This week’s edition of Publisher’s Weekly Comics Week continues Van Jensen’s interview with Jeff Smith about his upcoming RASL series:

PWCW: While RASL is a darker story, do you see any similarities between it and your other books? Are there universal themes or ideas that carry through all your work?

Jeff Smith: That’s actually a very good question. On a very general level, something that underlies all my work is that there’s more to life than we can see or touch with our eyes. There’s something just beyond our sense’s ability to detect. I think that’s in Bone. That’s in Shazam!. That’s in RASL in a fairly obvious way. But that’s just something that fires me up.

On a more surface level, they’re not very similar. The way I write and draw comics, the way I do panel transitions, that should be all very similar. I have my way of telling a comic book story, the way you can tell a Steven Spielberg movie. But the actual subject matter has been different. Bone was a comedy, but it was also a fantasy. And Shazam! was kind of an adventure of wonderment. And this is going to be pretty dark and world-weary and full of danger, which is very different from anything I’ve done before.

Also in this week’s edition: a look at the newly announced Marvel/Soleil deal; Abrams plans to publish a collected edition of Jon J. Muth’s M adaptation (will the tear-out record be included?); Carla Speed McNeil will adapt D.J. MacHale’s bestselling fantasy series Pendragon, the first in a new line of kids’ graphic novels from Simon & Schuster; and Dark Horse will release a number of manga and prose books based off of the Blood: The Last Vampire series.

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