Category: Interviews

Smash Pages Q&A: Robin Galante

The San Francisco-based artist discusses her work for the podcast ‘Nocturne,’ ‘The Bold Italic’ and more.

Robin Galante is a San Francisco-based artist whose work I first noticed as part of the great podcast Nocturne, where she drew the show’s logo and makes an illustration for each episode. Last year she published two visual essays in The Bold Italic, and continues to post work on Twitter and Instagram.

One of her biggest subjects is her neighborhood and more broadly, the city of San Francisco. Galante depicts the ways that the city is changing, and in documenting it is celebrating what is there and what we need to fight for to make urban life worth living. We spoke recently about her work

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Smash Pages Q&A: Gengorah Tagame

Alex Dueben goes back to the vault to share an interview with the legendary creator from 2017 on ‘My Brother’s Husband.’

Gengoroh Tagame is a comics legend, though many fans around the world may not know his work. He has long been acclaimed and beloved for his series of gay erotic comics, something that he’s achieved more attention for in recent years here in the U.S. with the publication of The Passion of Gegoroh Tagame and other books. His most recent project is the award-winning My Brother’s Husband, which after being released in hardcover in two volumes, is available now in an oversized paperback.

The book tells the story of Yaichi, a divorced father in suburban Tokyo who is visited by the widower of his twin brother, Ryoji. Mike wants to know and understand his late husband’s family, and Yaichi’s daughter is eager to, but what follows is a thoughtful meditation on prejudice, gender, conformity and identity. It is a hopeful and moving story about family life, masterfully told by one of the great cartoonists of his generation. At one point in the interview I mentioned the late Robert Mapplethorpe, an artist who remains beloved and perhaps best known for his erotic work, but who was a great portrait photographer with a gift for capturing people. Tagame has spent his career working as an artist, but while most straight people might be able to simply say that he was a great draftsman, he’s much more than that. What has made him great is his skill at body language, at conveying subtlety, depicting hidden or buried emotion. This is a project where he is putting those skills to work in a different way, and one that will hopefully introduce him to even larger audience.

I had the opportunity to interview Tagame in 2017, when the first volume was released in North America, although the article was never published. The collected paperback edition of My Brother’s Husband comes out today from Pantheon Books, and I’m happy to show this conversation with one of the world’s great cartoonists.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Niki Smith

The creator of ‘The Deep and Dark Blue’ discusses the graphic novel, its main characters, reversing tropes, the color blue and not owning a pencil.

Niki Smith’s second graphic novel, The Deep and Dark Blue, is a departure from her first book Crossplay. Blue, out now from Hachette, is a middle grade story of twin princes who, after a coup, have to hide out as girls in The Communion of Blue, an all-female magical order based around weaving and spinning and the magical properties of the color blue. The book plays with the trope of gender bending that has been popular for centuries, but for one of the twins, living as a girl isn’t an annoying burden, but offers her the chance to live as her true self.

The book is also a great medieval adventure as two sheltered children are given a crash course in the world around them that involves politics, conspiracies and magic. The book itself is designed and colored in a way that practically jumps off the page. Smith and I have talked before, and I was thrilled that we had the chance to discuss Grayce and Hawke, the color blue and not owning a pencil.

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Make some noise: Editor Erin Bried shares how ‘Noisemakers’ came together

The founder and editor-in-chief of Kazoo Magazine discusses her first foray into comics anthologies.

Four years ago, Erin Bried made history with Kazoo Magazine, the highest-funded journalism campaign on Kickstarter ever. Envisioned as a way to “celebrate girls for being smart, strong, fierce and true to themselves,” the quarterly magazine went on to gain fans and win awards, including the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2019.

In creating Kazoo, Bried also became something else — a comics editor. Each issue of Kazoo features a comic strip by a different female creator, celebrating the life of a woman who has made history. Those comics helped jumpstart Bried’s latest project — an anthology collecting similar comics by a host of talented creators. Noisemakers: 25 Women Who Raised Their Voices & Changed the World arrived in stores today, featuring comics by, among others, Emil Ferris, Lucy Knisley, Lucy Bellwood, Maris Wicks and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, whose strip about Hallie Daggett, the first woman hired as a fire lookout by the United States Forest Service, can be seen below.

It’s an impressive line-up of talent, and Bried took some time to answer my questions about how it all came together.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Malaka Gharib

The creator of ‘I Was Their American Dream’ discusses zine culture, being creative every day and more.

Malaka Gharib has been making comics and zines for years now, including The Runcible Spoon, a zine about food and fantasy she’s been making since 2010. Last year her first book I Was Their American Dream was released, looking at growing up as a Filipino-Egyptian in the United States and exploring questions of race, identity and belonging in different ways. 

Gharib has an active and entertaining Twitter and Instagram presence where she’s regularly making art, putting together things like a “5 minute zine” or other small projects. In her day job, Gharib is a writer and editor at NPR in Washington, D.C. She recently made an episode of the podcast Life Kit, about weaving art into your everyday life. We spoke recently about the book, zine culture and trying to make one creative thing a day.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Sophie Campbell

The writer and artist of IDW’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles discusses what she has planned for the series and more.

Sophie Campbell has established herself as one of the great comics voices of her generation. From her dynamic artwork that redefined Jem and the Holograms and Glory, to the seven volume series Wet Moon that she wrote and drew, to the science fiction superhero saga Shadoweyes, Campbell has built a unique body of work and in 2020, she’s trying something different.

Though Campbell has previously written and drawn Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics over the years, she took over writing and drawing the series with issue #101. With issue #102 out in stores this week, we spoke recently about what she has planned for the series, the new status quo she’s overseeing and her journey from fan to creator.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Ray Fawkes

The creator of ‘One Soul’ and ‘Possessions’ discusses the process of creating ‘In the Flood,’ his latest release from comiXology Originals.

