Second post in as many days about Larry Young’s upcoming The Black Diamond, but I wanted to point you in the direction of this PopSyndicate interview because of the following quote:
[B]ack in September of 2001, [Young's wife, and AiT/PlanetLar co-publisher] Mimi had travelled to Boston for a business trip, and ended up stranded a whole continent away from home and hearth when they shut down the commercial airlines. I very much remember telling her to grab one of her co-workers, a good pal of ours, and get in her rental car and just start driving west, because in those early hours, nobody knew what was going to happen. Just get in the car, and go.
That became our marketing tagline for The Black Diamond, as a little nod from me to Mimi and our pal Floz. JUST GET IN THE CAR, AND GO. And the two of them did, God bless ‘em, drove from Boston to Des Moines, Iowa, before they hopped a flight there back to San Francisco a few days later. But they had an adventure, on the road, and it made me think: if my wife was on the East Coast and I was on the West, and she needed me, toot sweet, I wouldn’t hesitate to go get her. Have an adventure, as she is hers, meet up, and go home and live happily ever after. And, no kidding, that’s pretty much the plot of The Black Diamond in a sentence. There’re more explosions and quips and less politics and tragedy, than the real-world thing back then, but there you go.
You could say I’m a dreamer — but I’m not the only one — but there’s something really romantic about that line about “if my wife was on the East Coast and I was on the West, and she needed me, toot sweet, I wouldn’t hesitate to go get her.” I nominate Lar for the title of comics’ least-known softie.
March 20th, 2007 at 11:25 am
Like I said, Black Diamond’s preview one-shot really evokes the “hey, that’s a pretty neat idea” of street level 70s and 80s sci-fi like Damnation Alley, Death Race 2000, or The Last Chase, which makes it very appealing to me.