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| << January07, 2006 - [ComicBooknet E-Mag] CBEM 557.03 |
January07, 2006 - [ComicBooknet E-Mag] CBEM 557.06 >> |
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----------------------------------------------------------------- COMICS OBSCURA Mike Curtis shandafa@cyberback.com [COMICS OBSCURA are facts Mike Curtis has dug out during his 30 years of collecting Superman and writing about comics. His website for his comic imprint is www.shandafantasyarts.net ] COULDN'T DO THAT TODAY Milt Gross was a cartoonist and humorist of the 1920's through the 1940's, renowned for inventing such slang as BANANA OIL! and NIZE BABY! One of his most popular comic strips was COUNT SCREWLOOSE OF TOOLOOSE. This decidedly non PC strip had the Count escaping his insane asylum at the start of each strip, to see crazier things on the outside and letting himself back in. _________________________________________________________________ ----------------------------------------------------------------- [6] Thoughts From the Land of Frost Alex Ness Alexander@popthought.com http://www.Popthought.com [Alex has taught college level history and is a full time father. His interests include cats, comics and militaria. His writings have been featured on SlushFactory.com, UGO.com, and are currently on the Popthought.com web site. ] Interviews with: JM DeMatteis, Stephen R. Bissette, Jordan Raskin, Steve Niles, Joshua Hale Fialkov, Nick Stakal, Christopher Long and Chee JM DeMatteis Speaks By Alex Ness JM DeMatteis has been a writer of comics for two and a half decades. His work has a quality about it that is childlike, not childish, that is spiritual but not altogether religious. His ability to write well has allowed him to work for many different publishers, including the majors of DC, Marvel and Image Comics. In this interview DeMatteis speaks about his most famous projects and gives a look at the future of Stardust Kid and Abadazad. Alex Ness: Your work has a quality about that is often considered mystical and that is where I intend to go here... What part of the inner search of spirit and soul do you think we need to investigate further, and how do you think that comics can help in the? JM DeMatteis: The inner search is as old as humankind. I think the answers have always been the same...but the LANGUAGE that we use to express those answers changes with the era we live in. As for the role of comics in reflecting that inner search: The comic book medium is one of great immediacy. Reading a comic book is almost like listening to a song. In the best of worlds, you get a great amount of information telescoped into a short, poetic form. (I've always thought there's a great relationship between writing poetry and writing comics. More significant in many ways than the relationship between comics and film that people are always harping on.) I can reach into the deepest part of myself, explore the issues that really matter...and project them out at readers through our wonderfully unique art form. My goal as a storyteller is, first and foremost, to COMMUNICATE...to reach people and, with some luck, touch them; using my own search - whether it's psychological or spiritual or (in my collaborations with Keith Giffen) just the search for a good laugh - to reflect theirs. Alex Ness: What part of the comic book medium is unique, why work in comics instead of either prose or film? JM DeMatteis: I do work in prose and film...and totally enjoy both...and I don't think it's an either/or proposition; but what comics have that film and prose don't is the ability to fuse words and pictures in a way that no other medium can. For instance, a comic book can tell one story in the pictures-a story of outer movement and action-and another story (a story of INNER movement and action) in the words. I love to push the boundaries that separate the novel from the comic book. As you've seen in Moonshadow or the Abadazad comic book (to name two). I'll often stop the forward flow of the visuals and just do a few pages that are primarily text-with- illustration. Then I might do three or four pages with minimal copy, turning the storytelling over to the visuals. Then there are sequences that fuse both. The great thing about comics is that THEY CAN BE ANYTHING WE WANT THEM TO BE. These days you hear so much about "movies on paper," how captions are out of style, how it's all about art and dialogue...but I don't subscribe to that. Yes, comics CAN be movies on paper-damn good movies, too- but they can be so much more. And when you're dealing with inner worlds, cosmic worlds, spiritual worlds...the ability to fuse poetry and image makes our medium uniquely suited to the exploration of the spirit, whether you're talking about Kirby's New Gods-where the quest plays out on a grand metaphoric stage (as only Kirby could do it)-or my own Seekers Into The Mystery, where the quest is more intimate, yet no less strange. (Seekers, I'm happy to report, is being reprinted by Boom! Studios...set for release in 2006) Alex Ness: You've had success across the board with mainstream titles and other, less traditional stories and genres. The three books that form a statement, it would seem, by you are Moonshadow, Abadazad, and Stardust Kid. Each is seen through the eyes of children and deal with the difficulties of children finding adulthood, dealing with adulthood or translating adulthood. Do they represent something about you, in terms of a personal journey? Or are they more a representation of your take upon that period of life where we move from childhood to being adult? JM DeMatteis: I would certainly add Brooklyn Dreams to that list...and probably Seekers Into The Mystery, as well. As