I must say, I like these quick little interviews Craig Yoe has been doing on his site lately. His latest one is with Tom Heintjes, editor of the comic-strip centered magazine, Hogan’s Alley:
2. How did Hogan’s Alley get started, Tom?
Rick Marschall and I conceived the idea of Hogan’s Alley in early 1994. We often talked about the type of comics magazine we would like to see on the stands, just blue-skying about our ideal comics magazine. Of course, Rick was the mastermind behind the legendary NEMO magazine, so he is a great partner to have. Anyway, the magazine we ended up describing sounded so good that–like a couple of idiots–we decided to put it out ourselves, figuring no one in their right minds would put such a magazine out. In the course of that first issue, published in the fall of 1994, we brought David Folkman on board as art director, and he’s been an indispensable part of things from the first issue.
One thing we felt was important was to connect cartooning’s present to its earliest days, so we came up with the title Hogan’s Alley, which is of course connected to the Yellow Kid. In hindsight, from a marketing point of view, it probably isn’t a good title. Most comics fans have no idea what the title represents–the Yellow Kid’s neighborhood–so they don’t know that they might be interested in the magazine. But we try to show both the interconnectedness of cartooning’s various disciplines as well as the role of cartooning in the larger realm of popular culture.
