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Monday, February 18, 2008

Mention in Douglas Wolk interview

I got a nice mention from Douglas Wolk in his interview with Tom Spurgeon over at The Comics Reporter:

SPURGEON: Your chapter on emerging seemed to me more about categorization than discussing anyone's work. Could you identify maybe one or two cartoonists younger than 35 whose work specifically interests you? Or maybe one or two books from younger cartoonists that you think are really valuable. You touch on it lightly at the beginning of the chapter, but do you think the way these artists are coming up, for instance without the market opportunity for many of them to do one-cartoonist serial comics, is going to have an effect on how their work develops?

WOLK: As far as younger cartoonists go, besides Kevin Huizenga and Hope Larson, who got their own chapters in the book (both practically unaltered from their Salon incarnations!), and Bryan Lee O'Malley, who's not exactly a big secret... I follow Laura Park's Flickr page, and I'd love to see her do more narrative stuff, but I'll happily look at anything she draws. Tom Neely's The Blot makes me eager to see what he's going to do next. (Also: Anders Nilsen's 35, I think, but a couple people have mentioned that I seemed to be dismissive about his work, and I'm sorry to have given that impression--I love a lot of his stuff, and even when I don't I'm impressed with how hard he's pushing himself.) Yes, I think the market conditions for non-mainstream serial comics are making a lot harder for some kinds of young cartoonists to develop their voice across a substantial body of work -- I can't see something like Neat Stuff or Lloyd Llewellyn flying now, for instance. On the other hand, when people really, really need to make comics, sometimes it happens even without decent market conditions, which is why The Blot exists.


Read the rest of the interview here. And go get his book Reading Comics. I liked it a lot.

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