SPX, or the Small Press Expo, returns to the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel and Conference Center in Bethesda, Md. this weekend.

The show’s special guests include Roz Chast, Jim Woodring, Diane Noomin, Jim Rugg, Ann Telnaes, Chester Brown, Johnny Ryan, Craig Thompson and Matthew Thurber, and fans who attend will also have the opportunity to meet and/or hear from Kevin Huizenga, Anders Nilsen, Jessica Abel, Sarah Glidden, Alex Robinson, Brian Ralph, Mike Dawson, Meredith Gran, Roger Langridge and Julia Wertz, just to name a few. I would also be remiss if I didn’t point out that our own Chris Mautner will be attending and conducting a Q&A with Johnny Ryan on Saturday, so be sure to tell him hi for us.

In addition to a lot of great talent, SPX also offers a full schedule of programming and the yearly Ignatz Awards. And a whole lot of new books and cool things will be available at the show:

• Drawn + Quarterly will have a ton of new books at the show, as detailed here, like Brain Ralph’s Daybreak collection, the Death-Ray hardcover and Big Questions, among many others.

• As we noted yesterday, AdHouse and Tom Scioli will have an American Barbarian print at the show. They’ll also have guests like Jim Rugg, Lamar Abrams, Ethan Rilly and Sterling Hundley at their table.

• Jennifer Hayden’s Underwire, from Top Shelf, makes its debut:

Underwire

• Roger Langridge’s The Show Must Go On! collection from BOOM! Town will debut there, and Langridge will also have a Snarked! print:

Snarked!

• Kevin Huizenga will have some new stuff at the show, not the least of which is a new Ganges book from Fantagraphics.

• NBM will debut Stargazing Dog and Ernie Colon’s Inner Sanctum at the show.

• The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund will host the first Jeff Alexander Memorial Benefit Auction, named for a cartoonist and an organizer of SPX and the Ignatz Awards. He passed away earlier this year. The auction includes pieces from Alexander ’s collection that he donated to the CBLDF, including original art by Charles Vess and Jeff Smith, Tony Millionaire, and Roger Langridge. The auction also includes contributions from Keith Knight, Raina Telgemeier, Jeffrey Brown and many more.

• A signed and numbered edition of Craig Thompson’s Habibi will be available from the CBLDF during the show. And Sara Varon will be at their table on Saturday signing Bake Sale.

• The SPX has a whole bunch more listed on their site, including Mike Dawson’s Troop 142, Pope Hats #2 by Ethan Rilly, Old-Time Hockey Tales by Robert Ullman and Jeffrey Brown, Monster Isle: Big Monster Stuff by Joey Weiser and more.

Mike Richardson

Publishing | In a wide-ranging interview with retail news and analysis site ICv2, Dark Horse CEO Mike Richardson discusses the state of the market, the potential impact of Borders’ bankruptcy, digital comics, the decline in manga sales, the success of Troublemaker and more. Of particular note is Richardson’s confirmation that Apple’s stricter enforcement of a prohibition on in-app purchases outside the iTunes store was behind the delay of the planned January launch of Dark Horse’s digital comics program. He also says that Frank Miller is working on the third issue of his 300 prequel Xerxes, which is expected to be “roughly six issues, but he hasn’t exactly decided yet.” [ICv2.com]

Publishing | Robot 6 contributor Brigid Alverson provides an overview of recent changes to BOOM! Studios’ kids’ line, from the loss of the Pixar licenses to a new imprint name — changed from BOOM! Kids to kaboom! — to the announcement this week of a Peanuts original graphic novel. “BOOM Kids! was designed to publish children’s comics — kaboom! is designed to be a true all-ages imprint, and for that reason Peanuts is the perfect launch title, the sort of material that adults and kids read alike,” CEO Ross Ritchie said. “Roger Langridge’s Snarked! is along these lines, as is Space Warped and Word Girl.  I put the Word Girl announcement on my wall on Facebook and immediately there were a zillion adults commenting, ‘My child loves this show but I’m buying this comic book for myself!’  The title mix will be broader for kaboom! than it was for BOOM Kids!” [Publishers Weekly]

Publishing | Atish Patel offers a snapshot of India’s “new wave of graphic novelists,” from creators like Adhiraj Singh and Sarnath Banerjee to publishers like Vimanika Comics and Campfire. [Reuters]

