Ahead of next weekend’s New York comic-con the New York Times has a profile of Dean Haspiel, talking about his work (with a nice emphasis on some of the online work such as the excellent webcomics collective Act-I-Vate he’s been involved with and how he and other creators are using that form):
“After a while, I realized there were a bunch of cartoonists online. And so I thought, why not create a comic blog of creator-owned stuff and create this online anthology? You own the material, you post on a weekly basis, and you piggyback off each other’s fan bases. So I started this comics collective called Act-I-Vate. I wanted a buzzword. When I looked up the name online, I found that it had been taken by something else, so I added the dashes… I did Act-I-Vate and “Billy Dogma” while doing print work. The difference between the two is for a printed graphic novel, you know the beginning, the middle and the end of the story when you get the script, and you take a year to draw it. Not many people see what you’ve done, except for the editor and the writer. It’s printed and marketed, and you hope a bunch of people see it and weigh in. What’s cool about doing “Billy Dogma” is that every week people tell me what they like, or don’t like, or “keep drawing!”
(a scene from Billy Dogma and the Sex Planet by and (c) Dean Haspiel)
Mon, Feb 2, 2009
Comics and cartoons, Interviews