Bookslut has posted up an interview with the excellent Jason Lutes (who chatted to Katherine Farmar here on the blog last autumn) which is well worth a read. Asked why someone who grew up reading superhero comics has never tackled one himself Jason’s answer is less than kind to the mainstream superhero genre:
“I’ve been approached before. Somebody asked me to do a Batman at one point and, at another point, Superman. So the two biggies. (laughs) And the people who approached me didn’t like my ideas and they were ideas I wasn’t interested in compromising. And I was very reluctant to do it. I needed the money. That was primarily the reason I was interested in doing them. But I would only do them if I could talk about the things I wanted to talk about. So the comics very quickly were scuttled because I wasn’t interested in doing the stories I didn’t want to tell.
[Doing superhero comics today] is like squeezing blood from a stone. No, a better analogy is beating a dead horse. Because the horse, at this point, isn’t even there. It’s like a putrefied puddle. Within the context of superhero comics today there’s a million of interesting different takes on the subject, but for me that basic subject matter is so — characters die and then are brought back to life and they’re discovering the darkness of the human soul through the superhero — so dead and gone to a point where I have so little interest. ” (via The Beat)
Fri, Jan 9, 2009
Comics and cartoons, Interviews