STUDIO SPACE

Parece que finalmente Joel Meadows ha encontrado un editor -Image- para su libro junto a Gary Marshall, con fotografías -de las cuales hemos ido enlazando aquí muestras desde el blog de Meadows- y entrevistas a autores de cómic en su estudio. Serán 320 páginas y la lista de autores fotografiados y entrevistados incluye a: Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons, Tim Bradstreet, Howard Chaykin, Sean Phillips, Duncan Fegredo, Joe Kubert, Mike Mignola, Tim Sale, George Pratt, Tommy Lee Edwards, Adam Hughes, Sergio Toppi, Walter Simonson, Jim Lee, Frank Miller, Bryan Talbot, Alex Ross, Steve Dillon y Dave Taylor. El libro se publica en EEUU en mayo de 2008; tenéis un extracto, en concreto de la entrevista a Frank Miller, en newsarama (gracias, Juan Carlos).

Miller (que fue boy scout de niño, según cuenta) habla sobre sus influencias. Entre ellas, las de los primeros tebeos que leyó, de EC Comics, y también las del cómic japonés:

Japanese culture and art is something that’s always had an influence on me too. I love the way the Japanese so unabashedly combine sex and violence in a way that Westerners shy away from and they create an exaggerated mystical approach that in many ways seems truer than the real world. I first discovered Lone Wolf and Cub when I was first starting out and felt that it ripped away all this glummery that had covered up comic books. It was a girlfriend of mine at the time, Laurie Sutton, who was an editor at DC Comics, who turned me onto it. He father worked in the oil industry and he brought a copy of it back from Japan to give to Laurie, who gave it to me and my mind exploded, so I had to hunt the rest down. Basically I went to Japan and gathered them all. I was in my early twenties and I came back from there full of vim and vigor that I was going to steal this stuff and also, I wanted to make sure that it was published in the United States because it was the best graphic novel I’d ever seen and nobody had seen it.

Sobre su descubrimiento de Moebius y otros autores europeos:

I worked from home for years. Eventually though, once I was doing Daredevil for Marvel, I hooked up with Walter Simonson, Jim Sherman and Howard Chaykin and joined Upstart Studios. I was invited to fill the place that Val Mayerik had left and that was a wonderful time because that was when I got exposed to the work of Moebius and other European artists. It was a salon and it changed my work forever. (...) I first conceived Ronin as a reaction to two huge influences: one was Koike and Kojima’s Lone Wolf and Cub and the other was the work of Moebius.