I’m planning to post about pleasure and reading, although I hope not to reignite the great reading debate of last fall, but tonight has been given over to simpler pleasures like gin and Gadamer and I won’t be finished with that until tomorrow. As an aside, though, I have decided I think it’s hilarious that people will say that a Batman characterization takes them out of the story in a situation where (and I don’t actually recall if this had been the case with JLA Classified as much as with Marvel books) any given pageturn could lead to loud, ugly, often sexist ads rather than a continuation of the story from the preceding page. I read some single issues last night and remembered why Steven and I are evil people who wait for trades.
But enough of that, because if I hide my point any farther down it won’t get read. At any rate, here’s the scoop. I did my first interview last fall and enjoyed the fun and the stress of it and would like to have another go. I’m not trying to dredge up new comics creators, but instead merge this interest with another one, philosophy of blogging. So if you’re a comics blogger and would like to answer questions from me about your work and your authorial intent and goals and blogging ideals and whatnot, let me know. These things take time and I wouldn’t do more than one a month or so, but I’d like to try to address some of the perspectives we have around here in more detail and depth. Plus I’m interested and I think it would be fun, which is decidedly a bonus.
I’m not sure where I’m going to draw the lines on who counts or anything like that, and if 500 bloggers show up from the ether and want to be interviewed, I’m not claiming I’ll get to them all, but I’m also not expecting anything like that. I plan to follow the same system I did in interviewing Mal, reading as much of my subject’s work as I can and then shooting off questions that interest me. I imagine this will seem awfully incestuous to people who don’t like blogging about blogs, but I don’t plan to take that criticism to heart because I think there’s a lot of space for anthropology of comics blogs and I’ve been wanting to move in that direction for a very long time. This is just a step and I’ll see where (if anywhere) it goes.
Bryan Lee O'Malley says:
I did my first face-to-face interview recently, with this guy Guy, and it should run in that magazine (and on that website) two weeks from today. I probably came across like a complete idiot, but his interviews are sort of just articles with loosely paraphrased “quotes”, I think. He didn’t record and it won’t be transcribed, I should say.
— 14 January 2005 at 5:20 am (Permalink)
Rose says:
I think I’d be paranoid knowing that all sorts of inaccurate quotes were going to be attributed to me publicly, but I guess that didn’t keep me from talking to the campus newspaper when necessary and since then I’ve managed to keep out of positions that would allow me to do so. At least (unlike the campus newspaper) he’s likely to be smart enough and a skilled enough listener not to consistently come up with some opposite of what you said for every quote, but I guess a policy like that generates plenty of mail or something. In the few issues I’ve read, The Eye seems to do a decent job, and I would look forward to reading your interview regardless of that.
Mostly unrelated to that, I’m curious whether people will decide not to participate in interviews because I’m the sort of writer who was able to use “pleasure” twice in one sentence without performing some sort of ritualized self-mutilating punishment afterwards. I respect them.
— 14 January 2005 at 11:39 am (Permalink)