for why I write so much about that particular transformation...I have no glib answer. Maybe that shift from childhood to adulthood is just so OBVIOUS...and often so painful...that it works both literally and as a metaphor for ALL the transformations we go through in life. It's my belief that, if we're living our lives right, we're continually transforming. I call it reincarnating in the same body. We "die" and get "reborn" over and over again...in just the span of one lifetime. Another reason I feel drawn to that particular period of life is that it still RESONATES so strongly for me. That was the period when my own transformation began in earnest, when the Universe knocked on the door and let me know there were some AMAZING things out there...and even MORE amazing things inside my own consciousness. I remember very clearly what it feels like to be a teenager, to struggle out of that cocoon. (Sometimes I think there's a part of me that's permanently stuck at 17!) So when I'm writing about Moonshadow or Kate Jameson...I KNOW them...as well as I know myself. I'm also very much in touch with my own childhood, that wide-eyed innocence that struggles so heroically to fend off all the chaos and madness of the Adult World. I think many of us who work in comics are deeply connected to childhood. Just as there's a part of me who's a Permanent Teenager, another part is still eight years old, surfing the waves of my own imagination...sprawled out on the living room floor reading comics. Alex Ness: When working with such a powerful metaphor as the transformation from child to adult, is there a caution to the writer, can you overplay your hand? JM DeMatteis: I'm sure you can. And I'm sure I have! I know that I sometimes struggle with Kate Jameson's voice in Abadazad...always watching to see that she doesn't step over the line and become TOO adult, TOO smart. And yet, paradoxically, the problem is never Kate...it's ME: If I just shut my big mouth, get out of the way, and let Kate do the talking...her voice will always remain true. I've come to really believe in Kate...to trust her voice...and to trust her to lead me safely (and honestly) across the vast terrain of Abadazad. Alex Ness: RE: Moonshadow... Are adults really so hard to understand? What was the raison d'etre of this work? JM DeMatteis: What motivated Moonshadow was a desire to write about a certain period of my life...and filter it through a fantasy world. Not because I didn't want to deal with the so- called reality...but because I think the fantasy genre is a far better reflection of what life is really like. "Realism," to me, is the genre that's TOTALLY unreal! Good fantasy-whether it's Baum's The Wizard of Oz or Serling's Twilight Zone-takes real people and then puts them in a place where the universe cracks open and reveals itself to be far more than we ever imagined. THAT'S reality, as far as I'm concerned: I'm continually stepping through those cracks in my life, looking around, amazed, and wondering what part of Oz or the Twilight Zone I've just stumbled into. Moonshadow began with an unformed urge to tell a particular story...and turned into the first comic book project that really allowed me to find my own voice as a writer. Paradoxically, I did it by allowing just about every literary influence I ever had to flow through me. I think because I was, essentially, writing about my own life (not literally, of course: my mother wasn't a hippie, my father wasn't a ball of light and, if I've ever been on a spaceship, the Little Greys have blacked out the memory!), I was able to take those influences and transcend them, making the story my own...as opposed to parroting someone else's ideas and style...which, till then, I'd done quite a bit of. Moonshadow set me free as a writer. It's a story that will always hold a special place in my heart. Brooklyn Dreams was, of course, another look at the same material...but from a so-called realistic POV...but what I wanted to do there was write about the real world as if it WAS a fantasy world. To really see the cosmic craziness not out on some other planet, but right here on Earth, on a block in Brooklyn. One of my Favorite Books of All Time is Bradbury's Dandelion Wine. I love how this man, so comfortable in the deeps of space, fashioned his most fantastic novel out of (seemingly) mundane incidents. Dandelion Wine has no spaceships, nothing supernatural, and yet it's really Bradbury's most magnificent fantasy...because it captures the fantastic nature of our so- called Real World. That's what I tried to do in Brooklyn Dreams. Of course Brooklyn isn't Greentown, Illinois...and so BD rocketed off in some very different directions. Are adults so hard to understand? For me, as a child, most adults absolutely WERE like the G'l-Doses in Moonshadow! Utterly unfathomable and endlessly fascinating in their shifts from love to lunacy and back again. Alex Ness: While at CrossGen in their death throes there were a number of good even great books that came out. Abadazad was one of those. How did it happen that you did it, how did you lure Mike Ploog from retirement, and what would you say is the target audience of the comic versus that of the young adult fantasy books soon out from Disney? JM DeMatteis: Abadazad was a story I'd been nursing for years. Along with that, I'd been trying (and failing), for way too long, to get some comic book companies interested in doing smart, literate comics for kids. The companies really weren't interested. (The one exception was Joe Calamari, who was running Marvel in the late 90's, but he was gone before we could ever get a project off the ground.) I almost got Abadazad going, with Michael Lark attached as artist, at DC...but the response