Dave and Raina and The Times

My friends* Dave Roman and Raina Telgemeier were recently profiled in a New York Times feature on what it's like to live and work as a couple of married cartoonists. It's a nice piece, aside from the writer's gratuitous swipe at fat comics nerds who go to conventions dressed like superheroes, which--although surely accurate--is a pretty tired observation that has nothing to do with the type of work Dave and Raina create.

As I've recounted once or twice, I first met Dave and Raina at the Eisner Awards in 2006, when I won for Mom's Cancer and Raina was edged out for Best New Talent. She's since gone on to adapt the very popular Baby-Sitters Club series and publish the autobiographical best-seller Smile, which finally got her the Eisner Award she deserved before. Dave was the long-time comics editor of Nickelodeon Magazine until Nickelodeon stupidly decided it didn't need a magazine. His books include Agnes Quill, Astronaut Academy, and Teen Boat (about a teenager who has the power to transform into a yacht, and yeah it's about that strange). They do nice work that doesn't pander or condescend to kids, which is a rare and admirable thing.

It makes me happy to see two kind, creative people succeeding together at a very difficult thing. I don't know how they do it. The anchor that's let me have a freelance writing and cartooning career over the past 12 or 13 years is my wife Karen's steady paycheck (and loving patient support!). Otherwise, forget it. I joke that my entire health care and retirement plan consists of not pissing off my wife. So kudos to Raina and Dave, two brave people shouting into the stormy abyss together. What an adventure.

And now, just because I have the excuse, here are two Two-Minute Interviews I did with Dave and Raina at the 2010 Comic-Con International in San Diego. As I apologized when I first posted them last year, my questioning of Raina was kind of deliberately dumb but I think got to an interesting discussion about process. Dave's interview was more straightforward. Doing these things in a loud and crowded hall is hard.





* "Friends" in this context means people I've talked to a few times, think highly of, and who would probably recognize me in the street or return my e-mail. Also, I can spell "Telgemeier" without looking it up.
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Two Minutes with Keith Knight

I think Keith Knight is one of the funniest and most distinctive cartoonists in the business and, as you'll see in this Two-Minute Interview, also one of the busiest and most entrepreneurial. He's got a lot going on. Keith used to live in the San Francisco Bay Area, knew Mom's Cancer, and so became one of those people I bumped into for five minutes once a year. Last Sunday at APE, I did it again.



Just a couple of follow-up thoughts: while not everyone appreciates poop humor, I think Keith's "9 Types of Baby Poo" is hilarious. Although I'm thankfully long out of the baby poo business, if it were still a part of my life or the life of anyone I knew, I would buy his beautiful color print and frame it for the nursery.


As often happens, a more interesting conversation took place after I turned off the camera. I commented admiringly on how many projects Keith had going and he told me he'd been criticized for being unfocused and spreading himself too thin. Not by me. I think diversification is smart. Comics, web, books, TV: it won't all succeed but something will, and the more seeds you sow the better chance of reaping something tremendous.

Also, I am consulting a thesaurus to add adjectives other than "cool" to my rhetorical repertoire. I promise to work in "good," "great," "neat," "swell," "keen," "spiffy," and "boffo" at the earliest opportunity.

Check out Keith's work at the Official K Chronicles and (Th)ink Website.

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I had a nice long conversation with Editor Charlie last night that I'm not going to say anything about right now except that it's all good. All good.

Two Minutes with Alexis Fajardo

Alexis Fajardo is a very nice, smart guy and the creator of a series titled Kid Beowulf, based on the ancient epic and aimed at young readers, as he explains in this three-minute Two-Minute Interview I recorded with him at APE on Sunday. He's also got a really neat day job that I think anyone who knows or cares about comics would find fascinating. But I'll let him tell you about it . . .



Thanks to Lex for playing along! Check out his work at http://www.kidbeowulf.com/.

Two Minutes with Charlie Kochman

When I finished my Mom's Cancer webcomic, printed it all out, and shoved it into an envelope addressed to "Dear Editor," it landed on Charlie Kochman's desk. Now the executive editor of Abrams ComicArts, Charlie had been hired by publisher Harry N. Abrams specifically to develop a graphic novel/pop culture line, and Mom's Cancer was the first project he signed. A couple of years later, Charlie was again my editor on Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow. In gratitude, I fed him to a giant prairie dog.

(By the way, in my humble opinion, "furious buck-toothed justice" may be the best three words I've ever strung together.)

Walking around Comic-Con with Charlie is like walking through Little Italy with the Godfather. You can't go five steps without someone stepping up to renew an acquaintance, beg a favor, or pay tribute. He knows everyone and has introduced me to some of the greats in the business. If Charlie vouched for me, I was in. Most importantly, if I'm ever stranded in Manhattan by another blizzard of the century, I know whose sofa I can sleep on.

