Larry Fondation
Talking Comics with Tim: Gary Phillips
Bicycle Cop Dave
Gary Phillips‘ new story on gentrification, Bicycle Cop Dave, which he is writing (with Manoel Magalhães as artist) is unlike any other webcomic I have read (and for those of you reading this interview at work, it is a mature webcomic [meaning not safe for work {NSFW}]). Phillips, a longtime community activist and successful mystery novelist, has teamed with FourStory (a housing advocacy site “supporting fair living conditions for everyone”) on this project. I interviewed Phillips a number of years ago in connection with Angeltown at Vertigo, so it was a pleasure to catch up with him through this email interview.
Tim O’Shea: Given the nature of Bicycle Cop Dave, would it be fair to say you are a community activist on some level?
Gary Phillips: Yes, as Sarah Palin tried to punk on last year, I was once a diligent and dreaded community organizers. I’ve also been a business rep for a union, the political director for an electoral campaign and the state director for a political action committee. Certainly in some of my prose work, from my first book Violent Spring, a mystery set after the ’92 riots (or civil unrest depending on where you are on the political spectrum) to my recent Freedom’s Fight, about black soldiers in WWII, a certain amount of social-political stuff infuses my work.
But, and this is a big, but as it were, there’s a reason I mostly write crime and mystery stories and not tired-ass, long-winded nonfiction polemics. I like my characters twisted, bent and strange doing all sorts of mischief, and not trotting out their soap boxes to jump on to give a spiel and harangue.
- November 30, 2009 @ 02:08 PM by Tim O'Shea