A couple of items ran late last week over on Comic Book Resources that I wanted to call your attention to. The first is an interview with Wiley Miller, creator of the daily Non Sequitur comic strip and the children’s book The Extraordinary Adventures of Ordinary Basil:
You’ve been instrumental in changing how Sunday comics are colored and I was hoping you could talk about why you pushed that and what the difference is for you, as a creator, but also a reader?
I absolutely hated how Sunday comics were colored, in that old manner of spot color. Newspapers have been using process color for photography and other art throughout the newspaper business since the mid-’70s, when I began as a staff artist for the Greensboro Daily News in North Carolina. I had been using process color for years and I could never understand why it wasn’t used in the most logical place, the Sunday color comics. So in 1995 I pursued it in the simplest manner — I asked. Much to my surprise no one had ever even asked about using it, so it never changed. So along with the late Tim Rosenthal at American Color, we set out to change the look of the Sunday comics. You can read about it in more detail in my book, “The Non Sequitur Sunday Color Treasury.”
Next is a conversation with Bill Willingham and James Jean about Fables:
James Jean, who has produced the covers for all 60-odd issues of “Fables,” first met Willingham six years ago when the series began, and the artist intends to continue to lend his artistic talent to the series for as long as it’s on the shelves. “Fables is a book that grows and changes over time,” James Jean told CBR News. “Unlike many mainstream comics, it’s not a variation on a theme, but a long narrative with a rich cast of characters. Consequently, I’m able to experiment and evolve each month when I create a new cover.”
Finally, Greg Burgas stands up on a podium and demands that Dazzler (the original series, not the character) get some respect:
What makes Dazzler interesting, however, is the way Fingeroth and Springer chose to present our heroine. Alison Blaire never wants to be a superhero, which, when you consider she starred in a pretty mainstream superhero book in the Marvel Universe for 42 issues, is pretty impressive. Until the very end of the comic, she denies any desire to be a hero, and although Fingeroth and later writers kind of beat the idea into the ground, it’s refreshing to read such an anti-superhero comic that is, ostensibly, about Alison learning how to be a hero.
