Originally published in The Comics Journal #164, November 1993 {mosimage}I was first introduced to Jim Woodring by Gil Kane in 1986. At the time, Jim was a storyboard artist at the animation studio Ruby-Spears, where he worked with Gil. Gil, who can be a relentless proponent of discoveries, insisted that I meet Jim, whom he told me was a great artist as well as a great human being. Against my own better judgment — why would a great artist, much less a great human being, work for a second-rate animation studio, I wondered — I got together with Jim and…
Interview – Peter Bagge (1993)
Originally published in The Comics Journal #159, 1993 {mosimage}Two days after his 35th birthday, Carole Sobocinski interviewed Peter Bagge. SOBOCINSKI: So the age of 35 is generally considered to be a midpoint in life where we reach a lot of crucial decisions about who we are and where we’re going. With that in mind, have you noticed any changes in terms of your outlook in life, your approach to life? Are you satisfied with where you are, where you’re going? BAGGE: Yes, to the latter. As far as changing outlooks on life in general, it seems to me that as…
Terr’ble Thompson – The Musical and Rarities
{mosimage} It was early 1955. The New York record producer, Arthur Shimkin, for whom I’d done a couple of animated musical shorts when I was directing the UPA/New York animation studio, heard of my developing newspaper strip and asked me to come up with a script for a musical production of it for a Simon & Shuster “Little Golden Record,” one of those little 6-inch yellow plastic discs made for kiddie record players. Not a big deal, yet Shimkin brought in truly top talent for the date. He got the pop American composer Alec Wilder, and Broadway lyricist Marshall Barer…
Artist Bio – Jim Woodring
{mosimage}Jim Woodring’s cartoons chart a course through some of the most surreal imagery ever seen in any artistic medium, drawing visions from the realms of the subconscious to create a graphic world of dreams. But while his work may speak in the language of dreams, Woodring’s life has often led him into nightmare territory. As a child, Woodring was plagued by both schoolmates and by waking nightmares accompanied by “voices” — a condition which would haunt him through childhood and much of his adult life. After enduring drug and alcohol abuse and homelessness, he worked as an animator for several…
Artist Bio – Robert Williams
In the late 20th and 21st century diverse forms of commonplace and popular art appeared to be coalescing into a formidable faction of new painted realism. The phenomenon owed its genesis to a number of factors. The new school of imagery was a product of art that didn’t fit comfortable into the accepted definition of fine art. It embraced some of the figurative graphics that formal art academia tended to reject: comic books, movie posters, trading cards, surfer art, hot rod illustration, to mention a few. This alternative art movement found its most congealing participant in one of America’s most…
Artist Bio – Lewis Trondheim
{mosimage}Lewis Trondheim was born in 1964 and spent his childhood in the french town of Fontainebleau. In 1987 he met Jean-Christophe Menu, an aspiring cartoonist who turned him on to the world of comics. In 1990, together with four other cartoonists, Menu and Trondheim co-founded L’Association, a publishing company which would go on to publish some of the most revolutionary alternative European comics of the decade. Trondheim has appropriated the classic funny-animal tradition of cartoonists like Carl Barks, Walt Kelly, and Stan Sakai and given it a fresh contemporary spin with his “McConey” stories. The dialogue is consistently witty, and…
Artist Bio – Carol Swain
{mosimage}Born in 1962, London, Carol Swain was brought up in Wales, the population of the village being an uneasy mix of mean Baptist hysteric (© Hunter S Thompson) and drop-out hippie. A place deemed so evil by travelling evangelist missionaries, they condemned it as a modern Sodom and Gomorrah. She left Sodom and Gomorrah to go to art school where she studied painting. In 1989 she began self-publishing her comic Way Out Strips, which was later picked up by Fantagraphics Books. Since then she has completed two graphic novels and has contributed numerous comics stories to anthologies worldwide. She lives…
Artist Bio – Roger Langridge
{mosimage}Roger Langridge was born in New Zealand in 1967. He decided to become a cartoonist when he was six years old; for some reason it stuck (perhaps because it was more attainable than his previous career goal of “mad scientist”). Since 1990, when he moved to London to pursue his career, Roger Langridge has worked for most of the major comic publishers in the English-speaking world, as well as sustaining a parallel career as an illustrator. His self-published title “Fred the Clown” (collected into one volume by Fantagraphics in 2004) has been nominated for Eisner, Harvey, Ignatz and Reuben Awards….
Artist Bio – Kaz
{mosimage}Kaz was born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1959. During the 1980s he studied comics under Art Spiegelman and contributed to the early issues of Raw magazine, eventually releasing his first anthology collection, the oversized (and now out of print and highly sought-after) Buzzbomb, with Fantagraphics Books. In 1991 he started the weekly self-syndicated comic strip: Underworld. Fantagraphics began collecting Underworld into book form in April of 1995, with five collections released to date. Sidetrack City and other Tales, a collection of longer comic strips, was published by Fantagraphics in 1996. The Underworld comic strip has been nominated for a…
Artist Bio – Jason
{mosimage}The Norwegian cartoonist Jason combines a poker-faced minimalist anthropomorphic style with more than a passing nod to the “clear-line” ethos of Hergé. As he has shown in a series of acclaimed graphic novels, this seemingly limited approach has proven amazingly versatile, allowing Jason to create gag comedy (Meow, Baby!), romantic melodramas (Tell Me Something), dramas (Hey, Wait…), and genuine thrillers (the period detective novel The Iron Wagon) — often without even the benefit of words, and using a stylishly minimalist color palette to boot. Jason won the Norwegian “Sproing” Award for “Best Norwegian Comic Book” twice, in 1995 and 2000….