Matt Fraction

Creators | Tom Spurgeon kicks off an interview with Matt Fraction about Casanova: “There’s nothing about Casanova that goes easily or well, on any conceivable level. For whatever reason, it has this sort of light whiff of curse about it that just takes longer to produce. It is the hardest thing I write. It took me literally a year to produce the first script. That wasn’t a year of working on it all day every day, but I started October of 2009 and finished October 2010 on the first issue of the third series. For whatever reason, it’s the book where we go crazy.” [Marvel.com]

Creators | Brian Truitt spotlights The Flash artist Francis Manapul, who talks about collaborating with writer Geoff Johns: “”It just feels like with every new script I get, we’re continually getting closer to almost having the same brain in how we like to tell the story. Honestly, after I finish this book, If I’m not working with Geoff, I don’t even know who I’d want to work with. I’d probably just write a story for myself.” [USA Today]

The New Brighton Archeological Society

Creators | Writer Mark Andrew Smith chats about using Kickstarter to fund a sequel to his all-ages book The New Brighton Archeological Society, and the challenges of creator-owned work: “The creative part comes easily. I think that the biggest challenge is the stress of putting so much work into a project and getting high hopes, only to see that work be for nothing. With each new book we put in energy and so much work, and think, ‘Okay, this is going to be it. We’re going to get to where we can turn this into a career’ and it never happens. We’ll work on a book sometimes for three years and it will come out and only 2,000 or 3,000 people will read it. Doing creator owned comics is a very Sisyphean task and you get your hopes up just to get knocked back down each time to where you started from with only a printed book to hold in your hands. I think that’s very hard to take on an emotional level. You’ve got to do your best to soldier on, keep a good outlook, and not let those things bother you.” [GeekDad]

Creators | Alex Robinson talks briefly about nostalgia, television and movie adaptations, and his Fantastic Four contribution to Marvel’s Strange Tales anthology: “A friend of mine pointed out, though, that the story takes place when Reed Richards, Doctor Doom, and Ben Grimm were all in college, so I don’t even have any superhero things in it. I got a chance to do superheroes, and I fell back on a bunch of people sitting around talking about their feelings. Maybe no matter what, I can’t shake that inclination. ” [The A.V. Club]

Creators | Ethan Nicolle talks about Axe Cop, his collaboration with his 6-year-old brother Malachi. [io9.com]

Creators | Shanghai artist Liu Chong, who uses the pen name L-Dart, discusses breaking into Japan’s competitive manga market with Killin-ji. [Reuters]

Pop culture | William Hollingsworth looks at the influence of Japan’s kawaii (“cute”) culture in England. [The Japan Times]

Wonder Woman #122

Passings | Veteran inker Mike Esposito, who teamed with childhood friend and frequent collaborator Ross Andru on such DC Comics titles as Action Comics, Wonder Woman and Metal Men, passed away Sunday at age 83. To conceal his Marvel work from DC, Esposito used the pseudonym Mickey Demeo, inking John Romita Sr. on The Amazing Spider-Man and Jack Kirby on The Hulk. Andru later joined him at Marvel on Spider-Man. [Mark Evanier]

Publishing | Kuwaiti entrepreneur Naif al-Mutawa, whose Muslim-superhero comic The 99 recently met with absurd, manufactured controversy, is profiled just as DC Comics prepares to debut a crossover with the Justice League: “It seems likely that a media firestorm is brewing. On forums last week, DC comics faced accusations of ‘Muslim pandering’ and ‘treachery,’ but that’s the salient feature of The 99, not just that they’re superheroes from four continents fighting crime wherever they find it, but that they – and Mutawa – have to fight enemies and overcome resistance from both the east and the west. ‘One of the tough things is that people always think I’m working for someone else. In America, it’s like, “Sure, they’re private investors.” Back home, they think I’m working for the Americans and here they think I’m working for some sort of Islamic agenda’.” [The Observer]

Publishing | Calvin Reid looks at upcoming changes at long-troubled e-book publisher Wowio.com. [Publishers Weekly]

Disney DigiComics

Publishing | Dario Di Zanni of Disney Publishing Worldwide discusses Disney DigiComics. [ICv2.com]

Conventions | Robert Meeks previews the second Long Beach Comic Con, which kicks off Friday at the Long Beach Convention Center. [Press-Telegram]

Retailing | Chris Randazzo, owner of Galaxy Comics Games and More in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, is profiled. [Wausau Daily Herald]

