The Comics Reporter Interview

It's back up, and eminently readable.

Comics journalist Tom Spurgeon passed away on November 13, 2019. He was one of the few comics journalists worthy of the name journalist. The New York Times profiled him here. 

The Comics Reporter was the only comics website I read regularly. That and a coffee started my day.

Unfortunately, only a month after Tom's death, the website was gone. I read somewhere a university was going to cache it, but for awhile, you couldn’t access it.

However, I realized the site is now back up, and so is my interview. Here are a few notes.

Tom quotes me several times as using the term "crap anchor". I actually kept saying "crap artist" but for some reason, he read that as "crap anchor".

Also, he rephrased one of his questions to me in the print version. He told me he'd been speaking with a colleague of mine who noted how uneven my work could be. The conclusion was that I drew things I liked to draw well and drew things I did not like to draw badly. Tom cut that from the interview but my response remains.

I think the truth there is more complex, especially after I found out I had a disorder that pretty much sapped my energy like a vampire. It is easier to draw things well when they come naturally to you, but it takes more energy to draw things that are more challenging.

I don’t think the average person has a clue how energy intensive drawing is, and how brain fog can make any cognitive task much more difficult than it has to be. People think we just sit there and move our hand around and magic comes out.

When my energy is low, I just don't get the same results. So I try to manage my low energy for certin kinds of tasks and my high energy times for other tasks.

Also, the artist he was speaking to has never been an industry journeyman, taking whatever job came his way. He's never been in a position to draw, say, a complex car chase. He only has to draw what he wants.

The difference between me and a lot of other artists is they never make it a point to draw anything outside their comfort zone, and I always do. There are things I really don’t like to do, like bicycles and motorcycles. They will take twice as long as things I do like to do. But they will be, technically, correct.

I can say without reservation that the artist who made the comment doesn’t have half my technical chops. Especially over a decade later.

Not a knock, just truth.

That said, I love fake perspective in comics, and this page is full of it.