there was so tepid that I knew we'd be doomed before we started. CrossGen, on the other hand, understood the project immediately. Ian Feller, who ran the Code 6 line, received the proposal on a Wednesday and by Friday I had a green light. CG publisher Mark Alessi was equally enthusiastic about the book: He was the guy who approached Mike Ploog about joining the team. (I'm still touched, delighted and amazed that Mike chose my story as the vehicle for his return to comics.) Mark and Ian really believed in Abadazad...and, for that, I will always be grateful. Of course CG was in trouble even then (not that I knew it...and it doesn't really pay to beat that dead horse) but, for all the angst and agony we went through as a result of the CrossGen bankruptcy, our story had a very happy ending with Disney and Hyperion Books For Children. Actually, it's a happy BEGINNING. The best is yet to come. The first two books in the new series -- Abadazad: The Road To Inconceivable and Abadazad: The Dream Thief -- will hit book stores in July of '06...with the third book following in the late fall. The response from the major book chains and from foreign publishers (we're being published all across Europe and across the world) has been fantastic...and, with a little luck and grace, we'll be telling the tales of Abadazad for years to come. The target audience for Abadazad remains the same. One of my motivations for doing the series in the first place was to have a comic book I could read with my daughter. The best children's literature delights the child in all of us. When I read Harry Potter or Oz or Narnia with my daughter, I'm as captivated, as enchanted, as she is. That's the way I've always seen Abadazad: It's a story that a child and a (so-called) adult should both be able to enjoy. So the audience is pretty much...everyone! Alex Ness: What are your short term and long term goals with Stardust Kid? What can we garner from a child's fears and encroaching darkness of his coming of age? JM DeMatteis: Stardust Kid is another story I've been nursing for years. Longer than Abadazad. In fact the original story goes back to the mid-eighties. At one point, in 1987 or '88, I actually sold it to DC, wrote several issues, and then bought it back when I realized that, despite DC's good intentions, the book would die a swift death, drowned in a sea of dark and depressing super heroes. But good ideas never die (not as long as we hold on to them) and it's been a delight resurrecting the Stardust Kid...especially with Mike Ploog (who really helped me reimagine the story in a fresh way) and our Abadazad coconspirators Nick Bell and Dave Lanphear along for the ride. What are my goals? First of all, getting the darn thing FINISHED. We're currently in the process of changing publishers. (Look for an "official" announcement soon. The guys at Desperado are fantastic, by the way. I'd be happy to work with them on another project if the right opportunity arose. It's just that, given the current market, SDK was a difficult sell for them.) Stardust Kid #4 should be out in January (or February at the latest)...and the plan is to finish it up with an extra-sized special a few months after that. Then we'd like to take advantage of the Abadazad wave that's rising...putting out an SDK collection late in 2006, after the first Abadazad books hit. I love writing child-friendly stories...it truly nourishes my soul...and I love the Stardust Kid. I hope that we can get our collected edition out into the book stores and reach a MUCH wider audience, using Disney's Abadazad push to shine a spotlight on SDK. "Hey, look over here! It's the SAME GUYS doing another project! And it's really good!" There are many more Stardust Kid tales to be told after this first one...and we'd love to have a chance to tell them. Maybe even launching the series in book form as we're doing with Abadazad. As for the question of a child's fears and the "darkness of his coming of age": I think you'll see, as the story unfolds, that darkness isn't the only element in this kind of transformation. Along with the fear of losing who we've been...of turning into something new that we can't quite fathom (and, again, this doesn't just happen in adolescence. It happens to all of us all the time. At least if we're living with our eyes open)...comes a sense of freedom and power and joy. In the end, I believe that the apparent agents of darkness, like the mysterious Woman in SDK, are really agents of light...and, if we can view them as that, it won't be quite so terrifying when the world inside us starts to change and new inner landscapes erupt across our psyches. And then, of course...we'll all live happily ever after! FINAL THOUGHTS Thanks to JM DeMatteis and Ian Feller.- ***** Thanks for subscribing to the Comic Book Network Electronic Magazine (CBEM) --------------------------->Disclaimer<--------------------------- This is an ANNOUNCE only mailing list, only the Editor can send messages to the list. No one else has access to the subscriber list. Replies to these messages will be received by the Editor ONLY, so you must CC: individual contributors if you want them to get your E-Mail. The E-mail to the E-mag MAY be used in future issues at the Editor's discretion UNLESS you specifically request that they not be. It is our policy to withhold names and/or Addresses, by request only, from letters of comment. All contributors are required to use their real name and have a valid Email address for their columns to be published. 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| << January07, 2006 - [ComicBooknet E-Mag] CBEM 557.03 |
January07, 2006 - [ComicBooknet E-Mag] CBEM 557.06 >> |
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