Creators | Alex Robinson talks about the upcoming re-release of his 2005 graphic novel Tricked: “It’s interesting to me because I feel like Tricked has always kind of been the overlooked child of the three graphic novels I’ve done. I mean, it’s going to a third printing, so it’s not as if it bombed or anything, but with Too Cool being the most recent book and Box Office Poison kind of being the one that everyone knows, Tricked is kind of the Jan Brady of the set.” [Graphic Novel Reporter]

Creators | Inker Ray Snyder is profiled as part of a series about Macon, Georgia, as a hub for comic artists. [Macon Telegraph]

Comics | Dareh Gregorian spotlights the debut this week of Superman: Earth One, the graphic novel by J. Michael Straczynski and Shane Davis: “In Superman: Earth One, the Man of Steel is a conflicted 20-year-old who’s trying to find his way in the world, bearing more of a resemblance to Robert Pattinson from the Twilight movies than Christopher Reeve from the Superman films.” [New York Post]

Comics | Grey Scherl looks at 10 Marvel and DC series that haven’t been collected. [Inside Pulse]

Comics | Ben Morse recommends superhero comics for beginners. [The Faster Times]

Legal

Legal | A former middle-school teacher in Idaho has pleaded guilty to possession of obscene visual depictions of the sexual abuse of children for downloading 70 cartoon images of minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct. Many of the images depicted characters from The Simpsons. Boise resident Steve Kutzner, 33, faces up to 10 years in federal prison, supervised release of up to three years, a maximum fine of $250,000 and … a special assessment of $100. Sentencing is set for Jan. 5. [Idaho Statesman, press release]

New York Comic Con | Tom Spurgeon settles in for a lengthy, bulleted look at the news and announcements from last weekend’s big convention. Gareth-Michael Skarka, meanwhile, offers commentary on the digital-comics arena. [The Comics Reporter, The Designer Monologues]

New York Comic Con | Ruth La Ferla uses the convention as a chance to look at the intersection of comic books and fashion, spotlighting both cosplayers and noted designers. [The New York Times]

Midtown Comics

Retailing | Chuck O’Donnell profiles Gerry Gladston, co-owner of Midtown Comics in New York City, and notes a third location will open on Nov. 3 near Wall Street. [NorthJersey.com]

Retailing | Elizabeth City, North Carolina, comics store Earth 383 will celebrate its eighth anniversary on Saturday with game tournaments, a sale and a cookout. [The Daily Advance]

Events | Two looks at “LitGraphic: The World of the Graphic Novel,” an exhibit running through Jan. 30 at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. [The Morning Call, CentralJersey.com]

Lynda Barry

Creators | Lynda Barry is interviewed ahead of her appearance this weekend at the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival. [Straight.com]

Creators | Eva Volin posts a video interview with Terry Moore from New York Comic Con. [Good Comics for Kids]

Creators | Hideous Energy posts a podcast interview with Alex Robinson. [Hideous Energy]

Creators | Bestselling author Diana Gabaldon discusses her wildly popular Outlander series, and the spinoff graphic novel The Exile. [Charleston Daily Mail]

Comics | The copy of Superman #703 in the photo accompanying this brief article about the Man of Steel’s visit to Cincinnati bears a $7.99 price tag. The issue, which was released just yesterday, has a $2.99 cover price. Crazy. [Kentucky Post]

A Kidnapped Santa Claus

Late last year, at my pop culture blog, I interviewed Alex Robinson about Too Cool to Be Forgotten. It was a really enjoyable interview (a fellow XTC fan is always a welcome addition to any discussion), so when I found out his new project was adapting L. Frank Baum’s Christmas tale, A Kidnapped Santa Claus, I decided it was time to catch up with him for another discussion.

Tim O’Shea: What was the biggest challenge to expanding the original Baum 10 prose pages to your adaptation’s 60 pages?

Alex Robinson: At first I was thinking that I was going to have to add a lot of material, and since the original story mostly focused on the plot I figured I could beef up the characterizations and try to give the characters a little more depth. It turned out I didn’t really need to add that much, since there’s relatively a lot of plot for such a short story.

The other challenge was deciding how closely I wanted to stick with Baum’s original dialogue and ideas. I wanted to stay true to the source material but I also felt like I had to update it a bit if it was going to resonate with children today.

O’Shea: How much fun and creative freedom did you gain in expanding the story?

