Meanwhile, over at ContainsEggs, my pals find a way to connect writer/director/actor Christopher Guest to the NFL.

This year, at a panel discussing comedy, Dorkin mentioned Kliph Nesteroff, a show business historian with a few websites (including Classic Television Showbiz) . When Dorkin mentioned that Nesteroff posts obscure videos that would have me staying on the website way too long, I doubted him.

Then I ran across this 1958 conversation between Hy Gardner and Steve Allen, which includes a link to a Allen op-ed Village Voice piece . Yes, Dorkin is right,  I will be spending a lot of time reading up

But there is a bonus Talking Comics with Tim, a blast of a discussion with witty and insightful artist Stuart Immonen over at Robot 6.

Heads Up Display

In mid-September 2010, Heads Up Display released it’s self-titled album. The band, which consists of Josh Davis Dillard (Trumpet, Guitar), Kevin Colden (Drums) and Steve Pellegrino (Bass), was kind enough to discuss their music with me. It marks the second time I’ve talked to Kevin about the band, the first time being in this Robot 6 interview in May. Also, congrats to Kevin and Miss Lasko-Gross on the November 24th birth of Charles Lasko Colden.

Tim O’Shea: What values/benefits do each of you think the record’s producer “General” George Fullan added to the project?

Josh: George has a very strong working knowledge of production from an engineering standpoint. We love working with him because he understands working in sounds similar to the records that we all love. Being the final band that recorded at his now closed General Studios was a big deal for us.

Kevin: George has a long and diverse history as a producer and engineer and has the kind of adaptability that our songs need. I think his most important contribution to the current LP is retaining the melodies and harmonics of the songs while not sacrificing the intensity of the playing. Our live show is pretty intense, and that’s not an easy thing to capture on a record, but we’ve come as close as ever with this album.

Steve: George is kind of my production mentor, I interned for him right out of college. He knows how to make bands work to get what he wants and what they want. Instead of cutting a song together from multiple takes he pushes you until you get the right one. Also he knows how to make really heavy records and has tons of crazy stories!

O’Shea: Can each of you single out some of your favorite cuts from this new release?

Josh: I personally love he tracks I got to play trumpet on, Best Guess and Beginners Luck. The record is great though overall because it really sounds like the band when we play live.

Kevin: Besides the very drum-centric tracks that Josh mentioned (heh-heh!), I’m most excited about 20/20 Hindsight. It was a last-minute experiment that we weren’t sure was even going to be included on the record, but ended up having really strong mood and texture.

Steve: My two favorite are probably Mr. Green and Little Teeth. Mr. Green is the kind of song that I always look forward to playing, it is short and sweet and has a lot of fun parts to play. Little Teeth is a song Josh and I have had sitting around for a while, the demo we recorded was almost perfect, so it was scary to try to recapture the spirit of that recording, but I think this new version definitely did all that and more.

O’Shea: Judging from the new video, Best Guess, am I mistaken or does the band enjoy making the videos almost as much as the music itself?

Josh: I suppose that us making videos is tied to having ideas for videos and then being crazy enough to try and actually make them. The Best Guess video was executed on a whim one evening, and once the footage was there it was done.

Kevin: I think we’re all a bit multi-disciplined, and Steve and I both have a bit of a background in film, so it follows naturally that we would utilize the video medium. In the internet age, it’s also a very good way to reach new people. And we just enjoy stretching ourselves creatively.

Steve: Making records is time consuming and it is hard to find the right venue to force people to listen to your music without coming across as one of those guys. Videos are fun ways for us to present the songs outside of the traditional ways. It is also a good way to constantly be creating in a different medium that we are less comfortable working in.

O’Shea: Can you walk folks through the creative process when developing a new song? Of the songs in this collection, are there certain songs that changed drastically from the initial collaborative inception to the final version?

Josh: Our songwriting process is as organic as possible. Usually, I will have some words and music that is discussed and then we will develop it in a practice. If it falls flat, we pretend it never happened and move on. Otherwise we throw it in a pile marked ‘don’t open till next record.’

This record was the largest amount of material we have collected together yet. It started as a consensus that we needed to record ‘it’s not what you think’ and quickly became eight songs. Some were fresh off the line others were older than the band. Somehow it all came together to make the record.

Kevin: Generally, all of the music starts with Josh’s song sketches, which we develop together. He’s a very prolific writer. We could make an album a year until the day we all die consisting only of songs he’s already written. Things don’t usually change very drastically for myself once my parts are written. These songs are very carefully structured, and while they have the feel of rock, the arrangements are almost orchestral.

