Interview Round-Up!
I decided about two weeks ago to post all interviews in one round-up post a week rather than individual links or quotes— and then I got too busy to remember to do it. But here it is at last!
There are heroes who sit there and calculate a plan. You probably have friends who do it, people who make lists and figure out what their move is going to be and wrestle over the ethics and morals of stuff and have ten-year plans and twenty-year plans. He doesn’t have any of that. Whenever I am wondering what he’d do in a scene, he’s an arrow: he shoots from the hip. He just is constantly trusting his inner compass. Sometimes there will be misfires, but at least he fires. I don’t see him ever having a story where he’s thought fifty steps ahead like a chess player.
- Rachel Yu: The Sixteen Year Old Girl Whose Comic Out-Sold ‘Watchmen’ - Her story’s pretty neat, a self-published creator’s 99-cent Kindle book topped the Amazon digital Graphic Novels list over the holidays, but here’s my favorite part of the interview:
Geek: What’s next for you?
RY: Well, I’m working on a new book about a space cop superhero. It’s basically a funny, light take of comics like Green Lantern or the Nova Corps. Also, I’m finishing up finals and have to study for a Bio test next week. For dinner, I’m going to have chicken and rice. Too bad there are no more ice cream sandwiches…
The characters are in their early twenties, a time when you start out taking yourself so damn seriously, you think you understand the world, and there are a dozen different choices to make while growing up. The parallel journeys of Dee and Bunny Boy involve different methods of figuring yourself out, be it hack-and-slash throwing yourself at parties and love, or delicate and internal self-discovery. If you connect back to the center, you tend to find that person you were as a kid, all your childhood interests and weirdness, was just hanging out underneath all the other emotions. And then you need to re-embrace them again. Running from them gets you nowhere!…
The most unhappy people I know are people who won’t spend time to get lost in their passion, or people who are trying to hard to make something happen that isn’t genuine.
- Girls Read Comics Too continues their series of Women in Comics interviews with Paige Braddock, Rachel Nabors, Liz Prince
- Fellow gin-and-St. Germain enthusiast Laura Park is interviewed by Chicago Publishes.
And of course, the interview that everyone should read:
Women make 80% of the retail purchases in America. EIGHTY PERCENT. And that means that more often than not, if a kid is shopping, it’s with mom. So if the comic industry wants to have a future and hook readers young, they need to target both women and children. If a woman is reading comics, she’ll be more likely to let her kid read comics. And if a kid is raised in a house where one or both parents read comics, I think we all already know that he or she will be more likely to read comics. Kids who never know comics exist are going to have a hard time finding them when they’re at an age that most superhero comics are geared towards. And even better in all of this is the fact that if mom reads comics, she’ll have no problem with her daughters reading comics, which increases the future female readership of comics as well as just the future male readership of comics. There’s no loss here for the comics industry. It just takes foresight.
