Dilbert is recession-proof, even if Dilbert’s workplace isn’t: Barron’s interviews Scott Adams about his strip and its current storyline.
I now hate whoever failed to greenlight the Batman, hero of the hobos story: Bookslut conducts a prosaically headlined but wide-ranging interview with Jason Lutes about his work on his signature series Berlin, among other topics. Among all the ground covered is the possibility of Lutes doing superhero work—it’s “like squeezing blood from a stone. No, a better analogy is beating a dead horse. Because the horse, at this point, isn’t even there. It’s like a putrefied puddle”—and a decade-old Batman proposal he’d made:
The Batman was going to be called “The Ballad of the Bat.” And it was going to go back to the beginnings of the Batman during the Depression. It was going to treat him sort of like a folk hero and really try to treat it realistically in the context of what was happening in America then. [He would be] this mythical defender of the downtrodden and I imagined a bunch of hobos sitting around a fire singing “The Ballad of the Bat” about this guy who would save them from the railroad dick who was trying to keep them off the trains or whatever. Sort of like a Woody Guthrie character… (laughs) Totally absurd. It was going to work though.
