It's all sunny, except outside it's still raining.

Melbourne's newspaper The Age, the sunday magazine insert, M , is doing a feature on the presence of the 'graphic novel' in the Melbourne Writers' Festival this year. They've interviewed me and Nicki Greenberg. She's been photographed for the front cover and superimposed against blow-ups of her characters, and I was commissioned to do a full page in colour for inside. It's a 12 panel autobiographical job, and that's a small detail enlarged on the left. It's in the style of the Fate of the Artist. So let's cross fingers and hope that it all comes out right, as you never know whether mainstream mags are goint to 'get it'. But Editor Michelle Griffin interviewed me for the Australian back in 2001 when she was a freelance journalist and that came out very well, so I'm hopeful. There's certainly room to write an optimistic piece on the subect vis a vis this country. With my First Second books distributed over here by MacMillan (my self-published books have never really been on sale outside of the comicbook specialty shops), with Nicki's book (see yesterday) and The Arrival by Shaun Tan, who will also be a guest of the festival, there's ample room to make a case for the form at last having its moment in the Australian sunshine. That's Sunday 26 aug. If any of it is online I'll let you know. For my appearances on panels and interviews, scroll down and see my post of 8th aug.
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Nick Bertozzi has posted all ten pages of the Black Diamond pitch he and James Sturm prepared. My understanding is that they worked this up from the movie script (though they ignored its actual contents much more than I did) for the purpose of pitching to publishers. By the time First Second showed an interest in the book, they had committed to other jobs and could no longer see it through. This is dated 2003 and I was called in towards the end of 2004
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Taking comics seriously -- fun and all- Chicago Tribune- August 19.
Douglas Wolk is a nice enough bloke, but my feeling right now is that his book "Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean" (Da Capo, 2007), which I haven't read, is probably doing more damage than good. I'm tired of having it all lumped together as though we are all doing the same thing. As my pal Evans once quipped; "Did Ingmar Bergman have to justify Star Wars every time he sat down for an interview?"
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YEEHOO!!! "The world's most unlikely detective comes to DVD for the first time ever in all 23 thrilling Season One episodes of The Rockford Files."
EVERYBODY OUT OF THE POOL!!