular about Wife Swap–I was happy. Why? Well Dave has a unique pop culture view of the world like myself. So to have a blog where I can read about one of my current TV guilty pleasures, Wife Swap, well it’s a good thing.

Campbell is a witty writer with some good observations (about several ABC shows, not just Wife Swap). Be sure to check Campbell’s Live from L.A., you won’t be sorry.

But I’m not complaining.

Thanks to hulu, I have just watched for the third time in 30 seconds the point in a recent 30 Rock episode where Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin at his best) introduces a character with the following line: “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the bravest New Yorker since Bernie Goetz.”

Between the guest stars (Tim Conway) and writing for a strong ensemble (am I the only person that would love to see an entire episode focused on Kevin Brown’s “Dot-Com” Slattery?) this show achieves a quality normally reserved for premium cable with cussing. Seriously though, any show that can reference Sigourney Weaver’s father as a funny punchline is a catch.

Back in AP art during high school in the mid-1980s, I vividly remember dabbling in scratchboard (according to m-w.com “a black-surfaced cardboard having an undercoat of white clay on which an effect resembling engraving is achieved by scratching away portions of the surface to produce white lines”) and completely screwing it up. So the fact that Leah Hayes created Funeral of the Heart, a 120-page book drawn on scratchboard, caught my attention (and earned my unceasing respect) rather quickly. Thanks to some assistance from Fantagraphics’ Eric Reynolds, I was able to recently email interview Hayes. Here’s part of Fantagraphics description of the book: “Hayes creates a world of unease and ambiguity populated by obsessive characters, forlorn animals, and mysterious, inanimate objects; odd occurrences, unnerving deaths and unconventional but genuine love bind these characters and their stories together.” In addition to some sample pages, Fantagraphics set up a Flickr slideshow for the book and also offered a 10-page PDF preview. My thanks to Hayes for the interview, and please be sure to also check out her musical projects, Scary Mansion and La Laque.

Tim O’Shea: What made you decide to work with scratchboard for Funeral of the Heart?

Leah Hayes: It happened by accident. I was playing around with Scratchboard at the time that Fantagraphics talked to me about publishing a second book with them. I had written part of one story just for fun, so I decided to go with it.

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Charlton Heston is dead. But in some ways, once the impact of Alzheimer’s started robbing his mind, I dare say to some in his family his dying process had already begun back in 2002 (with his announcement of the disease).

I’m a liberal who believes in reasonable levels of gun control. So clearly, my philosophy is not in line with the NRA (which Heston led in the late 1990s). A man should be evaluated by the sum of his parts–as an actor Heston was in many classic films–made classic partially by his performances. As a private citizen, Heston served in World War II,  then in the 1960s he participated in civil rights protests (as evidenced here)–long before becoming more conservative and a Republican.

But of course, for every relatively nice Daily Kos diary post in tribute to Heston, there are ill-conceived, insensitive posts like this one. Mourn for the passing of Heston. You don’t have to agree with him completely, but one should respect his body of work as a whole. And one should hope that none of us or our loved ones are ravaged by a disease like Alzheimer’s.

I wonder and worry about the increasingly lack of civility on the Internet–like folks who choose to mock the dead. To paraphrase Joseph Welch’s comment to Joseph McCarthy back in 1954: “Have we left no sense of decency?”

I sure hope we do.

And I equally hope that Turner Classic Movies has a planned Heston marathon in the near-term.

As an unabashed information junkie, I continually feel like I’m missing out on news. As a result, I’m often checking Internet resources for new means for uncovering information (both useless to some and useful to others…).  Today, I discovered the Literature portal at Wikipedia.

From there, I discovered a January 4, 2008 (U.K.) Guardian article that documented the opening to the public of the Norman Mailer archive at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas.  (Be sure to visit the Ransom Center online, as it’s astounding how much they have in terms of holdings for a variety of people, places and events…)

Anyway, back to the article, I was struck by the unique nature of materials included in the Mailer archive:

“Although the public nature of Mailer’s life means that there are unlikely to be many surprises, the collection still contains a few nuggets. A personal phone list includes numbers for Playboy’s Hugh Hefner, women’s rights activist Gloria Steinem, actor Montgomery Clift and writer Truman Capote. The collection of letters includes one from Capote in 1960, when the novelist was living in Spain and writing In Cold Blood. ‘Hope other aspects of your summer are equally triumphant,’ Capote wrote in tiny script in blue ink. ‘My own is - quiet. Am working steadily on my book about the murder case in Kansas - but it is very difficult, especially since I have to keep battling my own emotional involvement.’”

Bottom line, information is where you find it, and fortunately I keep finding new outlets for info. Be sure to check out the links mentioned previously, as somewhere along the way you’ll find info to capture your attention as well.