Over on the always excellent Comics Reporter Tom Spurgeon talks to writer and comics commentator Tom De Haven as his long essay Our Hero: Superman on Earth:
“TOM SPURGEON: At the beginning of Our Hero, you discuss various reasons for your doing the essay. One thing you mention but don’t tie into the reasons this book came about is the whole It’s Superman experience. How do you think Our Hero is different for your having had the relatively rare experience of actually writing the Superman character?
TOM DE HAVEN: I guess there’s three parts to my answer. The first is that I deliberately tried not to do too much writing about writing It’s Superman. I didn’t want to make this an advertisement for the novel. I deliberately played it down.
The second thing is, before writing the Superman novel, I had read a lot of the old comics and comic strips but hadn’t read them in any kind of order. To write the essay I was approaching the character in a very different way. Probably one of the reasons I wrote the essay at all was thinking that, “I’ve done almost all the research. I’ve read all this stuff.” But then when I started doing chronological research, I realized, “I’ve read nothing.” [laughter]
The other part of the answer is that had it not been for the novel I probably would not have been asked to do this. Art Spiegelman suggested me. Yale University Press had called Artie up and asked him, as I recall, if he would do a book on Alfred E. Neuman. Art wasn’t interested but said there’s this guy who did a novel about Superman and Superman should be one of the icons in your series.”
Mon, Mar 8, 2010
Comics and cartoons, Interviews