The holidays may be long over, but Tom Spurgeon is still conducting interviews. His latest one is with Rex Libris creator James Turner:
SPURGEON: You have the rare distinction these days of publishing in comic book form these Rex Libris issues before collecting them. Is it important to you that your work is serialized before collection? Does putting work out there that way help you at all creatively, say to make course corrections from something you see or something that’s pointed out to you?
TURNER: I think I can do more course corrections if it’s put out first as a graphic novel. Putting it out issue by issue sets things in place. I wouldn’t go back in and restructure/remove/alter major elements in the trade collection, for example. I think readers would feel cheated by that.
In fact, I refrained from doing any changes at all in the Rex trade. For some weird reason I had the idea that I should just let it stand with all it’s warts as my initial point of “artistic departure,” so I, and others, can see how my work evolved (and hopefully improved) as it went on. I must have been on drugs or something.