Steve: Josh tends to write the majority of the songs, he brings in a rough outline and Kevin and I will get a basic feel for the song. Then we just play the songs over and over to smooth out the bumps and fine tune the arrangements. We recently moved to a much more comfortable practice space where we can actually sit down and work on writing together which is a change of pace for us. Though we know Josh has a back catalog of songs that will keep us working for a long time.

O’Shea: Not to put you on the spot, but what qualities (musical or otherwise) do each of the members admire about the others in the band?

Josh: Kevin has a terrific smile. He can also be very intimidating pounding the drums. Steve is Talks quietly but carries a very loud fuzz bass.

Kevin: Steve is our secret weapon – the most skilled bass player I’ve ever played with, but don’t tell him I said that. Josh is a songwriter and arranger on par with the best working today. No – he’s better. And they’re both so damn tall.

Steve: Josh and I have been doing this together for a very long time, so I understand how he works. Regardless of how much success or failure we have experienced he is always really excited about what we are gonna do next. Kevin acts all modest about playing drums but he is a monster, he beats drums into submission.

O’Shea: Do each of you have certain venues that rank among your favorite to play live shows at?

Josh: We love Bar Matchless, Hanks Saloon, and Cameo Gallery. Had some great shows at Bruar Falls and Shea Stadium. Also, hats off to our old buddies at Sweatshop Rehearsal. Love to our friends’ bands, No One and the Somebodies, The Drinkers Themselves, TJ Desola, Turbosleaze, Bill Manning, Heliotropes.

Kevin: We tend to have great shows at the weirdest venues. Paul Shaffer’s House is a venue in the Bronx that our friends run – in their actual basement. It’s all-ages and the crowds are fantastic. Same with Shea Stadium in Bushwick; the energy is incredible. There was also a great show at a dank place that turned into a dance club exactly at 10pm. My drum kit kept falling apart while I was playing it, we had to cut our show short for time and then had to carry out our gear over the heads of moussed-up guidos. But the energy was great.

Steve: Bar Matchless is one of my favorite places to play and drink. One place that I miss is Sin-E, we had some of our best shows there in the olden days. I also really enjoy Hank’s Saloon, from the looks of it you wouldn’t think it would sound good, but there is some weird magical thing that makes it a fantastic room for live music.

Astro City Special: Silver Agent 2

Normally my comic reviews run as part of Robot 6′s weekly What Are You Reading? feature, but family events (and falling asleep on the sofa) caused me to have to scramble this past weekend and only submit part of my reviews. So, this week, I have opted to run the remainder of my reviews at my own blog.

First up, after years of wanting to know the full story of the fate of Astro City’s Silver Agent, readers finally got that closure last week in the final installment of the two-issue Astro City Special: Silver Agent. Busiek’s fortunate in that addition to possessing an affinity for time travel stories, Busiek has the understanding to write such stories effectively. Too often time travel in comics is a muddled mess, not so here. So much of the appeal of Astro City’s success is the sense of community and family that permeates some of the series best stories. In this final installment of the tale, Busiek gives us an incredible couple of moments with Alan Craig/Silver Agent and his nephew Thomas. It’s a bittersweet and touching scene that goes to the heart of why Busiek remains one of my favorite writers in comics.

I was pleased to get a double-shot of writer Jim McCann this week. In the first instance, McCann and artist Chris Samnee teamed up for a short story in the I Am An Avenger five-part anthology miniseries. I’ve not been a faithful reader of The Young Avengers over the years, so I was pleasantly surprised to find how entertained I was by this short story. I’ll admit that part of the reasons this story clicked with me is that McCann tied the old Avengers guard with the present day, utilizing Clint Barton/Hawkeye as a common ground.

My other McCann fix involved Hawkeye & Mockingbird 4. The characters have been going through some rough times in recent issue, not that the challenges evaporated with this issue. That being said, McCann is able to inject his sense of humor with the dialogue in this issue. McCann’s approach to the modern day version of Marvel superheroes imbues it with a fun vibe that reminds me of 1970s/1980s comics writer, David Michelinie. In addition to the character banter, I was pleasantly thrown by the Phantom Rider curveballs that appear in the final pages of this issue.

In the interim, please feel free to enjoy these interviews I recently did for Robot 6 with Jim Ottaviani, Michael Dowers, James Kochalka, Jim Rugg and Ho Che Anderson.