Robinson: Since the book is part of a series in which cartoonists adapt classic stories Harper really wanted it to be fairly close to the original, but they also gave me a lot of freedom within that framework. Does make any sense? Aside from beefing up the characterization of the supporting cast (they’re little more than names in the original story) I tinkered around with the ending. I explained to my editor what I was doing and why I thought it should be changed and they were okay with it.

It was actually a lot of fun taking someone else’s story and adapting it. It’s kind of like covering a song in music, I imagine. Without having to worry about the basic structure there wasn’t as much pressure.

O’Shea: How weird is it draw Santa in the middle of the year. Did you have to surround yourself with snow globes every once and awhile to get in the Santa creative mood?

Robinson: It was pretty weird. The funny part is that I started it in October of last year, so to try and get myself in the mood I would put Christmas music on in the background and whatnot, so by the time Christmas actually came I was really, really sick of it! I didn’t actually finish until April, but as the book went on and I got used to drawing the characters and so on it felt just like any other book. When you do comics you have to get used to drawing the same character over and over and over.

O’Shea: Baum’s story was created in early 1904, did you choose to make it a timeless story or did you try to make it modern for the present day kid?.

Robinson: It was a balancing act. One interesting thing about the Baum original is that it was written at a time when Santa’s mythology doesn’t seem to have been canonized–for instance, Santa lives in The Laughing Valley, not the North Pole, and his reindeer don’t fly. As much as I wanted to remain faithful I also didn’t want modern kids to be confused so I kind of glossed over some of the differences (he still lives in Laughing Valley but it’s still snow covered and Christmas-y, so maybe Laughing Valley is at the pole).

I think kids are a bit more sophisticated than they were in Baum’s time–thanks to TV, video games, movies, etc a five year old in 2009 has probably experienced more “stories” than adults did in 1904–so I think it required some updating and altering the dialogue a bit. One thing I wrestled with was the presents. Do I include references to very modern toys like video games which today’s kids would naturally want? The idea of elves building Xboxes or ipods was just too weird so whenever toys are mentioned they’re either classics like bikes and dolls or made up things.

O’Shea: Can you give folks a run-down of some of the major players in the tale, and which ones were you most enjoyed getting to use in the story?

Robinson: Well, like I said, Santa’s helpers in the original story–interestingly, they’re all of different magical races but none of them are elves–were little more than names with maybe one attribute so I had a lot of room to play around with them. The main one is Wisk, is a fairy who’s kind of of Santa’s personal assistant, handling the naughty-nice lists and everything else. She’s kind of the hero of the book, since she takes charge after Santa is kidnapped. In the original story Wisk is a male character but since there were no girls in the story–not even Mrs. Claus, though I included her too–I changed he to a she. She’s helped by Kilter, a pixie–who she has a crush on–and Nuter, a hardworking, grumpy Ryl. He’s sort of a comic relief character.

On the other hand, we also have the daemons who conspire to kidnap Santa: Hatred, Envy and Selfishness. They’re angry that Santa spreads so much happiness so want to ruin Christmas by taking him out of the picture. I wanted them to be bad guys but not so frightening that they’d scare kids so they’re somewhat clownish but hopefully menacing.

All the characters were fun to do. Someone suggested that if the book is a hit I make a series out of it, where the daemons try to ruin other holidays, “An Assaulted Easter Bunny” or “A Stolen Baby New Year” and so on. I’m up for it!

O’Shea: After reading this blog post (The old Christmas switcheroo) I was curious–have you pulled the old switcheroo yet?

Robinson: Haha! No, I haven’t had the courage to put my book in a more prominent location in a bookstore. I think the seven years I spent working at Barnes and Noble have altered my DNA to the point where I cannot purposely put a book somewhere it doesn’t belong. This does not mean I don’t encourage anyone reading this to move the book to the best sellers table, however.

O’Shea: Did you adjust your art style at all for what hopefully may be a whole new audience for your great work–or did you not worry about that when working on the story?

Robinson: I didn’t make any conscious changes regarding the art. Since my other stories all tackle adult situations and have cursing and nudity in them I obviously had to keep in mind that this was aimed at kids (though like a Warner Brothers cartoon I tried to include some jokes that adults would like). I really liked the idea of doing something for kids, since it seems like the books people most fondly recall are books they read as children. I love the idea that in twenty years someone might try to track down the book on ebay or something since they remember reading it as a kid.

