A Moment of Comics Journalism

 

 

Tak Toyoshima's birthday is today. Here's another page from The Comics Interpreter Robert Young recently scanned and sent to me. Tak's interview was the last one I did for the magazine (second volume, third issue). This was during a time when he and Keith Knight were featuring regularly in Boston's Weekly Dig. I got to interview Keith Knight too, but then Robert stopped producing issues of TCI. Maybe someday I'll buy an old mini cassette player and transcribe some of my lost files. Maybe I'll offer them to Robert if he ever produces a collection of the old interviews.

 

A Moment of Comics Journalism

 

 

With my Hans Rickheit interview finally up, I wanted to thank Robert Young for sending me scans of my prior writing on Hans' work in The Comics Interpreter so many years ago. My essay "Mental Debris: The Comics of Hans Rickheit" was mostly written during August 2000 while I was staying with my family post-surgery. It was published the following summer in The Comics Interpreter #5. Rich Kreiner reviewed the issue in an issue The Comics Journal and called my piece "astute." That kept me going as a writer for years.

My Jordan Crane Interiew from Eyeball Magazine Now Archived

The late nineties (and early zeroes) was an exciting time to be into independent comics. This was when then-Million Year Picnic employee Tom Devlin had started Highwater Books. It wasn't before long that he had a collaborator in cartoonist on the rise Jordan Crane.

Crane moved to Massachusetts around this time, and his self-published anthology NON started showing up in stores. I interviewed him in the summer of 1999. As per my usual, insane method back in the day, I started interviewing subjects before I even had a guaranteed place to publish the article.

One of the main zines I was writing for, Robert Young's The Comics Interpreter, had already published a pretty detailed interview of Crane. I tried The Weekly Dig and even gave  issues of Non to my editor to look over and possibly scan for the article. Nothing came of it, and I ended up losing the first issue to the back and fourth. Too bad, since that comic was a rare find even back then.

Enter Eyeball Magazine, a short-lived but fun journal I covered a while back when I archived my Rich Mackin article from that first issue. Editor Christopher Sharpe was happy to take another piece from me for the second issue.

Despite the article's lackluster title (replacing my proposed title, which was worse), I'm still happy with the piece when I look through it today (though I have to squint when I go over certain passages).

I sat down and talked with Crane just as he published the fourth issue of Non. By 2001, when this article saw the light of day, the fifth issue would be published along with his mini-graphic novel Col Dee.

An ad for Col Dee as it appeared on the back cover of Eyeball #2.

Col Dee (an underrated gem of Crane's) was published both as part of the anthology and on its own. In fact, it's inclusion in Non 5 was basically the book inserted (along with Kurt Wolfgang's Where Hats Go) into a special cut-out section of the book.
 

The inside of Non 5, with Col Dee (blue) and Where Hats Go (brown) from the special insert. Image taken from Gnus.

I was proud that I was perhaps the first to ask Crane about the meaning of his anthology's name. Unfortunately, I think the comics anthology Stalagmite had an interview with Crane in its first issue by Editor Craig McKenney, who asked Crane the same thing. Worse, I'm pretty sure his interview came out before mine. Well-played, Mr. McKenney.

In the article, there's a lot of talk about "Floating," a story serialized in Non. That story, to the best of my knowledge, was never finished. Sad, but Crane has produced an amazing amount of comics work since then, both long spanning/ongoing tales and short vignettes. "Before they Got Better," from his one man anthology show Uptight, remains one of the best short stories I've read in recent years.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Crane.