Category Archives: interviews

Comics and Graphic Novels at the Brooklyn Book Festival

Calvin Reid -- September 19th, 2011

The Comics Writ Large and Small Panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival (l. to r.) Meg Lemke, moderator, Craig Thompson (Habibi), Anders Nilsen (Big Questions) and Adrian Tomine (Optic Nerve).

Comics and graphic novels have always been a part of the Brooklyn Book Festival, held this past weekend on a beautiful fall Sunday September 18 at Borough Hall and surrounding sites. But this weekend the Brooklyn Book Festival 2011 seems to have really ramped up the involvement of comics artists at the one-day literary festival, incorporating cartoonists into a wide range of literary panels along with prose authors in addition to all-comics and youth comics panels.

The Quick Draw panel (l. to r.) Laura Lee Gulledge, Dave Roman and Raina Telgemier.

Indeed Meg Lemke, acquisitions editor at Teachers College Press and a member of the BBF youth committee, told PW that the festival worked to incorporate comics throughout the show’s programming. And Lemke was the moderator for one of the hottest tickets at the show, Comics Writ Large and Small, a public interview with three of the most acclaimed cartoonists of the moment about their newest works: Craig Thompson (Habibi, Pantheon); Anders Nilsen (Big Questions, Drawn & Quarterly) and Adrian Tomine (Optic Nerve, D&Q). The event was held at the St. Francis College Auditorium, a block away from Borough hall and one of several additional venues (which included projection capability in order to show off comics and visuals) added to the festival to accommodate the growth in attendence.

And the show is definitely growing. The plaza at Borough hall was jammed with visitors from the time this reporter arrived around 10am on Sunday to moderate—if that’s the word—a panel on drawing for kids featuring three cartoonists. The panel, Comics Quick-Draw!, was more of a tongue-in-cheek sports event than a conventional panel—it was a packed outdoor tent full of parents and young kids, who were asked to tell the cartoonists to draw any kind of crazy thing—like, say, aliens eating bagels on the moon!—and the intrepid cartoonists did their best to comply. Dave Roman (Astronaut Academy), Raina Telgemier (Smile) and Laura Lee Gulledge (Paige by Page) were great troopers and expert draughtspeople and the kids were screaming with delight by the end of the session (they also bum-rushed the stage at the end to claim the drawings). Comics aimed at kids were well represented with a combination of panels and workshops throughout the day featuring such cartoonists as Nick Bertozzi and Sarah Glidden.

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The PW Morning Report: Thursday, April 7 2011

Craig Morgan Teicher -- April 7th, 2011

The PW Morning Report: Wednesday, March 9, 2010

Craig Morgan Teicher -- March 9th, 2011

Poet, Editor, Critic, and now Publisher Max Winter on Jim Shepard’s Gojira, King of the Monsters

Mike Harvkey -- November 3rd, 2010

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Cover Design by Michael Kupperman

Jim Shepard’s Gojira, King of the Monsters is out next week from Solid Objects, a New York press recently founded by poet and critic Max Winter and poet and translator Lisa Lubasch.

At 52 pages, the work falls into the murky and, for some reason, often controversial, realm between the “long short story” and the novella.

When I asked Winter how he’d come to be publishing a single short work by Jim Shepard, he said he’d been a fan of Shepard’s for years and contacted him when he and Lubasch decided to start the press. Shepard sent him Gojira, and Winter was “moved and fascinated. One immediate draw for me,” Winter said, “was what you could call the cult of Godzilla [the American-ization of the original Japanese title], an observed, long-standing intense interest in both the Japanese and American versions of the monster and the film. In addition, the movie has always been important historically, as an influence on other movies and as a metaphor for America’s status in the world at the time of its release.”

Set mostly in 1954, Shepard’s novella sticks closely to Eiji Tsuburaya, the real life special effects director of the historic film (known during production as only “project G”), revealing a Japanese man torn, like many, between home and work. “He was falling behind everywhere: in his wife’s affections and in his work’s responsibilities,” writes Shepard. Tsuburaya’s wife, Masano, is unhappy, and seems to shoulder the lion’s share of grief over the loss of their young daughter years before. She’s also not thrilled that Hajime, their 19-year-old son, wants to follow in dad’s footsteps; indeed, Tsuburaya gets him a job working on the film as a camera assistant helping to shoot the miniatures (of which there are many). Continue reading →

This Much Approval Means ‘I must be near the end of my career,’ says Franzen

Mike Harvkey -- September 28th, 2010

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The author with his shovel.

In an interview with the UK’s Guardian newspaper, Jonathan Franzen opens up about the fallout from his Corrections Oprah incident (for which he blames “the prevailing mood of philistinism”; being reviled set him back a year), the gap between men and women when it comes to books (calling it “a very destructive disconnect between the critical establishment and the predominantly female readership”), and his process, including earplugs, “pink noise” headphones, and blindfolds.