O’Shea: Would you like to do more books for kids?

Robinson: Yeah, though I don’t have any particular ideas in mind. The interesting thing about this project is that it’s something I never would’ve thought to do on my own in a million years. Since I don’t have any kids of my own and don’t hang out with kids too much I have a hard time imagining what sort of thing they would like, so I often had to think back to what kind of thing I would’ve liked when I was a kid.

O’Shea: It Books (The HarperCollins Imprint) is a relatively new imprint, how did you score the project?

Robinson: They had come up with the idea of doing this line of cartoonists adapting classic Christmas stories and I was one of the people they approached. I was looking to start a new book but didn’t have any ideas so it seemed like a stroke of luck.

O’Shea: Between your work and Eric Shanower/Skottie Young’s Oz work at Marvel, Baum is a popular comics property these days. If you had the opportunity to adapt Baum again, would you be interested? Did you find you had a newfound understanding of Baum’s writing after this project?

Robinson: I feel kind of sheepish admitting it but I didn’t do a lot of research for the book, in terms of reading Baum. Other than this story I’ve never actually read any of his other work! I think I didn’t want to limit myself by reading other stories or how other people had approached his work. It was only after I was about halfway through the book that I realized that some of the characters and races had actually appeared in other Christmas stories he’d written. The comic-nerd in me was worried that it would violate some sort of Baumverse continuity but I wanted to do the best book I could do without worrying about that. I mentioned some of this on my blog and a Baum fan let me know that he’d read the Oz books a million times and had never even heard of “A Kidnapped Santa Claus” so that put me at ease.
But it definitely opened me up to the idea of doing other adaptations.

O’Shea: Any short wish list for other adaptations you might be open to doing?

Robinson: Nothing readily springs to mind, though I wouldn’t limit it to short stories. Sometimes when I’m stuck for a new book idea I’ll toy with adapting a classic myth or even Shakespeare or some other older material, but never pursued it too seriously. The fact that a publisher approached me with a specific plan in mind definitely helped get the ball rolling.

The fact that I’d never read this story or even heard of it prior to doing the adaptation might’ve helped me in this case since I wasn’t going in with any preconceived notions. Obviously if you’re trying to adapt “Hamlet” you have centuries’ worth of versions to compete with and be compared to.

O’Shea: What’s the next project for you–and what else is on the creative horizon for you?

Robinson: I have started a new book but I’m not really ready to go public on any of the details. I will say it’s shaping up to be very long, and I’d like to serialize it somehow so that people don’t have to wait six years for something new from me. Stay tuned!

O’Shea: In terms of potentially serializing your next project, would you like to do it in a webcomic and/or something for IPhones or Kindle–or is it too early to say what serialization platforms you’re considering?

Robinson: I think I’m still old school enough where my first thought is toward print but it does seem like we’re in the beginning of a digital revolution similar to the one that changed the music industry and it would be foolish to not keep that in mind. I’ve actually been toying with the idea of doing a separate comic specifically for a digital release, but at this point it would be more of side project and I would need to work with someone who understood all the technical stuff. I can’t even figure out photoshop and still do everything in pen and ink.

Ace-Face: The Mod with the Metal Arms

In addition to discussing Ace-Face, we delve into Freddie & Me. But that’s not all, as starting February 17, Dawson is returning to ACT-I-VATE with Jack and Max Escape From the End of Time, a webcomic spinning out of the Ace-Face universe. My thanks to Alex Robinson for facilitating this email interview as well as Dawson for his time and thoughts.

Ace-Face

Tim O’Shea: How much of the Ace-Face book consists of flashbacks to his childhood and how much of is it “present day” adventures?

Mike Dawson: The stories take place in a variety of different times over the course of Ace-Face’s career. A good chunk of the stories happen in close-to present day, but there are a number of flashbacks. We see his origin as a little kid with gigantic metal arms in the 1940’s and 50’s, a little bit of his mod hey-day in the 1960’s, and some of his latter-day adventures as well.

O’Shea: How much of the present day supporting cast are the kids he grew up with? (From the AdHouse PDF preview, I’m really hoping that Sally is still in his life…)

Dawson: Yes, Sally stays in the picture, becoming Ace-Face’s wife, and mother to his son Stuart, who becomes takes the lead in a few of the stories as “The Son of Ace-Face”. The ruffians from the preview, alas, are not seen or heard from again…

O’Shea: What adventure tales or creators inspired Ace-Face?

