The Wild River Review talks to Chip Kidd about his new book, The Learners, book design and other stuff:
WRR: The catalog of graphic novels that you oversee from Pantheon includes beautifully packaged work from today’s greatest cartoonists including Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth), Art Spiegelman (In the Shadow of No Towers), Dan Clowes (Ice Haven), Charles Burns (Black Hole), Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis), and Ben Katchor (Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer) among others and has redefined comics as respectable. Can you talk about the success of this line and what we may expect in the future from the Pantheon imprint?
God, that’s a whole other discussion. This basically grew out of artists who I really like and care about — and who had projects that needed to be published — so that was a very fortunate circumstance… especially with Chris Ware and Dan Clowes. We’ve got books by these people and others signed up for future publication.
We’ve got interesting things. But it’s more about quality than quantity. So last year we released two books, and this year we’re releasing six. So it’s all about what is there and what should be published.