Ray Fawkes is the writer of a long list of comics series including Constantine, Wolverines, Batman Eternal and Gotham by Midnight, but for many of us, no matter how many comics he writes, he will always be the cartoonist behind a long run of graphic novels and comics series including One Soul, Underwinter, Intersect, Possessions and The People Inside. He’s a creator who seems to effortlessly move between forms and approaches and genres

His new book is In the Flood. A digital comic that’s out now from comiXology Originals, Fawkes made the book with Lee Loughridge and Thomas Mauer, and though it’s hard to talk about the book involving a couple separated by a flood without giving some of the story away, it very much fits in with Fawkes’ other comics which he’s written and drawn. I spoke with Fawkes recently about how the book required a different way to work, how having a messy studio helps him to craft order on the page and his drawing practice.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Bryan Caplan

The writer and professor who “say things that a lot of people think are crazy” discusses his latest project, the graphic novel “Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration.”

Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University and the author of books like The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have Kids and The Case Against Education. He’s a blogger at EconLog, has contributed to Freakonomics and is affiliated with the Mercatus Center and the Cato Institute.

Caplan is also the author with Zach Weinersmith of the book Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. Simply stating that it’s a book promoting the idea of open borders will be shocking (or offensive) to many people, but through a series of reports, analyses and thought experiments, the book looks at multiple moral, legal and logistical questions around immigration. Caplan admitted that he writes books that “say things that a lot of people think are crazy” and this book manages to make this argument through a deft use of the comics medium, which will leave readers saying, “Maybe this isn’t such a crazy idea.”

It’s a startling and thoughtful book that I couldn’t stop thinking about after reading it, and Caplan was kind enough to answer a few questions about comics, economics and why the late Milton Friedman was wrong.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Aude White

The illustrator and cartoonist discusses her latest comic for The Believer, her day job (which she loves) and more.

Aude White may spend much of her time working in communications for New York Magazine, but the illustrator and cartoonist has a long list of credits she’s accumulated over the past few years, in addition to the work she posts on her own Instagram. From The Believer to Outside, The HotPod newsletter to The New York Times Book Review to The Cut to Vox, she’s managed to establish her own voice and style.

Her comics are especially personal works that manage to gain their poignancy by the ways that she draws connections between people and objects and places. Not by how they define us or describe us, but by the ways that we invest them with meaning, often at a cost.

White said that she fancied herself a poet in college, and though she laughed at that ambition today, the turns of phrase in her comics, the ways that she draws connections between people and places and objects, reframing and recontextualizing those relationships in different ways, show that poetic sensibility at work. In her new comic The Toothbrush Dilemma, which is in the December 2019/January 2020 issue of The Believer, on stands now, White tells the story of a relationship and a toothbrush. We spoke recently about that comic and her work.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Danny Fingeroth

The writer and editor discusses his unauthorized biography of ‘the most famous person in comics.’

Danny Fingeroth has been working in comics for decades. A longtime editor at Marvel, Byron Preiss and Visionary Media, Fingeroth wrote comics like Darkhawk, Dazzler, Venom: Deathtrap – The Vault and Deadly Foes of Spider-Man, and wrote nonfiction books including Superman on the Couch and Disguised as Clark Kent. He’s also known to a lot of convention goers as one of the people who runs a lot of panels — interviewing and celebrating the creators who helped to invent comics at dozens of labels across the country. At the end of 2019 he came out with his biggest book to date, A Marvelous Life: The Amazing Story of Stan Lee. 

The biography of the late Stan Lee is unauthorized but affectionate, and tries to capture the man that Fingeroth got to know later in his life with the young man who has been written about at length. After reading the book, I asked Fingeroth a few questions about the project and how it fits in with his other work, including serving as chair of Will Eisner Week.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Steven Scott

The co-author of ‘They Called Us Enemy’ discusses the project, working with George Takei, his future plans and more.

When They Called Us Enemy was released this summer, it was quickly named one of the best graphic novels of the year by those who read it. George Takei, the actor and activist, has received much of the attention, and for good reason. This is his story, about how he and his family – and more than 100,000 other Japanese-Americans were interned by the American government. In recent years the actor, known best as Star Trek’s Sulu, has become best known as an activist for LGBTQ rights, but recently he has spent a great deal of time and energy to educating people about what happened in those years, both to help American citizens more fully understand our own history, but also to ensure that it never happens again.

Takei made the book with Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott and Harmony Becker. Scott may not be known to comics readers, but he’s been working in the comics industry for years and it’s how I first got to know him years ago. They Called Us Enemy is his first graphic novel, and I reached out to Scott to talk about how he ended up here, working with Takei and what he wants to do next.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Fieldmouse Press

The four men behind the nonprofit publisher and comics criticism site discuss the initiative.

Ryan Carey, Rob Clough, Daniel Elkin and Alex Hoffman are four of the major comics critics in the U.S. right now. In Enemies of the State, Four Color Apocalypse, High-Low, Sequential State and Your Chicken Enemy, along with their writing in various other outlets, each has established a reputation as a thoughtful, insightful critic.

In comics, criticism tends to be maligned, or seen as a stepping stone to becoming a comics professional, but anyone who spends time with serious criticism – and the work of all four definitely are – can see the love for the medium, the passion for creators, the obsession with ideas and formalism. Good critics offer new ways to think about art, can introduce us to new work and inspire not just readers but creators.

It was announced recently that the four have teamed up to establish Fieldmouse Press, and in January 2020 they’re launching SOLRAD, which is just the very first aspect of the nonprofit organization. I reached out and was thrilled that they were willing to talk about criticism, their ambitions, and what people can look forward to next year.

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