Dawson: Well, the origin story in the preview was very definitely inspired by The Who, particularly the concept album and film, Quadrophenia. I think there’s definitely a lot of influence from the Marvel and DC comics I read growing up as well. One of the stories is called “Dr. Funhauser’s Haus of Fun”, and my initial inspiration for this was “Arcade” the X-Men villain. He’s a character I first became aware of when he appeared in an early Excalibur comic, the Alan Davis run of which might be one of my favorite superhero serials ever.

O’Shea: This book is a departure from Freddie & Me–how did you choose to pursue this project? Was it an intentional effort to show folks the variety of stories you can tell?

Dawson: Some of the stories (the two that have appeared previously, in Project: Superior and Superior Showcase) I wrote while I was still working on Freddie & Me. The new material is all stuff that I did since completing that book. I really just wanted to create some fun short stories. Fun in all aspects – most definitely I hope they’re fun to read, but they were also a lot of fun to write and draw.

O’Shea: Why did you opt to make your hero a Mod, with an eye for dressing sharp?

Dawson: I just thought it was funny. To be truthful, I don’t think Ace-Face appears in any particularly sharp clothing in any of the stories I presented. It amused me to have him known for being a snappy dresser in his hey-day, but generally skipping a lot of that time-period and focusing more on what happened before and after.

O’Shea: The character got its start in the Project: Superior collection, did you initially plan for it to be a one-shot short story and it grew from there?

Dawson: Pretty much. I hadn’t planned on writing more with the character, but I just got new ideas.

O’Shea: Am I correct in thinking that while it’s an adventure tale, on another level it is also satire of the adventure genre?

Dawson: It’s kind of a satire – I think in all of the Ace-Face stories I’m trying to play around with comic-book violence vs. real-life violence.

O’Shea: How hard is it to try to promote a project as unique as Ace-Face when the sequential art marketplace seems to be redefining itself in many ways on a daily basis?

Dawson: Yeesh, I’m not sure… everything feels a bit out of sorts at the moment. I guess I’m going to find out how well things go. I’m really, really excited to be doing this book with Chris Pitzer at AdHouse. My Freddie & Me experience was great, but since Bloomsbury isn’t traditionally a comics publisher, I sometimes felt a little disconnected from the comics scene. I am really happy to have my book be a part of a full line of great comics and graphic novels this time around.

Freddie & Me

Freddie & Me

O’Shea: I’m not sure if you have read this or not, but in the comments section of Johanna Draper Carlson’s mainly unimpressed response to Freddie & Me, industry veteran Steven Grant weighed in, agreeing with her. We both know not every critic or consumer is going to like one’s work, but I was stupefied by Grant’s line: “I never got the slightest idea from the book that Freddy Mercury and the music of Queen had any more real effect on Dawson’s life than, say, Elton John’s music had on me, aside from being contemporaneous with his youth and giving his relatively ordinary life a marketing hook.” How odd is it when folks shift from assessing your autobiographical work and instead assess your life as “relatively ordinary”? And is it harder to take a negative review of your semi-autobiographical work versus a negative review of another less personal work of yours?

Dawson: It’s a little tough to respond to this, because as much as I disagree with most of the things said in that link, it’s hard to defend your own work without coming off as personally being defensive. That said, I have heard a few times the criticism that the book doesn’t explicitly explain exactly what it is about Queen that I love so much, but I don’t really believe that the person who says that would really like the story all that much more if I did have that information in there.

To keep things fair and balanced, here’s a link to a much more positive take on the book, where the reviewer seemingly appreciates my intentions a little more, in that the Queen obsession, and the “effect” that they had on my life, is really a bit of a McGuffin; moving the plot along, being kind of inconsequential at the end of the day, but allowing me to talk about the things that I really wanted to talk about – which was different aspects of memory itself.

O’Shea: How large is the original art for the Queen Timeline piece that runs at the outset of the book? Of that timelines, which was the hardest cover to draw and how long did that timeline take to draw?

Dawson: Those two spreads were really large. I did them on illustration board 32 inches across and 22 inches high. I had to import them in from the scanner in about six pieces and knit them all together. Both were a little tough – I actually re-did them from scratch at one point. That was a version that I’d drawn early on, and was no longer right for the book as it had turned out. The ones that appear in the book were some of the last things I drew, after the story itself was all complete, and I knew what needed to be in there for sure.

