In a conversation with Van Jensen, Paul Karasik (and Fletcher Hanks aficionado) lights into the recent Stardust story by Joe Keatinge and Mike Allred that appeared in Image’s recent Next Issue Project:
CMix: What were the aspects of the new story that you liked most? And, conversely, what did you like the least?
PK: Gee, what did I like? Well the lettering inside the balloons is pretty good, but even the lettering is sabotaged by balloons that are too cramped. The whole enterprise has a slapped-together feel to it. Even the boxed narration looks slapped down. Aside from the bankrupt premise, I guess that I hated the ugliness of it all especially those drab fuzzy cut-and-pasted Photoshopped buildings. I have seen Allred’s work elsewhere and know that he can compose a page. This is a good example of how Photoshop can ruin a person’s design sense. By not doing it by hand it is easy to lose touch with the page. In contrast, Hanks’ artwork is bright, fresh and 100-percent handmade. It’s so alive. This story feels dead, dead, dead. And what the hell does Little Nemo have to do with anything?
March 19th, 2008 at 9:44 am
Wasn’t it supposed to feel dead for most of the story? That was the point, that it had become a drab, boring place.
March 19th, 2008 at 9:57 am
jeez, what a snoot that dude is.
March 19th, 2008 at 10:32 am
But did he like it or not? ;-D
March 19th, 2008 at 11:16 am
Huh. Looks like the interview was updated yesterday with something resembling an apology by Karasik.
March 19th, 2008 at 11:25 am
I said and will repeat, THE guy to do a new Stardust story nowadays should be Rob Liefeld!
Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)
March 19th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
The thing is, Karasik was completely right. Stardust was never supposed to be a romantic figure, he’s pretty much a nightmarish, ominpresent force of nature bent on punishment. The original stories were crude and brutal, and Keatinge and Allred’s version was so jarringly out of step with the character, one has to wonder if they even read the source material to begin with. This was the story I was most interested in the Next Issue Project for, and it’s also singlehandedly the one that made me not buy the comic.
The story itself is decent, if completely unoriginal in terms of premise, but it falls apart when you realize they could not have possibly picked a worse character for it to revolve around.
March 20th, 2008 at 5:18 am
All I know is I really enjoyed the Stardust story, so much so that I wrote Joe Keatinge to tell him so.