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A brief interview at the Dallas Fantasy Fair focusing on Eisner's recent graphic novel The Building, in which he explores what happens to a building's soul after demolition. Eisner reflects on his urban upbringing as the source of his work's emotional atmosphere — drawing a parallel to Duke Ellington's "Harlem Air Shaft" — and on his approach to autobiographical material grounded in memory and the human condition rather than formal history.

Interview with the quietly prolific Marvel letterer, who has been in the business since 1940 and calls this his first interview after forty years. Rosen traces his entry into comics through his brother Sam, who lettered The Spirit for Will Eisner and got Joe his first job lettering The Blue Beetle for Fox just before Pearl Harbor. He recalls Marvel when it was "just Stan Lee and Artie Simek working in the corner of an office on Madison Avenue" and credits Marvel's institution of creator credits with making letterers feel prouder of their work. Known for the smallest lettering in the business — a necessity he developed to fit heavy scripts into tight spaces on a Sgt. Fury story — Rosen describes lettering about forty pages a week while working seven days, and notes that his current contract with benefits would have been "undreamed of" thirty years ago when he earned fifty cents a page.

Wagner, described by Comico colleagues as "the next Frank Miller," discusses Mage, his fifteen-issue series in which the protagonist Kevin is visually modeled on Wagner himself — a deliberate choice to take the comics trend of creators appearing in their own books one step further by making the creator and hero the same person. He explains that Kevin is the embodiment of the Eternal Hero archetype, and describes how Grendel, his six-issue black-and-white assassin series, grew from a desire to do a comic where the villain is the protagonist and where good and evil are deliberately indistinguishable. He cites Frank Miller and Will Eisner as his primary comics influences and reveals he has a Moon Knight back-up story completed but not yet submitted to Marvel.

Grandenetti recalls his origins as a background artist at Will Eisner's studio, describing Eisner as "like a god to us," and traces a career spanning DC war comics (as one of Bob Kanigher's main artists), Warren's horror magazines (where he had full creative freedom to experiment with layout), and collaboration with Joe Simon on offbeat features like Prez and "The Green Team." He singles out his Warren period as the most exciting of his career and his time at Eisner's studio as the most formative, and speaks candidly about DC's war books being so sanitized he could never relate them to his own Navy experience. By the time of the interview he had retired from DC.

The founder of Graphitti Studios explains how he pioneered quality licensed comic-character T-shirts for the direct sales market, having started with Dave Stevens' Rocketeer and Will Eisner's Spirit before word-of-mouth brought creators to him. Chapman discusses the frustrating difficulty of licensing from DC and Marvel (whose licensing arms demand unrealistic revenue projections for niche characters), the technical process of hand-separated and laser-scanned screen printing, and the current bestseller: a new Cerebus "Most Holy" shirt. He also previews upcoming expansion into cloisonné pins and a signed limited hardbound edition of The Rocketeer graphic novel.

Gilbert discusses his dual career working on Elric: Sailor on the Seas of Fate (layouts with George Freeman finishing art and coloring, Roy Thomas scripting) and his own creation Mr. Monster for Eclipse, explaining how the somber tone of Elric led him to create the deliberately over-the-top Mr. Monster as a counterbalance. He describes the chaotic coloring problems on the original Pacific Comics Elric series, the collapse of Pacific Comics (which he learned about the night before a cross-country move), and how First Comics picked up Elric. He also reveals that Alan Moore wrote a 16-page Mr. Monster story with a 40-page single-spaced script, and that he and Moore have had serious discussions about a Swamp Thing vs. Mr. Monster crossover — pending approval from DC's Paul Levitz. Gilbert praises the storytelling-first philosophy he shares with Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman, and is critical of the "Marvel method" for undercompensating artists like Steve Ditko who were effectively writing the stories they drew.

Canadian documentary filmmaker Ron Mann discusses Comic Book Confidential, his 90-minute theatrical film profiling comics history through interviews with ~45 creators including Will Eisner, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Harvey Kurtzman, and Stan Lee. He explains his outsider-to-convert arc, his focus on underground comics and censorship history (Kefauver hearings footage), and the film's festival run (Berlin, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal).

In a wide-ranging conversation, Loebs and McCloud discuss the appeal of Jonny Quest, the nature of the independent comics market, and Loebs's philosophy of honest, character-driven storytelling in Journey. Topics range from realism in adventure narratives and the limitations of the revenge motif, to the tension between writer and artist in collaborative comics, copyright law, and the role of comics criticism. Loebs also reflects on his artistic development — his debt to Will Eisner, his shift toward a more cartoony style, and his experiences working on Mr. Monster, Munden's Bar, and DC's Flash.

Wagner discusses the full arc of Grendel from its origins in the Comico Primer through its generational structure and the upcoming Grendel Tales anthology series, which he will oversee as creative director. He details the long-gestating Batman/Grendel crossover and the legal and financial complications surrounding Comico's Chapter 11 filing. Wagner also reflects on his artistic influences (Will Eisner's Spirit, Frank Miller, European albums, Japanese manga) and upcoming projects including a Three Musketeers adaptation for First's Classics Illustrated and an erotic graphic novel.

A wide-ranging career retrospective with the longtime artist of the syndicated soap strip Apartment 3-G. Kotzky recounts his early comic-book work in the 1940s for Will Eisner (on The Spirit) alongside Lou Fine, his wartime service, his postwar ghosting work for Milton Caniff, Stan Drake, and John Cullen Murphy, and how Apartment 3-G came together starting in 1961 with writer Nick Dallis.

In Part One of a two-part interview, Rovin recounts his entry into comics in the early 1970s, starting with Skywald under Sol Brodsky, then writing at DC under Dorothy Woolfolk and Joe Kubert. He moves on to running Warren Publishing's Captain Company mail-order operation under Jim Warren, witnessing the rise of Spanish artists and creators like Rich Corben, Will Eisner, and Bernie Wrightson, and shares colorful anecdotes about Jim Warren's eccentric personality and the events that brought the Warren empire down.

Heavy Metal's art director discusses the editorial process of assembling each issue from a vast backlog of European material (three years' worth in the office), his creation of the "June 2050" feature as a way to showcase American artists, and his disappointment that so many artists couldn't conceive of creating a single page without a writer. Passionately advocates for the auteur model in comics, naming Kurtzman, Eisner, Toth, Barks, Krigstein, Steranko, and Corben as genius-level creators, and argues that the fragmentation of comics labor into separate writer-penciller-inker-letterer roles dissipates the storytelling power that one person can bring. Expresses concern that American comics publishers are losing their traditional young audience by catering to continuity-obsessed fans while newsstand distribution collapses in smaller towns. Praises Frank Miller's Ronin as proof that "an American can shoot the Europeans right out of the water" and hopes Epic and other publishers will create more Heavy Metal-style anthology magazines.