Over at Robot 6, last week I had the pleasure of taking part in one of the best interviews I’ve gotten to do–with Joe the Barbarian artist Sean Murphy. Murphy gets the credit for the interview’s greatness.

Robot 6: Guy Davis

Over at my group comic book blog home, Robot 6, we are celebrating one year of blogging fun by unleashing a deluge of new content and site exclusives. Plus, I get to interview Cully Hamner. Also Guy Davis did this great piece of art in celebration of our anniversary (colored by the great Dave Stewart).

Caryn A. Tate's Red Plains

Since I joined Robot 6 earlier this year, my webcomics and overall sequential art interviews have run there, for the most part, rather than here. But given that Red Plains writer Caryn A. Tate was already interviewed by fellow great Robot Sixer Brigid Alverson recently (go read it, it’s a great interview [thanks to Alverson's questions and Tate's answers] as is this one [again, thanks to Tate's answers]), I opted to give Tate a slot here at my home site to discuss her work at Top Shelf 2.0, Top Shelf’s online comics program. I’m always happy to support a Top Shelf creator, partially as I often say, because I consider the publisher to be my home team (both the publisher and myself are Georgia-based). As detailed in a recent Top Shelf press release: “Written by Red Plains series creator Caryn A. Tate and featuring beautifully and brutally rendered art by Larry Watts, ‘A Nice Place to Raise Your Kids Up’ focuses on the violence, corruption, and crime of the Old West that is seldom deeply explored. While other towns may have tried it, can guns really be outlawed in a place like Red Plains? Sheriff Doles, the recently appointed lawman in Red Plains, may find himself out of a job–if he doesn’t lose his life first. As a new family comes to Red Plains, meet the Escovido clan and find out what role to they have to play in all of this. Who will vie for the favor of the vivacious Lupe, and who will be scarred in the attempt? How many people will be calling on Doc DeGraff–and how many more on the undertaker?” My thanks to Tate for her time. Be sure to go back and visit Top Shelf 2.0 site frequently, as there will be new Red Plains chapters every two weeks.

Tim O’Shea: What attracts you to telling this tale in particular–why as a comic, as opposed to prose?

Caryn A. Tate: The tale of Red Plains is one that’s really dear to me. I grew up and lived in the West on working ranches and farms, being around Western people, and there’s a distinct beauty to the land, its lifestyles, its people. I’ve been passionate about telling our stories for a long time, and Red Plains is the culmination of all of that.

I love comics, and one of the reasons I think the medium is so satisfying as a creator is because the final result manifests faster than prose work. And I’m a very visual writer – I have a visual art background – so I tend to see things very clearly and I have a desire to see that on the page. But, that said, I do love prose too, so who knows?

O’Shea: Red Plains started as a mini-comic, right, how beneficial was it to you when you gained a slot at the Top Shelf site?

Tate: Oh, it was the definition of beneficial! I couldn’t have asked for a better place to showcase the series and gain readership. I’m grateful that the folks at Top Shelf saw the potential in Red Plains from that little 7 page mini comic and gave us a shot on Top Shelf 2.0. Now we’re building an audience, and Red Plains is way more visible than it would be elsewhere online. It’s an amazing opportunity.

O’Shea: The story features a rotating selection of artists, how do you go about selecting the artists and making sure their styles compliment each other?

Tate: Every artist that I’ve worked with so far I’ve met online. There’s a surprising number of driven creators out there. It’s just a matter of finding them, and making sure you’re compatible creatively.

More than the artists complementing each other, I try to make sure their styles complement the series and what I’m trying to accomplish with it. And the genre, of course. I generally look for artists who can inject a good amount of detail and the trappings of the West, but who also have a good grasp of storytelling, facial expressions, and can depict a variety of people. Larry Watts, the artist on the current “Nice Place to Raise Your Kids Up” storyline, is great at these kinds of things. Wait till you see issues 12 and 13!

O’Shea: Would you describe the genre for the story as Western noir?

Tate: That’s exactly how I would describe it! I think the Western and noir genres and styles complement each other really well, especially in a case like Red Plains, where our focus often tends to be on crime and corruption. But it’s imperative to me to keep the essence of the Western genre, to keep that the more prevalent of the two genres.

O’Shea: What fuels your creativity in building a character like Lupe Escovido?

