The Daily Cross Hatch has posted the first of a promised three-part interview with hot young artist Dash Shaw, whose Bottomless Belly Button and Body World are winning all the raves these days:
When you were working on the book, did it feel like a turning point, in terms of recognition? Having Fantagraphics on your side must have helped a lot.
But I didn’t know that Fantagraphics was going to do it. I had more than half of it done, and then I showed it to Fanta. They said that they were interested, but they wanted to see the rest of it. I finished the rest of it, and then, maybe half a year later, they said, “yes.” In that time I edited a bit and redrew a lot of stuff, but the only things I did after I knew that Fantagraphics was going to publish it was stuff like the cover. Knowing that Fantagraphics was going to publish it and that it was going to be in bookstores did inform my decision about the cover. I wanted it to be the comic in the bookstore that looks more like a minicomic, and not have the author bio and the picture and the coverflaps, and all of these things that it seems like people who do minicomics get in the bookstore market and immediately do. They want their stuff to look like every other book. So I wanted to be the person who gets into the bookstore market and has something that looks like what I was doing before.
