Skip Carey is dead and I’m getting married in less than six days. The first bit makes me sad, the second part makes me very happy and busy. On with quotes of the past week.
“If you’re the sort of person who’s going to find Mary Jane sexist, why weren’t you disillusioned with her a long time ago? I mean, even if some other writers have made her more of an independent woman, there is this history of the character being a preposterous brain-dead male fantasy. Surely, were you a feminist, this might give you pause before you pledged her your undying loyalty.”
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“Sinatra didn’t become a great singer until his heart was broken, and Mauldin didn’t become a great cartoonist until the invasion of Sicily. There, along with the civilian dead in towns, he was witness to a horrific snafu where hundreds of U.S. paratroopers were killed by friendly fire, not that such an idiotic term existed then. Any gore or death was offstage in his cartoons, but his humor grew grimmer, his mud and zipping bullets more palpable. You can feel the rain and chill in the cartoon that won him the Pulitzer Prize: A news headline ‘Fresh, spirited American troops, flushed with victory, are bringing in thousands of hungry, ragged, Battle-weary prisoners’ is accompanied by his drawing of rain-soaked, exhausted, hangdog German prisoners, indistinguishable but for their uniforms from their sodden, exhausted, hangdog American captors.”
- Jim Washburn on Bill Mauldin
“The first thing I learned, I actually learned years before I ever did my first interview. Back in the 80s, when I was in college, I read a profile in Playboy of musician Little Richard written by film maker John Waters. By the end of the article, I knew more about how John Waters felt about Little Richard than I did about Little Richard himself. That may well have been the intent of Playboy’s editor, given the fact that Waters is a strong personality, but it made me mad. I wanted to learn about Little Richard, and I didn’t. That lead me to realize that people read interviews to learn about the person who is being interviewed, not the person doing the interviewing. I don’t care who you are, how famous you are, or how clever you think you are, the spotlight should shine on the person being profiled. To that end, I try to make myself as unobtrusive as possible when I’m doing an interview.”
- Roger Ash on the key to a good interview
“Everyone knows that corporate synergy is stronger than death or retirement, after all.”
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“I’m not saying smoking is advisable for adults, children, or even superheroes. I’m saying the clumsy and lecturing approach this title takes in its preaching on the subject of smoking has ruined the book’s readability.”
- D3 getting lit up about a perceived anti-smoking agenda in Spider-Man’s Brand New Day era
“…we’re Penelope, with all these bums in our palace eating our food, telling us Odysseus is dead and we need to settle for one of them. But he’s not, and if we’re patient, the lot of them are going to catch an ass-full of arrows very soon. And, it will be funny.”
- Jeff Parker on encountering Hollywood types who want him to create franchises for them without ownership rights (thanks to fellow Blog@ contributor Michael May for this last quote)