Tate: Well, initially, I created her father Luis, who was inspired by one of my favorite works of fiction, Zorro. I wanted to play with the concept of the wealthy Latino family, and I was interested in focusing on that rather than the more common peasant and bandit depictions.

In the beginning, Lupe was created as the sort of wild child of the Escovidos, a free spirit. But the more I wrote her, the more her personality started showing itself, and she grew into a full person from there. I became very interested in seeing where she and her sisters would go, how their stories would evolve. We’ll be seeing a lot of them in Red Plains.

O’Shea: When doing a period piece like this, how much research do you do?

Tate: Actually I’m a stickler for realism in Red Plains, so I do a whole lot of research, both in books and online. Because I’ve experienced the Western lifestyle first hand, it always drives me crazy when I watch a film or read a book that gets details wrong. Like the high noon gunfights in the middle of the street, cowboys who never do any cowboying, gunmen firing way more than six shots. These are a few examples of things you’ll never see in Red Plains, because they’re not real and they just didn’t happen.

In Red Plains, the cowboys do real ranch work, people run out of bullets, and gunfights are ambushes, not clean “ten paces, turn, and shoot” affairs. Other details like clothing and speech, weaponry, and peoples’ mindsets back then, are all things that I do my best to accurately portray.

A happy realization I’ve had in doing research for the series is that the old adage, “the truth is stranger than fiction,” is true! I’ve learned of some really bizarre and astounding things that happened that are crazier than you would imagine, and they’re way more interesting than some of the tropes we’ve seen in a lot of Western films and novels. So I inject a lot of those sorts of details that pull from real life occurrences and people.

O’Shea: I love that in discussing your work, you referenced Marty Robbins “Gunfighter Ballads & Trail Songs”. Would you say music, movies, comics or prose novels (or a mixture of all) most influence your storytelling mindset?

Tate: Oh, definitely all of the above. I’m influenced by everything around me. I think it’s vital to not allow yourself to to be limited to a particular medium or art form for inspiration. Everything feeds my creativity, and anything can spark an idea. I always want to grow and improve, and the only way to do that in my opinion is for me to be open to learning from everything.

For example, one of my biggest storytelling influences is the TV series The Wire because there’s so much more to it than you may expect going in, something I’m striving for with Red Plains. I’m influenced by a variety of sources, including filmmakers like Scorsese, Hitchcock, Spike Lee…writers like Cormac McCarthy, Greg Rucka, Grant Morrison, David Simon, James Yoshimura, Ed Brubaker, Kazuo Koike…musicians ranging from Marty Robbins to Metallica. And so much more. I actually like lettering to Marty Robbins music!

O’Shea: How far out do you have Red Plains planned out?

Tate: I have the whole series planned out roughly, but there’s plenty room for spontaneous changes. That happens all the time – it’s so fun to be surprised by an idea and working it into the series.

But yeah, the basic beginning, middle, and end are there. I know where Red Plains is going and pretty much how it’s going to end. That really helps as I go along – it’s like I can see the Big Picture.

O’Shea: Would you ever like to write a Western tale for DC or Marvel, or are you more interested in working with your creator-owned properties?

Tate: Sure, I’m always interested in writing for anyone. It’s what I love to do most. But of course Red Plains and my other creations are definitely first in my heart.

O’Shea: Is there anything you’d like to discuss that I glossed over?

Tate: I’d just like to emphasize that Red Plains is very accessible to new readers. There are no long, drawn out origin stories, no detailed backgrounds that you need to be aware of before you can start reading. You can jump on any time without any trouble.

Also, it might surprise folks who feel that they aren’t Western fans. I’ve even had a few people who have never thought they liked Westerns reach out and tell me they really enjoy Red Plains and have become regular readers. There’s a lot more to it than a tin star and gunfights.

Robot 6

I’ll be posting another interview later this evening, but it looks like I am fast approaching the end of my ability to post two interviews a week .

I may be able to post two interviews next week, but if not I hope to start doing some non-interview posts of interest. I am, as always, open to suggestions.

The past few weeks have been busy in terms of interviews at Robot 6 as well. In case you missed any, here are links to several of the pieces:

• Nick Tapalansky & Alex Eckman-Lawn on Awakening
• Nevin Martell on Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip
• Dustin Harbin on Storytelling
• Mark Waid on the Unknown
• Tim Hall on Uplift the Postivicals

If that’s not enough here’s a link to all my Robot 6 interviews or a link to all my interviews here at Talking with Tim.