The panels last night went very well. It was great just having a public conversation with Bryan Talbot for an hour. If you want a hint of what that might be like you should check out his new book, The Naked Artist, certainly relevant to the title and theme of my blog. It is a compendium of the anecdotes that comic book artists tell each other, gathered from hither and yon during Bryan's multifarious travels around the globe. I personally have had a drink or two with Bryan on at least three continents and we have dined together with the wives of our bosoms. One of my own yarns even pops up in here, the one about my meeting with the great Hugo Pratt, which I was telling as a bar anecdote long before I put it into my own book How to be an Artist. Some of the stories have been so exaggerated through retelling as to be near mythical. Others are quite charming such as the one where where innocent passerby Harvey Kurtzman is dragged into a swimming pool at the El Cortez hotel in 1977 by Linda Gebbie and two other female cartoonsists. A fanboy hears the splash and looks over his balcony. "Hey! It's Harvey Kurtzman! he's in the pool with three chicks! And they've all got their clothes on!" Harvey was mortified.
Bryan's book is in prose with a dozen large illustrations by my old pal Hunt Emerson