Today’s USA Today has brief interviews with comic book writers Ed Brubaker, about Incognito: Bad Influences, featuring the return of Zack Overkill, and Grant Morrison, about the Batman Incorporated series.
“The people who grew up reading comic books are now in charge of pop cuture,” Brubaker says. Which is the same contention made by and about Doctor Who fans who, now adult writers, actors, directors, producers, special-effects folk, marketers, et al., took over the BBC and re-launched the longest running — and best — sci-fi TV show. (The next season airs on BBC and BBC America this coming April.)
You can read my earlier post on Brubaker here, and see the USA Today stories here and here.
David Small’s Stitches has been nominated for a 2010 Will Eisner Award, for best reality-based work.
You can see the list of nominees here, on the Graphic Novel Reporter site. My post on Small’s presentation in Michigan last autumn can be read here.
Other 2010 Eisner Award nominees on whom I’ve written recent posts include:
• The TOON Treasury of Classic Children's Comics, edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly, in the best publication for children category and in the best archival collection/project-comic books category
• Bill Willingham’s Fables in the best-continuing series category and Willingham himself for best writer
• Incognito, by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, in the best limited series or story arc category.
Issue number three of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s “The Sinners” just came out, part of their Criminal series. If you’re old enough to see over the steering wheel of your old man’s car, you ought to go grab a copy, as one of the characters might say.
As with their six-part Incognito series (about a witness-protection program for super villains), Criminal (about, well, criminals) offers a perfect blend of narration and art: Brubaker’s hard-boiled Mickey Spillane-ish text — “Her sadness … her loneliness … they got to a place deep inside him. Much as he hated to admit it.” — and Phillips’s anguished, scarred and scared characters — faces half in shadows, tormented eyes averted — move the story along at dangerous speed. You’re almost afraid everyone’s going to crash and burn before the murder mystery is resolved.
Take a look at Criminal. Then dip back for Incognito, now available in a collected edition, or the earlier run of the Criminal series, also now collected in one book.
