Thursday, May 6, 2010

Because We CAN

Had to leave this letter at Jian Ghomeshi's Q:

Dan Clowes is a great drawn book author ("artist/writer/letterer/colorist/owns copyright,"), and a nice guy to boot.

But here are the dumbest questions he and I and ALL of us drawn book authors are asked by interviewers, with my answers (first heaving huge sigh):

"Did you draw that TOO?" (No, elves on crack did).

"How long did it take you to do a page?" (WTF does this one mean?  My answer: 52 years -- and I've been publishing since 1986.)

"Why do you do comics?"  ("Because I can write and I can draw.")

"Why did you draw it that way?" (Because I CAN)

"Who's your inspiration?" (WTF? Do ALL prose people think we're tracing other artists?  I was inspired by ancient anonymous tomb art, specifically Egyptian, Mayan and Scythian).

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE start writing smarter, more uncommon questions than this, the ones we all get tormented with.  Interviews are like programming:  GIGO.

Poor Dan....at least he doesn't get invited to the idiot eternal "Women in Comics" panels. But I would have loved to have heard some really good questions asked him, instead of the SOS we all get tormented with.  I'm about to do a t-shirt, I swear, with those questions on it....

5 comments:

desembrey said...

I never understand these "Women in ..." groups/panels/etc - there aren't any "Men in ..." or "Ethnics in ..." gatherings. Women are the 'minority group' who aren't actually a minority and somehow we can continue to be condescending to as a society?

Donna Barr said...

"condescended to." We're not the one condescending. And we're the ones with 35,000 more chromosomes, on average. I'm a little tired of these semi-developed kiddies looking down their unformed noses at us.

Anonymous said...

"Who's your inspiration?"
I must say I was a bit puzzled by your reaction to that one - "inspired by" and "have copied" are different things. I've been doing on-and-off work with interior artwork for role-playing games since the early 90s, and one of my major inspirations in that field was your illustrations for Traveller; I borrowed the idea of bringing a humorous mood into RPG pics and (for a while) having a recurring group of characters. That very question has been asked to me a few times, and I have replied "Donna Barr" on more than one occasion. Doesn't mean the stuff looks anything like yours.

Donna Barr said...

Maybe it's a difference in idiom. "Inspiration" to me means having a lot more to do full immersion in images or ideas. More of the religious side of the word. Maybe it's because I'm a Recovering Catholic -- that's always a good excuse.

Donna Barr said...

Oh, and thank you for thinking I was worthy to be an inspiration. Very flattered.