Here's two minutes with my friend Charlie:



In the first half of the interview, I sidetracked Charlie into a discussion of Wacky Packages--which is just one minor example of dozens of cool books he's overseen--while trying to make the point that his experience and connections allow him to hook up great people with interesting projects, a valuable skill and part of what makes him good at his job. Which I wouldn't take for anything.

As for the second half of the interview, well . . . I always thought I was special. I thought we had something. Sniff. I still love you, man. Thanks for everything.

EDITED TO ADD: At the risk of ruining the gag, it's a gag. I think that's obvious--the camera shakes because I was laughing during the recording--but I'm explaining it now because I don't want anyone to think ill of Charlie. We're good friends joking around, and this is my favorite interview.

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Two Minutes with Stephan Pastis

You need to know a few things going into today's Two-Minute Comic-Con Interview with Stephan Pastis, former lawyer, fellow Harvey Award nominee, and creator of the very successful syndicated comic strip "Pearls Before Swine."

First, Stephan and I coincidentally live in the same city. We also coincidentally live in the same neighborhood. In fact, our homes coincidentally have exactly the same floorplan except his is a mirror image of mine. We even coincidentally work in the same room of our respective houses. For me, visiting Stephan is like traveling to a Bizarro universe where left is right, right is wrong, up is down, and cartoonists earn enough to live on.

When Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow came out last summer, I had the idea of hosting a live webcast "virtual launch party" to celebrate. I figured I'd show off the book, do some drawing, maybe take some Q&A, and I invited Stephan to drop by as a Very Special Guest. He said he'd be happy to do it, on the condition that he could be the Worst Very Special Guest Ever. He was as good as his word. Stephan brought beer, Cheetos, balloons, a paddleball, and a blatantly disruptive attitude to the party, and made it a . . . magical . . . evening.

With that background, here are two minutes with Stephan Pastis. See you on the other side.



Not everyone knows that Stephan works part-time for Creative Associates, the studio that oversees the "Peanuts" empire built by Charles Schulz. Cartoonist Paige Braddock, who makes a cameo in the Two-Minute Interview, is Creative Associates' creative director. That explains why they both participated in a Comic-Con panel on "Peanuts at 60." (As I mentioned in my post-Con post, I tried to get in to watch that panel but the room was over capacity, which was nice to see.) The new animated special that Stephan co-wrote is the upcoming "Happiness is a Blanket, Charlie Brown," which will feature Linus.

The idea of the man who created the cynical, misanthropic Rat putting words into the mouth of the wise and sensitive Linus unnerves me. But then, Stephan also created the wise Goat and sensitive Pig, so perhaps he has it in him after all. He is a man of hidden talents. He's also a good guy, but don't tell him I said so. I'll surprise him with it at 9 a.m. next Sunday.

Tomorrow: my last Two-Minute Comic-Con Interview. Don't look so relieved.
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Two Minutes with Paul Guinan

I'd never met Paul Guinan before I discovered his table in Comic-Con's Artists Alley. I thought his book Boilerplate: History's Mechanical Marvel, co-authored with his wife Anina Bennett, was fantastic and stopped to tell him so.

Boilerplate is a robot who, like Zelig or Forrest Gump, happens to show up to play a role in key turn-of-the-century events. Although the robot is (spoiler alert!) fictional, Paul worked hard to get the history right, and it's a fun and interesting blend. We talked for just a few minutes before I got the bright idea to pull out my Flip and record a Two-Minute Interview with him, the fourth of six.

My first question to Paul was really stupid. I asked if he did the writing or the drawing. In fact, there's little "drawing" in Boilerplate, and I knew that. I guess I'm just used to thinking in terms of comics (which Boilerplate isn't) and it was the first thing out of my mouth. Fortunately, Paul executed a graceful save and we went on from there:


The question about people being fooled by Boilerplate was prompted by an incident involving comic actor and writer Chris Elliott, who came across Boilerplate, thought the robot was a hoax from the late 19th century rather than the early 21st, and incorporated the character into his novel The Shroud of the Thwacker. I remember enjoying this New York Times article about it at the time. In an unusually civil fashion, Messrs. Guinan and Elliott worked out a deal between themselves giving Paul a cut of Elliott's earnings to compensate him for the copyright violation. Elliott's confusion was understandable.

I may have gotten the interview off on the wrong foot, but my enthusiasm for Boilerplate is genuine. Visit Paul's website, and if that looks like the kind of thing you'd enjoy, check out the book with my recommendation.

