Comics Interview — Issue #019

The creator of Neil the Horse (published by Aardvark-Vanaheim) discusses his deep roots in pre-superhero comics — Carl Barks, Milton Caniff, Floyd Gottfredson — and his disdain for superheroes, which he calls "a cancerous tumor" killing comics as an art form. He explains how his three main characters (Neil, Soapy, and Mam'selle Poupee) were designed around archetypal personality types to be universal and flexible, and describes his earlier career as a CBC radio broadcaster producing documentary programs on comics history. He reflects on the balancing act of making Neil simultaneously accessible to children and meaningful to adults, in the tradition of Barks, and mentions his new "Canine the Barbarian" parody strip.

The British artist, interviewed at his London flat, traces his career from underground comics and Nigerian strip Power Man through his defining run on Judge Dredd in 2000 AD, to his work on DC's Camelot 3000. He discusses the moral ambiguity he found fascinating in Dredd — "He is a component of a police state" — and his struggles with the book's delays, caused by his increasingly obsessive pencilling technique (spending up to two and a half days on a single page). He reveals that Alan Moore had written a synopsis for a Batman Meets Judge Dredd crossover that ultimately fell through due to inter-company complications, and mentions upcoming projects including a Munden's Bar story for Grimjack and a desire to do a Batman graphic novel.

In part two of his interview, McCloud discusses the Jungian archetypal framework underpinning *Zot!*'s four main characters, and his belief in the writer-artist as auteur — arguing that the best comics come from a single unified creative vision. He defends Zot! against the perception that it is merely a children's book, emphasizing its serious emotional underpinning including a major character death in issue #6, and connects the book's optimistic future-world premise to nuclear anxieties and a desire to reclaim naive, hopeful visions of the future. He also advocates passionately for mini-comics as a way for aspiring creators to develop their own voices outside the Marvel/DC system.

The colorist for American Flagg! — and in real life Howard Chaykin's wife — explains how she came to the job when Lynn Varley could not handle both Ronin and Flagg! simultaneously, bringing a background in textile design and color theory rather than comics. She describes the severe constraints of the four-color printing process (only 63 color combinations from three primaries at three strengths each) and the additional frustration of having hand separations introduce errors. She is currently coloring the American Flagg! graphic novel using a full-color laser process, which she finds far more expressive, and discusses her deliberate use of antiseptic pastels for the Plex mall environment to convey its dehumanizing sterility.

The co-editors of The Comics Buyer's Guide trace their history from science-fiction fandom in 1960 through pioneering comics fanzines (*Harbinger*, Comic Art, Newfangles) to their current roles at Krause Publications. They reveal that CBG's paid circulation has grown from 6,743 (Alan Light's last issue) to over 10,000 under their editorship, and describe taking on Comics Collector simultaneously — during which Don suffered a heart attack and triple coronary bypass surgery, leaving Maggie to edit all three publications alone. They advocate for a Best Of The Year comics anthology in bookstores to legitimize the field, lament the lack of complete comic-strip reprints, and note that reader demand overwhelmingly skews toward current superhero content despite their own preference for broader coverage.

DAK's brief editorial reflects on the pleasures of good conversation about shared passions, noting that this issue is particularly rich in substantive talk from a diverse range of creators and industry figures.