Two good interviews in the LA Times:
Jerry Robinson on being one of the early superhero comics greats who went on to a broad and successful cartooning career...
Quote:
“I did 32 years of political cartoons, one every day for six days a week, I wrote and drew every word, every line,” Robinson said. “That body of work is the one I’m proudest of. Looking at the Batman pages is like revisiting my youth. My first seven years in New York were the first seven years of Batman itself. While my time on ‘Batman’ was important and exciting and notable considering the characters that came out of it, it was really just the start of my life.”
...and
Michael Chabon on the eternal oppression of genre fiction by the literary establishment:
Quote:
Tolkien’s "Cauldron of Story" is one of my central ways of thinking about what I do. If you accept this notion, which Tolkien talks about in "Tree and Leaf," then you look at writers coming of age with me, what you see is a willingness to recognize that the "Cauldon of Story" includes not only recognizably literary elements, and root elements like folk tale and fairy tale and Bible stories which have always been acknowledged as part of the writers tool kit, but also this other material, which in turn is just further reflections and emanations of these fundamental kinds of stories.
When I’m 7 years old and reading Batman and Fantastic Four, I’m reading Greek myths and Norse myths, and I’m finding the mighty Thor in the pages of Marvel Comics, and it’s all just completely connected in my mind. It was all coming from the same place, as far as I was concerned.