How to use this Page

Have you ever written a scary story? In honor of the Halloween season, we are interviewing horror writers to learn about the craft of scaring readers.

We sat down with comics creator I.N.J. Culbard to discuss his new graphic novel, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Culbard adapted the story from H.P. Lovecraft’s novel. Check out the highlights from our interview below…

Q: How did you land your first book deal?
A: Back in 2004 I was enrolled in The New Recruits programme set up by Dark Horse comics. I had two stories appear in an anthology there and a short while after that, 2000AD publisher Rebellion published a short strip of mine called “Monsters in The Megazine.” Following the work I did there I got in contact with artist D’Israeli, who put me in contact with a long time collaborator of his, Ian Edginton.

(more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

BY JEN VAUGHN – On October 21st, Stephen Bissette from The Center for Cartoon Studies met up with Oliver Goodenough from The Vermont Law School to discuss Jack Kirby and his relationship with Marvel Comics. The Comics Journal put the audio up and it is a good listen with a nice James Sturm introduction. It was standing/sitting on the floor room only as law students and cartooning students mingled in the law classroom in South Royalton, Vermont.

Bottom line: get it in writing before you do the work. Listen for cartoonist Alec Longstreth’s Carl Barks/Disney question too!

Goodenough and Bissette

From TCJ:

Professor Oliver Goodenough’s research and writing at the intersection of law, economics, finance, media, technology, neuroscience and behavioral biology make him an authority in several emerging areas of law. He is a Professor of Law and the Director of Scholarship at the Vermont Law School. His is also currently a Faculty Fellow at The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, where he is co-director of the Law Lab project. Prof. Goodenough holds many appointments and has written on a vast array of subjects including the topic of today’s conversation, intellectual property and the transmission of culture.

Stephen R. Bissette has won many industry awards in his quarter-century in comics as a cartoonist, writer, editor and publisher and is best-known for Saga of the Swamp Thing and his self-published  horror anthology Taboo. His efforts in comics and publishing have provided fuel for many films including Constantine, From Hell, and TMNT II: Secret of the Ooze. He is a founding faculty member at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vt. and has been a champion for creator rights for decades.

–

Jen Vaughn is a freelance cartoonist, librarian an

Steve Bissette is second to none when it comes to well-sourced, exhaustively thorough and stimulatingly thoughtful writings on culture, so his new book TEEN ANGELS & NEW MUTANTS should be quite the read. It’s a 400-page look at BRAT PACK, the great GN by Rick Veitch that is criminally underrated. Along the way, Bissette “offers a crash-course on teen pop culture and superhero sidekick history, provides fresh analysis of Dr. Fredric Wertham’s seminal books, ponders real-world “new mutants” like Michael Jackson, The Olsen Twins, and Justin Bieber, and charts the 1980s comicbook explosion and 1990s implosion–and more.”

Amazingly, while EW’s comics coverage has been spotty of late, here’s an awesome interview with Bissette in Shelf Life:

Brat Pack is not a graphic novel that tends to get mentioned in the same breath as, say, Watchmen or The Dark Knight Returns, when people talk about all-time great comics. Do you think it’s of a comparable quality?

I think so. It was, if you will, the underground answer to Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. I would also say that Kevin O’Neill’s Marshal Law is another of that same breed, same time period. Does it get as much attention? Of course not. It’s under the radar for most people. And that was another reason for seeing through this book project, to be honest. I think Brat Pack does deserve the attention.