O’Shea: How hard or easy was it to remember aspects of your childhood–I was impressed that you told the tale and your realization (in anticipation of the family’s move to America): “I’ve never met anybody black before”. Was that something you remembered saying, or a conversation moment that one of your family remembered?

Dawson: I definitely remember saying it. It was true. When my Dad first moved to America before the rest of us, I remember asking him on the phone if there were any black people in our new neighborhood, and he said there was one family. I dunno – I’m not sure if it’s weird or not. There are obviously a lot of people of varied ethnicities in England, just maybe not where I lived.

I remember saying almost all of the things in the book. I think everything came back to me slowly, as I worked on the story. I basically started at the beginning and went page by page, so the more time I spent dwelling on my past, the more little tidbits and nuggets sort of floated to the surface.

O’Shea: I was struck how you conceded in telling the string vest tale that upon reflection it’s a story you tell better orally. With that realization, why did you choose to still try to tell that story aspect visually?

Dawson: I included it because it was in a section of the book where I was focusing on those first few years in America. Aside from it being funny (and memorable – that’s a scene that people ask me about a lot), it tied into the theme I was discussing about people being storytellers, and how storytelling defines our senses of ourselves. It’s a story that I thought I’d told to a lot of people in person. Amusingly, in that scene I show myself telling it to my friend Alex and his wife (in the panel they are laughing uproariously at my hilarious recounting). After the book came out, Alex told me I’d never told him that story before in real-life. So there you go: memory definitely isn’t infallible. I know mine isn’t. But maybe he’s the one who forgot.

O’Shea: How much input did Bloomsbury have in editing the book? How many scenes did you end up deleting from the book?

Dawson: At the point I found myself at Bloomsbury the book was essentially written already. It just needed some tightening and tweaking here and there. Cutting parts of the book wasn’t a problem for me. Some major scenes (such as two long sequences featuring Freddie Mercury and Brian May in imagined conversations) had already been axed by me long ago, because I felt like they messed up the flow. I took out another imaged sequence with Andrew Ridgeley talking to a VH1 VJ a few years after Wham!’s breakup, which I do actually kind of wish I’d left in there now.

O’Shea: Speaking of scenes deleted and those left in, what made you want to include the anecdote about the French and Italian individuals fighting on the plane?

Dawson: Well, I thought it was funny, and I thought it was relevant. I think that death (especially fear of dying) is one of the themes running throughout the book. I don’t spend too much time talking explicitly about 9/11 in the story, but it does get mentioned casually quite frequently, as does flying in general. My fear of flying became much more explicit as an adult, and that was a moment that stood out to me.

O’Shea: Writing about your fear of flying, in that process did that help ease your fear of flying somewhat in the long run?

Dawson: No, not really. It ebbs and flows. At the moment I’m going through a “too afraid to get on a plane” phase, which stinks because my wife is urging me to plan a trip to Florida soon so we can introduce her grandparents to our baby. The last time I was on a plane was last Summer, coming back from HeroesCon in North Carolina. I was on the plane with Heidi MacDonald from The Beat, comic book writer Vito Delsante, and a few other notable New York cartoonist types. The flight was horrendous. I wonder if the plane had gone down, which of us comic folks would have been remembered. Someone would get to be the Buddy Holly and someone would get stuck having to be The Big Bopper.

O’Shea: For me, as much as the story is about you and Freddie, I also think it’s about the loss of your grandparents on two levels–1) Moving away from them; 2) Their passing years later.

Dawson: Yeah, as I said, a lot of the book is about death. I’ve spoken elsewhere about how I arranged the book to match the structure of the song Bohemian Rhapsody. I also borrowed a lot of the themes from the song – I think the line “I don’t wanna die” is represented in Freddie & Me many, many times. I practically say the line at one point, whilst on a plane, but in a larger sense, I much as admit that the act of going to such great lengths to record the events of my own life, is really just a reaction to a fear of mortality.

O’Shea: What has been your family’s reaction to the book (be as general or specific as you like)?

Dawson: I think it’s been extremely positive in general. I did recently get chastised by my Granny on my father’s side for not including that side of the family in the book more, but aside from that, I think my parents and siblings are happy with it, and generally OK with the way I portrayed them.

Jack and Max Escape from the End of Time

O’Shea: What can you tell folks about your upcoming project for ACT-I-VATE?

