Review This Online

Journalist Bill Baker's interviews with four of the comics field's most interesting and prolific creators have just been released in sturdy, attractive editions from Rosen Publishing (Michael Avon Oeming, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, George Perez). If you ever wanted the chance to sit down and talk at length with any of these four, here's your chance to do so by proxy. Baker's interviews are thorough and entertaining, and he clearly has done his homework on each interviewee. The books also come with selected works, selected awards, glossary, further reading, and further information sections. Great stuff.

Here are a few snippets to whet your appetite...

A lot of storytellers will swing their camera around, wildly, from one panel to the next. I'm not going to knock anybody for that, but I think that's one of the things that makes things confusing--other than composition. When the camera's moving around so much that you can't get a bearing on where things are, I think that makes things confusing for people. So that's why we have that kind of still camera [effect], with repeated panels...

If you were to describe this tour, you'd get a drunk spider, dip it in ink, and put it on a map of America...

I would say that whatever any of us choose to think, whatever any of us would like to believe, as writers, or as artists, we have a lot in common with Paul Joseph Goebbels. That all art is propaganda. It is not propaganda for the nation state of Germany, it is propaganda for a state of mind. It is a broadcast from each of our lonely little broadcasting stations...

Sometimes a subtle, sideward glance says much more than the whole person's whole body turning, or them reacting with their hands. Sometimes, if you can get the eyes to tell the story...then you've added much more to the character's depth.