At Chasing Ray, Colleen Mondor talks with Eddie Campbell about The Black Diamond Detective Agency and graphic novels in general:
“I think that for the ‘graphic novel’ (a term I no longer have any affection for) to advance, it must evolve into something else. The comic book field has arrived at a state in which the readers are mostly adult, and the writers and artists are attempting to graft what they imagine to be adult sensibilities onto an immature medium. That is the prevailing mentality, and within that milieu, works of real value are unlikely to be adequately recognized. But they are also unlikely to be recognized outside of it, where a crippling conservatism prevails among the establishment, as we saw last year when Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese was up for a book prize in the young reader’s category. Young readers, who are much less conservative than adults who would speak on their behalf, must have wondered what that was all about.”
