Go read THE COMICS JOURNAL #300
Last week, I finally got my copy of The Comics Journal #300, the final issue of the current incarnation of the Journal. After this, it'll become a once or twice a year event which may or may not be the wisest move for the magazine. While TCJ has been known to crawl up its own but on plenty of occasions, it's always featured some of the best writing and interviews about comics. I know that the Journal has the reputation of being unfriendly towards the mainstream but, in the last few years, it's featured some great interviews with everyone from Brian Michael Bendis to Norwegian artist Jason. I still think the Bendis interview from around 3-4 years ago is the quintessential Bendis interview. You can go here to find an archive of full reviews and excepts from the past years. The Journal has always been full of great interviews. I think they may have topped themselves with #300 where instead of straight-forward interviews, they have a number of writers, artists and cartoonists talking with each other. The idea is to have a younger comic creator talking with an older one and the conversations are just completely engrossing. Each conversation goes off into interesting and fascinating areas. Starting with the Art Spiegelman/Kevin Huizenga discussion about art, through the discussions of the similarities and differences of the American and French comic industry by Sammy Harkman and Jean-Christophe Menu, I haven't been able to put this magazine down yet. I'm currently on the Dash Shaw/David Mazucchelli conversation (another fascinating discussion about art) but have been flipping ahead to the Ho Che Anderson/Howard Chaykin and the Matt Fraction/Dennis O'Neil conversations that are more about the business of comics and the life of comics than they are about the heady ideas of art. But it's all fascinating and gripping. If this is what the Journal could have produced more of, conversations between different artists, I would have loved to see more of it in print. So far, I haven't found anything gripping yet on the Journal's new website but it's still early. There's a feeling that the Journal is finally trying to redefine itself for the web-age something that, honestly, it should have done years ago.