Toronto’s Eye Weekly devotes its cover to this weekend’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival, and Paul Pope, who discusses, among other things, his recent Batman: Year 100:
“It was a little subtle,” he jokes. “They were like, ‘What would you do if we gave you Batman?’” The answer: take a mysterious figure who seems more like a silent-movie vampire (complete with removable fangs) than the World’s Greatest Detective and pit him against an authoritarian dystopia. “A lot of my friends here are performers,” Pope explains, “and I’m really fascinated by this idea of set-up/clean-up. You know, Batman in a sense is a production – to be able to pull off a superhero, that’s gonna require a team of people. So that’s why I wanted to go with the whole superstition angle. I think the best thing to play off high-tech is superstition.” The artist’s trademark libertarian themes were apparent, but he’s trying to express them more subtly: “If you’ve read any of my early stuff, I think I come from a much more earnest and very didactic side of expressing ideas.” He now favours the playful approach: when the sinister, collectivist “bugfaces” who rule Mars ban all cartoons, THB’s teenage heroine HR responds with the rallying cry “WALT DISNEY!”
The paper’s coverage also includes an interview with writer Jim Munroe.
(Via Christopher Butcher)
August 17th, 2007 at 11:16 am
Oh, hey, Jim Munroe! Munroe wrote an excellent superhero novel called ‘Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask’ which I recommend to you all. (I think it might be downloadable free from his website, come to think of it.)