Dawson: There are two short stories in the Ace-Face collection featuring two super-powered siblings, named Jack and Max. Jack is a fifth grader with the power of telekinesis, and his younger brother is in 3rd grade, and can teleport, like Nightcrawler from the X-Men. My story for ACT-I-VATE  is called “Jack and Max Escape From the End of Time”. The story picks up on a concept introduced in one of the short stories, which is about how they have a father who is a Time-Lord, who punishes the boys for misbehaving by jumping back in time to before they were bad.

O’Shea: How much are you adjusting your narrative for the webcomics format?

Dawson: Well, for one, the comic will be in color, which is something new for me. My goal will be to post segments each week which move the story along in a satisfying way. Serializing a story like this is also new for me, so I’m quite interested to see how the webcomics format effects the storytelling. I’m really excited about the whole thing.

O’Shea: This marks a return to ACT-I-VATE for you, given that a couple of years back you did a story involving the characters from your past project, Gabagool! In what ways have you improved as a storyteller since your last ACT-I-VATE stint?

Dawson: Well, for one, my head is more in the game this time around. I was flattered and honored to be asked to be a part of AIV back in the day, but unfortunately at the time I was too absorbed in the writing of Freddie & Me to give my web-comic the effort I should have. I’m not sure in which ways I have specifically improved, except that one would hope to keep getting better after just having drawn so many more pages between then and now.

O’Shea: What attracted you to working with the ACT-I-VATE gang in the first place?

Dawson: I’m excited to have my comic included in amongst so many other great ongoing serials. I think it’s great that Dino and crew have not only kept their webcomics portal going, but kept it growing, adding new great comics all the time. I’m really happy to be posting my comic at a site that’s only getting better and better, and shows no signs of going anywhere anytime soon.

Ten Against the World by Scott Morse

As Chris goes through the 2009 catalogs of various publishers like Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly, I thought I’d share a few update on future projects that creators have mentioned on their blogs. First, over on his blog Red Window, Scott Morse says he’s working on a follow-up to The Ancient Book of Myth and War called The Ancient Book of Sex and Science. He’s also got another Magic Pickle book coming out in 2009, as well as what sounds like a gigantic bunch of awesomeness, a ’50s monster book called Ten Against the World:

*TEN AGAINST THE WORLD is in the works, I’m pleased to officially announce. It’s a 160 (or so) page Kirby/Toth-inspired monster comic set in the 1950′s, lots of comic book fun I’m certain Wertham would love. There’s a teaser above. It’s being produced entirely in Photoshop on my Cintique, no pencils, just straight digital black, white, and blue, as an experiment in economics and speed. I’m about 40 pages in at this point. Keep your eyes and ears open for this one, as it may actually hit initially in online installments.

Next, Alex Robinson’s Too Cool To Be Forgotten has been popping up on year-end best of lists here and there (Tim O’Shea had it on his), and over on his LiveJournal he talks about the project he’s just starting starring Santa Claus:

I seem to have finished my script for A Kidnapped Santa Claus. I say “seem” because I will undoubtedly fine tune it as I go.
This is the first time in my entire life I’ve scripted out an entire story from beginning to end, and I gotta say, I don’t know how you people do it. It was an ordeal! Trying to create scenes, just picturing them in my head, only with a keyboard and no visual component was a real challenge. Ideally, we’ll see this paying off with the drawing phase of the book going a lot faster (I hope so since my deadline is closer than I would like!) and hopefully it will all have been worth it.

Amazing Joy Buzzards

Artist Dan Hipp notes that the next Amazing Joy Buzzards book he’s doing with Mark Andrew Smith was due in 2008, but as you might have noticed hasn’t come out yet:

Originally solicited for last month, the deadline came and went, with the book unfinished. It was well on it’s way to completion, but life decided it was time to get in the way, and production on the book has slowed. All I can say is that it’s awesome, it will still be finished, but I can’t tell you when. Truly, I am sorry, as that book has a slice of me sewn into the binding, and it saddens me that I can’t get it to you sooner.

He also says he’s working on the third volume of Gyakushu!, the first two volumes of which were published by Tokyopop before their implosion. He says it’ll likely appear online first, but print copies will appear … in Italy.

Lastly, it isn’t exactly an unannounced project, but Neil Gaiman shares some really nice Andy Kubert artwork from their Batman two-parter over on his blog. Be sure to read all the way to the bottom …