• There's an excellent interview with David O'Connell, the writer and artist behind science fiction comic Tozo, over at Garen Ewing's website.David's art is very much in the tradition of ligne claire (clear line) artists such as Belgium's Herge (of Tin Tin fame) and France's Jacque Tardi. In the interview, Garen, himself a talented cartoonist, talks to David about ligne claire, world-building and the Dutch comics scene (David lived in Amsterdam for a while):
"The Dutch domestic comic scene is unsurprisingly small but very healthy," says David in the interview. "They have fun with what they do and are more interested in the 'artform' of comics than in the 'business', or at least, that's my perception.
"I've found that idea very important to hold on to: if you go looking for some kind of material gratification through comics, whether it's in terms of cash or number of blog comments then you'll end up miserable."
Garen Ewing is the man behind the rather fantastic Rainbow Orchid. He's also got a forthcoming strip, Charlie Jefferson and the Tomb of Nazaleod, in new children's comic The DFC. You can see a preview of this strip here. David's Tozo strip can be found here.
(This interview sourced via the brill Forbidden Planet blog)
• Oliver East of Bugpowder makes us aware of the new issue of Colouring Outside the Lines, which features an interview with British indie cartoonist, Lizz Lunney.
According to its myspace site, Colouring Outside the Lines is "...a zine featuring interviews with contemporary female artists; illuminating various corners of current female artistic and creative activity."
Lizz Lunney's minimalist style and occasional anthropomorphic stylings should appeal to fans of cartoonists such as Ralph Kidson and Lewis Trondheim.
Anyway, sounds like a cool zine. Please check it out.
• Speaking of Oliver East, his blog is well worth a read, especially for its stream of consciousness musings on India, the creative process and fellow cartoonist Stuart Kolakovic's superb rugs!
• Richard Bruton draws our attention to cartoonist Hunt Emerson's recently revitalised website, Large Cow.
I'll let Richard do the plug for this one:
"Hunt Emerson's website Large Cow is proving to be a black hole of time stealing delight. I was directed there via Pete to have a look at the Owl & The Pussy Cat three page strip from the Beano and I find myself looking around for the best part of an hour..."
If we're mentioning Richard, we should also give a shout-out to his excellent blog, Fictions, which often contains lots of comics-related goodies, including the Propoganda reviews that are cross-posted at the aforementioned Forbidden Planet blog.
And finally... Peter Murphy has just posted an interview with comics legend Alan Moore over at the Blog of Revelations. It's pretty good stuff, with some classic Moore-isms and interesting anecdotes:
"So I got the second draft of the [film] script [for V for Vendetta] where I think to justify the special effects budget, they decided that having Britain taken over by fascists was just not exciting enough, and they’d used the fact that I mentioned a limited nuclear war to say, ‘Right, there’s mutants everywhere!’ So instead of it being fascist policemen that are patrolling the benighted streets of this enslaved London of the future, it’s half-goat mutant policemen. You’ve got these people that are policemen down to the waist and have goats’ legs. And as I said at the time, if you wanted to do a film about goat policemen, then why the f**k didn’t you just buy the option to Rupert Bear?!!"