Since the run-up to the publication of Freedom (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and the Time magazine cover, Franzen-mania has taken on a blob-like character, growing ever bigger and devouring smaller books and writers in its path (something Franzen himself has done in the past). It shows no signs of slowing anytime soon, and the military hasn’t been called in to straif the creature yet. Of course frequent profiles, articles (like this one), and interviews help to feed the beast. But in the current climate (“Publishing’s dead! Run, Forrest, run!!”), a beast of a novel isn’t such a bad thing.

The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington sat down with Franzen in his “spartan writing studio in New York’s Upper East Side. The tiny room, furnished with a battered old desk and greasy-looking mattress, resembles a monastic cell. The walls are bare except for a single decorative plate. There is a tiny kitchen with one small saucepan.”

Read the full interview here.

Cover Reveal: Forever by Maggie Stiefvater

John A. Sellers -- September 27th, 2010

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Earlier today, Scholastic unveiled the cover of Forever, the third and final book in Maggie Stiefvater’s bestselling Wolves of Mercy Falls trilogy, which is due out in summer 2011. To mark the occasion, we reached out to Chris Stengel, associate art director at Scholastic, with questions about his distinctive designs for the trilogy’s covers.

PW: How exactly did you decide to go in this spare, monochromatic silhouette direction, as opposed to some other treatment of wolves and forests?

CS: In the beginning, I can remember playing with a number of photos to try and make them feel more abstract, however, things just weren’t quite working. Things were feeling much too bold and hard. I it was clear to me that there was a subtlety missing. I began with the idea of the heart-shaped leaf, created a graphic interpretation of it, and from there, things really began to grow. In order to achieve a sense of depth, I played with the color values of the branches, and felt pretty happy with the outcome. By keeping things a bit stark, I figured it could help set this title apart from others on the bookshelf.

PW: Since this is the third and final book in this trilogy, did that present any particular design challenges? Did you approach this cover with any specific goals?

CS: I definitely knew that I wanted to make the third book red. It seemed logical to me to follow the progression of the seasons. At first, I wasn’t sure how close to Shiver the sequels should be, but once the artwork came together, it felt right to create a variation on the theme. The reversal of positions for the girl, boy, and the wolves relates to the plots of the books.

PW: David Levithan bought four more books from Maggie Stiefvater back in March—Forever, plus three other novels. Will you be working on the covers for any of those? Anything you can say about any of them?

CS: Funny that you should ask, because I’m actually in the middle of concepting the design for a new book by Maggie right now! It’s been challenging to try and emulate the same subtlety that exists on Shiver, Linger and Forever, but I’m sure something will come together soon. Over the weekend, I was able to begin fleshing things out a bit. Hopefully everyone will like the direction!

PW: Any other covers you’ve been working on that we should keep an eye out for?

CS: Half Brother by Ken Oppel (September 2010) hit the shelves recently and I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. Three others I enjoyed working on should also be released pretty soon: Gemini Bites by Patrick Ryan (March 2011), The Big Crunch by Pete Hautman (January 2011), and the sequel to Numbers by Rachel Ward called The Chaos (March 2011). I can’t wait to see how they’re received!

Kobo’s Ami Greko Talks to PWxyz

Craig Morgan Teicher -- September 3rd, 2010

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Ami Greko has worked at almost every kind of publicity and marketing job in publishing, and now she’s joined Kobo as senior manager of vendor relations (books). PWxyz caught up with her to discuss her career, her new gig, and the changing publishing industry.

What was your first publishing job?

Well, there are really about three ways to answer this–for those of you with limited time, the short version is that for a girl from the Midwest, a path to a real, live New York City publishing job is a long one.

There was the fabulous indie bookstore job in Kalamazoo, MI, and after that closed, the Waldenbooks in the mall. I copyedited scientific journals in Boston for a while.

But I always think of my first publishing job as being a publicity assistant gig at Viking Penguin, which I got as a direct result of the Columbia Publishing Course.

What are your duties in your new role at Kobo?

I’m bringing new publishers on board to sell their titles, working with current publishers to make sure we’re selling as many of their titles as we can, and of course, general cheer-spreading about ebooks and the digital future. I’ll be out and about at a lot conferences and events, so I’m really looking forward to meeting a ton of new folks.

It’s going to be a lot of fun, and along the way there may even be some of those drinks with little plastic monkeys hanging from the rim.

Publishing has undergone lots of changes since you started, going digital, losing review space, suffering lots of layoffs. How have those changes affected your work–obviously, your new job at Kobo is a direct result of those changes.
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