Talking with Tim

Two interviews in one week? Is it still summer schedule for this blog? Yes it is, but here’s what I was thinking: Some of us might be interested in reading a comics industry-related piece in the latter part of this week that does not involve San Diego. Plus I’m really worried about industry pulse taker, Dirk Deppey, falling asleep from counting “tumbleweeds in the street“. Fortunately, writer Todd Dezago was recently available to do an email interview about his and artist Craig Rousseau’s The Perhapanauts. Issue 3 of the series, which moved to Image earlier this year, came out last week. Dezago is always an opportunity for fun–well fun for me, because I can always do a joke or two in the questions. Hopefully he had fun as well.

Before the interview, though, a smidge of background:

“There are places in this world where the fabric of reality has worn thin, where strange and terrible creatures have crossed over to lurk in the shadows and the night.

There is an organization dedicated to finding these creatures and sending them back whence they came, sealing the rift behind them, and maintaining the integrity of those borders.

The organization is called BEDLAM. Its agents are…The PERHAPANAUTS!”

Tim O’Shea: How soon after seeing you and Craig in these matching shirts did Larsen step down as publisher?

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The comic book industry is well-populated with many good folks that I respect immensely. One of those folks is Bob Greenberger. If you’ve ever enjoyed a reprint collection from Marvel or DC–odds are good that Greenberger was involved in the project (but that’s just one aspect of his prolific career). In recent years, he’s branched out into a variety of even more freelance projects–and with the release of the new Batman film, I became interested in Greenberger’s most recent effort, The Essential Batman Encyclopedia. Despite juggling a great deal of far more important demands on personal and professional fronts, he was kind enough to grant me an email interview this past weekend. I greatly appreciated his time and strongly recommend you visit his site after reading the interview.

Tim O’Shea: In researching the deep history of Batman, were there any particular characters (from the golden or silver or whatever age) that you think has been underutilized and DC would do well to bring into the present day?

Bob Greenberger: These days one writer or another brings back the underutilized or the obscure, especially in Grant Morrison’s current run on Batman. So, really, no, I can’t come up with someone truly deserving for a second look.

O’Shea: Were there any Batman writers or artists with which you gained a newfound appreciation for their work?

Greenberger: Frank Robbins and Don Cameron come to mind. Other than Bill Finger, Don wrote the majority of the stories during the Golden Age and gave us Vicki Vale and the Mad Hatter among others. While better known for his Superman work, his Batman stories were very entertaining.

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As the parent of an eight-year old boy who is still warming up to the concept of reading outside of school assignments, I’m always looking for resources to help interest him in reading. So when I found out that Brigid Alverson had started a blog called Good Comics for Kids, I was definitely enthused. In fact I was so interested in finding out more about the group blog, I contacted Alverson for an interview. Here’s some background on Alverson:

“Editor-in-chief Brigid Alverson grew up reading American and British comics and developed a passion for manga late in life. She is the blogger at MangaBlog and the editor-in-chief of Digital Strips, and she does freelance comics writing for Publishers’ Weekly Comics Week, Shojo Beat, and other publications. You can see examples of her non-comics journalism at her personal site.”

After reading this interview, be sure to check out the links that Alverson was kind enough to provide of her fellow Good Comics for Kids bloggers.

Tim O’Shea: When did the idea for this blog first come about?

Brigid Alverson: Shortly before this year’s New York Comic-Con. Gina Gagliano, of First Second Books, and Janna Morishima, from Diamond, invited me to take part in a few panels on children’s comics. I started poking around on the internet and couldn’t find a site that was covering them in a regular, systematic way. So I started one.

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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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So a week or so ago, one of my sisters emailed me to ask–even as she conceded I was clearly on a summer “man that wedding date is coming up fast (August 9)” schedule–if I was going to comment on the passing of George Carlin. And I agreed that I should.

As a kid, I listed to Carlin’s comedy albums. He helped shape my sense of humor, no doubt. But there’s not much I can say that has not been said about the man.

Two things. Visit his website, as he gets the last word, in a sense, there–including the following great words:

“Upon my death, I wish to be cremated. The disposition of my ashes (dispersal at sea, on land, or in the air) shall be determined by my surviving family (wife and daughter) in accordance with their knowledge of my prejudices and philosophies regarding geography and spirituality. Under no circumstances are my ashes to be retained by anyone or buried in a particular location. The eventual dispersal can be delayed for any reasonable length of time required to reach a decision, but not to exceed one month following my death.”

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Sorry to not have a new interview this week. And I genuinely have intended to post a smidge more frequently. But life demands have precluded frequent blogging. I wish I could promise increased posting, but wedding plans will be a top priority until early August. Please indulge me.

Elizabeth Genco caught my attention a month or so back, with a post she did for Blog@Newsarama on “How to Get Your Indie Book into Comic Shops”. If more indie creators sought the counsel of retailers like she did , I think we’d see a great deal more successfully marketed projects. I contacted her to discuss her upcoming work, Blue–partially because I respected her marketing savvy.

Here’s the official word on the project:

“BLUE
by Elizabeth Genco w/art by Sami Makkonen, coming July 2008 from Desperado Publishing. Available for pre-order in MAY 08 PREVIEWS (MAY083778). Preview pages HERE.

A fresh, fantastic take on the bloodiest of classic fairy tales. When Blue’s ex-boyfriend appears on her doorstep, he says he wants to make things right. His true intentions are far more sinister. Blue’s shape-shifting powers can help her outrun him, but to survive, she must face him as herself.”

And, rather than trying to summarize her diverse bio, I merely direct you to go here. Finally, I am fairly certain this is the first time I have interviewed a busker–I could be wrong.

Tim O’Shea: How did you end up collaborating with Finnish artist Sami Makkonen?

Elizabeth Genco: Oh, gosh, I’m not even sure anymore! I think I first found his work on The Engine, maybe? I can’t remember exactly, but I do remember thinking, “This guy is the bomb… he’s probably got starving writers crawling all over him… he’ll never have time for l’il old me!” But I tend to be pretty ballsy when it comes to approaching artists, so I just gave it a shot.

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I will be posting less as the summer begins for two reasons–my son is out of school and I want to spend more time with him and less of my free time behind a computer. I’m getting married in a few months, and I need a smidge more spare time. Normal (a relative term) will resume in the fall. It is my hope to still have new interviews every OTHER Monday, rather than every Monday this summer.

So I swung by Hulu.com the other evening and on a lark, I did a search for Letterman to see if they had anything. Much to my surprise they had a documentary (my term, not theirs, and I use this term quite loosely) called Early Dave: The Letterman Tapes (1978-1993). It’s a mixture of Tom Brokaw, Jane Pauley, Tom Snyder and other NBC interviews with Dave, not really a documentary.

They are tightly edited, sometimes annoying so. For example, one Snyder interview they do has Dave along with Merrill Markoe and other folks–whom you never see. Letterman refers to Markoe at one point in the interview, that’s the only way I know, because they edit her bits completely out. Markoe, I dare say, is as funny as Letterman at times and I’m annoyed she was edited out of the piece.

It’s vintage Dave, shown driving his old pick-up truck to his gigs to substitute for Carson. Dave doing a stand-up routine. A tour of his new home, where you can see his beloved dog, Bob, is another interesting bit. A 1970s era Johnny Carson associate Fred de Cordova (with baseball cap no less)  talking to Letterman before a taping of the Tonight Show. Later we see a clip of Letterman talking to Mariette Hartley about his morning show for NBC (I forgot he got a whole 90 minutes with that show…) and an upcoming feature on the show called Stupid Pet Tricks (still in its infancy, I believe). It’s a fun romp leading up to Brokaw’s interview with Letterman on the night of his last NBC show.

I was surprised to find this on Hulu, given that as a Universal property in some ways it is very much an NBC product. And more importantly, while I know Carson had the rights to his Tonight Show (meaning unless the estate/company makes a deal, it will not be showing up on Hulu), was this an effort by NBC to test the waters and ultimately start offering Letterman’s old NBC shows on Hulu?

Part of me would love to see that, but I’m sure it would irk Dave to no end. Maybe I’m wrong on both counts. We’ll have to wait and see. Either way, be sure to check out the documentary for vintage and I do mean vintage Letterman. I would love to know what producer thought it a good idea to have Today show host Jane Pauley interview Letterman while the both sat on an inactive merry go-round…

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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