Talking with Tim

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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