Tomorrow: a Two-Minute Interview goes horribly awry.
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Two Minutes with Raina Telgemeier

A few minutes after recording yesterday's Two-Minute Comic-Con Interview with Dave Roman, I tracked down his wife Raina Telgemeier, who was working a different booth. (In fact, while I was talking to Raina she got a phone call from Dave and told him, "Yeah, Brian's here." I think I heard his groan through the phone.)

Raina's graphic novel Smile, a memoir of her middle-school experience with some nasty dental problems that compounded the usual social dramas of adolescence, has been well-reviewed and picked up by Scholastic, which sold it to school kids throughout the country. As mentioned in today's interview, she has also done comics adaptations of Ann M. Martin's Baby-Sitters Club series and co-wrote the manga-style X-Men: Misfits. We did not mention that she also contributed a story to Volume 4 of the popular anthology series Flight.

Raina and Dave are two of my favorite people in the business. I like their approach to their readers and the work they do. Here's Raina:



My question about ink was meant to be kind of funny-stupid, but I think led to an interesting answer. Raina says she once tried to use the same ink I use and hated it. I had a similar experience with paper, when I changed brands and thought I'd lost the ability to draw. Turned out I just couldn't draw well on that paper--its texture did bad things to my ink line.

Cartoonists say that one of the most common questions they get is "What kind of pen/paper/ink/brush/computer program do you use?" The easy answer is that it doesn't matter: a cartoonist can work with expensive, exotic materials or ballpoint pens on cheap printer paper. But I think a better answer is to try a bunch of different stuff and learn what you like. Materials and media that one cartoonist loves may not work for you at all, and vice versa.

Tomorrow: a Two-Minute Interview with a total stranger.
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Two Minutes with Dave Roman

Continuing my post-Comic-Con posts, here's the second of six Two-Minute Interviews I did. Today's subject is cartoonist Dave Roman, husband of cartoonist Raina Telgemeier. I don't know how two full-time comics makers manage to feed themselves, but somehow they not only survive but thrive.

As noted in the interview, Dave is the creator or co-creator of Astronaut Elementary, Agnes Quill (a well-received book whose movie rights were optioned by Paramount), Jax Epoch and the Quicken Forbidden, Boat Boy, and the manga-style X-Men: Misfits book. Dave was also an editor for Nickelodeon Magazine until Nickelodeon foolishly decided it didn't need a magazine anymore. I met Dave and Raina at my first Eisner Awards in 2006 and I've happily followed their success from afar.

As I mention in the interview, what I like most about Dave's work is that he respects his juvenile audience, creating interesting stories that don't pander or condescend. He does kids' literature sincerely and unapologetically. I think that's rare in the comics world. Here's Dave's perspective on that:



Many thanks to Dave for his time (which I took much more of than two minutes). I bet you'll never guess who I interviewed next. She's (oops, a clue!) up tomorrow.
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Two Minutes with Scott Kurtz

Following up on my previous Comic-Con post-mortem, this is the first of six Two-Minute Interviews I did with five friends and one complete stranger in San Diego. The idea was to capture a spontaneous conversation about comics that I hoped would be interesting and fun. I'll post one a day for the rest of the week.

Scott Kurtz is the creator of "PvP" ("Player vs. Player"), which is among the most popular and successful webcomics in the universe. Scott won the Eisner Award for Best Webcomic the year after I did. Most remarkable is that Scott has figured out how to make a living at it, an accomplishment that has eluded 99.94% of webcomics creators. He shared some of his insights in a book he co-wrote, How to Make Webcomics.

I met Scott last February when he came to town to spend a day as the Schulz Museum's cartoonist in residence, something I'd done the month before. I was wary. In online message boards and such, Scott has a dynamic presence. He speaks his mind bluntly, sparks arguments, fuels fueds. So I was expecting a real bomb-throwing fire-breather when we met for dinner after his engagements at the museum.

I might as well tell that story now, although I didn't at the time. Scott was staying at the guest house of Jeannie Schulz, Charles Schulz's widow. I don't think Scott was special in that regard; my impression is that Mrs. Schulz opens her home to any vagrant cartoonist passing through. Jeannie wanted to host a little gathering for Scott and invited a small group of local cartoonists including me, whom she'd just met a month before. My wife Karen and I drove out to her home not knowing quite what to expect, and were delighted to find a very comfortable, casual meal of pizza and salad, accompanied by horsing around on the Schulz's indoor basketball half-court.

It was a wonderful, slightly surreal evening I'll never forget, during which I met Scott, his wife and his father. Given what I'd seen of Scott's online persona, I was surprised to find him even-tempered, warm, thoughtful, sensitive, and very nice to talk with. We bonded pretty quickly over shared experiences and approaches to cartooning. An instant friend. Not that he needs my endorsement, but Scott Kurtz is all right by me.

With that intro, I hope you enjoy my Two-Minute Interview with Scott: