IPOD
RADIO
Jim Valentino
By Daniel Robert Epstein
May 29, 2007
If you grew up in the 80’s reading Marvel Comics you sure as hell know how talented Jim Valentino is. He had a great period at Marvel through the early 90’s with runs on Guardians of the Galaxy and several awesome issues of What If? He left Marvel along with many of their top creators to establish Image Comics, one of comics’ premiere companies. But throughout the independent comic book community Valentino has been hailed for his highly personal books, like the autobiographical Valentino and the satirical normalman. Just a few years ago Valentino dipped his two back into semi-autobiographical work with A Touch of Silver. But now he’s come completely back into autobiography with the special, Drawing from Life. I got a chance to talk with one of my favorite creators from his home in California.
Check out the website for Drawing from Life
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?
Jim Valentino: Today we are looking at some proposals and editing a cover mock, trying to get the colors right.
DRE:
Is it for one of your books?
Jim:
This is for one of the books that Shadowline is publishing.
DRE:
Which book?
Jim:
It’s called “Parade with Fireworks.” It hasn’t been announced yet.
DRE:
Is it by someone we know?
Jim:
It’s a new guy. He’s put it up on the web. It’s about his grandfather and the takeover of Italy during Fascist World War II.
DRE:
So it’s a lot different from the stuff you’ve been doing.
Jim:
We try to do everything different.
DRE:
It’s good to see you doing autobiographical work again. I’m a big fan from way back of that stuff. I bumped into you at Midtown Comics in Manhattan a few years ago. I think I asked you if you were going to do anymore Touch of Silver and you said that you weren’t sure because those books were really hard to do.
Jim:
Books like A Touch of Silver, Vignettes or Drawing from Life are the ones that touch a little closer to home. They are really hard to do because it’s almost self-evisceration if you will. They sort of tell me when they are ready to come, and that’s it, and I just go with it. I can’t force them.
DRE:
But it’s your choice to stop, right?
Jim:
Yeah. I’ve had a couple friends for the last several years bugging me to get back to it. I kept putting it off, probably giving them the same answer I gave you, “Oh, it will come when it’s ready, blah-blah-blah.” Then I moved up here to Portland, Oregon and within a month of being here, it just came. I went, “Okay, I’m going to do this book now.” The biggest problem was deciding which stories to tell and deciding what to title it because I didn’t want to call it Valentino because I always hated that name. I didn’t want to call it Vignettes because that was the name of the book. So I came up with Life Drawings or Drawings from Life and I settled on the latter.
DRE:
But Valentino’s your last name.
Jim:
Yes it is.
DRE:
How do you hate that?
Jim:
It just seems weird naming the book after yourself. I know people do it with albums all the time, but I felt very weird about it. Dave Sim insisted we call the book Valentino, and I wanted to call it Vignettes, but he told me people would mispronounce it. I was like, “Yeah, so.” He insisted on Valentino because he thought it was more powerful and would stand out because it’s a pretty powerful name.
DRE:
Didn’t he do a book that no one was sure how the name was pronounced, about an aardvark?
Jim:
[laughs] Maybe having gone through that experience once, he didn’t want to go through that again.
DRE:
How do you decide which stories to do?
Jim:
I tend to do the big, weird funny stuff. All the autobiographical stories are verbal stories first. So I say them verbally to friends, like over drinks and then get the timing down correctly and stuff like that. But a lot of times with these stories, you need some time to gain that perspective on them. I have a list of 10 to 15 different stories. I went through them and whichever ones felt right, those are the ones I did. It’s very organic. There’s nothing planned about it at all.
DRE:
How many kids do you have?
Jim:
I have three step kids and two sons.
DRE:
Do you ever do stories for them to eventually see?
Jim:
[laughs] They’ve seen them all. The youngest is 20 so they are all grown up. There’s a story in Drawing from Life called “First Day” that’s about Aaron’s first day at school and what happened, which was a parent’s worst nightmare for your child’s first day at school. Of course, it had to happen to me. There’s another story “A Day at the Beach,” which is about the step-kids when they were younger. None of them mind. They all think it’s crazy. When Aaron was a freshman in high school, his English teacher was taking roll call on the first day of school and stopped at his desk and read his last name and said, “Are you any relation to Jim Valentino?” Aaron goes, “Yeah, he’s my dad.” The guy paused and said to him, “Please tell me you’re nothing like him. I’ve read every one of his comics.”
DRE:
[laughs] What did Aaron say?
Jim:
He laughed and he said, “No, I’m not.”
DRE:
Either in the introduction to the Touch of Silver collection or the Vignettes collection, you wrote that these stories are difficult to write and they don’t really make that much money, so what do they do for you?
Jim:
I think they are the better stories I have to tell. Drawing from Life opens up with a two page story called “The Talk with Deni.” It’s about this conversation Deni Loubert and I had before the first Valentino book came out. She was apprehensive because she didn’t know if I should tell such personal things so publicly. I quoted a line from an old David Crosby song to her, something about how these are the difficult ones but they are the only ones worth singing. That’s true I think.
DRE:
Also in one of those introductions you call superhero comics “adolescent male power fantasies” and I use that line on a lot of comic book creators I talk to. Ed Brubaker is the only one to ever give me a good answer. He said, “No more than 24.” I thought that’s a really good point. I’ve read some of your more recent Shadowhawk line and they do seem to be geared more toward a younger audience, definitely more than the backbreaker Shadowhawk comics.
Jim:
One of the many reasons I stopped doing the Shadowhawk series was that it was getting more violent than I could handle and I was getting letters from kids saying, “Make him kill. Make more blood. Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.” I had a plague of conscious with it. I decided if I went back to the character, I would want him to be a bit lighter, more fun and that’s what I tried to do. The old Shadowhawk had no humor in it whatsoever and I wanted to change that.
DRE:
Do you still feel that they are adolescent power fantasies?
Jim:
Sure. Superheroes are misplaced sexual frustrations. Come on, guys in panties punching other guys in panties. How much more blatant can it be?
DRE:
I don’t read a lot of mainstream books, but Grant Morrison says he always tries to appeal to the intelligent 14 year old with his superhero books. But are these newer grittier mainstream superheroes all different aspects of the adolescent male?
Jim:
Yeah and I don’t say that as a negative. Therein lies the problem. In saying that, you understand what the genre is and what describes a hell of a lot of action movies, if not all of them. They are all the same way. But you can still walk into an action movie let’s say, The Terminator or Terminator II or Spider-Man 3 and you can sit down for two hours and fill your face with popcorn and enjoy the ride. You’re on a rollercoaster, so enjoy the ride. There’s nothing wrong with that. I was out the other night with some friends and I said I think I grew up at the perfect time. I was 10 in 1962, so I was right there at the cusp of the Silver Age. In 1972, I was 20 years old, I was right there at the cusp of underground comics and in 1982, I was getting into the field at the alternative comics. I was equally influenced by Curt Swan and Robert Crumb, by Vaughn Bode and Jack Kirby. There’s no difference between Justin Green and Gil Kane to me. I enjoy them both equally.
DRE:
I remember your story Snakes back in Vignettes and it had that wild inking style. For each autobiographical story you do, how do you decide what art style to go with?
Jim:
It tells me how to draw it. I just did the first story for Drawing from Life II, which I think is going to be called Still Drawing from Life and it’s done in sort of this Eddie Campbell-ish scratchy way. That’s the way I sketched it out when I wrote it out. It comes out exactly the way it wants to come out. I have very little control over it. I know that sounds weird, but it’s true.
DRE:
Are you planning any prose stories like you used to do?
Jim:
No, actually once I get the next issue of Drawing from Life done, I might tackle Touch of Silver again. If I do, that will probably be a prose ending because the story has an ending. So maybe a weird mixture of prose and illustrations with a few comics thrown in. I’m not really sure yet; it’s gelling into more of a prose story than anything. A Touch of Silver is basically about my parents’ divorce, but when I was writing it, I was going through my own divorce. So by the issue six, I was about ready to put my head in an oven. I was like, “Okay, time to stop this now.”
DRE:
Do you remember how many books you used to sell of those autobiographical books in the ’80s?
Jim:
No.
DRE:
Do you have expectations for this stuff?
Jim:
No, I don’t care. If it sells, it sells; if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. It doesn’t matter to me.
DRE:
Is stuff like Shadowhawk out there to support books like this?
Jim:
Not really. When I feel the urge, I like superhero comics. I don’t have an objection to them as a lot of people do and I like alternative comics too. Different things will hit me at different times and knock me upside the head and say, “Okay, time to a superhero story.” I do. Or time to do this, or time to do that and I just go with it.
DRE:
Is Drawing from Life going to be black and white?
Jim:
Yeah, I think pretty much all alternative-type or underground-type comics should be in black and white.
DRE:
What makes you say that with such confidence?
Jim:
They are just drawn differently. They are told differently, they are presented differently and they are just different books. Drawing from Life is drawn in a cartoony style with lots of crosshatching and stuff like that. There have been a few exceptions. There are a few underground color comics, but not too many. I also like black and white comics. It’s an aesthetic choice just as much as color or 3D or whatever is an aesthetic choice. You service the art; you service the story.
DRE:
Does anyone art assist you with this stuff?
Jim:
Nobody touches it. I send the dialogue past Kris Simon and she corrects my terrible spelling. [laughs] That’s it.
DRE:
I first discovered your name, though I probably had read your books before, with the Guardians of the Galaxy series. Then I went back and got involved in your older stuff. What was the reaction from the comics community when you went from being this guy who did very underground comics to doing mainstream Marvel work?
Jim:
[chuckles] I started out doing small press comic books. They used to be called NewWave Comics back in the mid to late ’70s. When I went to Aardvark-Vanaheim, I was called a sell-out. Didn’t bother me. [laughs] When I went from doing alternative comics to Marvel comics, I was called a sell-out; that didn’t bother me. When we left Marvel and started Image, we were called sell-outs again and again it didn’t bother me. I do what I want to do. If anybody has a problem with it, tough. I’m a true believer in whatever lifts your skirt. Have fun, do what you want to do and don’t worry about other people think. Who cares? It’s not their life, it’s yours.
DRE:
You sound very confident when you say this, but when you do a story about people calling you a sell-out you’ll be crazy and neurotic.
Jim:
If I had a story like that, I would.
DRE:
So there’s no secret story? [laughs]
Jim:
No. [laughs] I really didn’t care. My goal in life was to become a professional artist and a professional cartoonist and to feed my family by it. I didn’t want to stack tires at Sears. That was my goal in life. It wasn’t to be famous and it wasn’t to be rich and it wasn’t to make TV shows or movies or toys. It was just to make comics, that’s all it was.
DRE:
I read an interview where you said that people are bugging you to do more normalman.
Jim:
Yeah there were friends bugging me about. I go to a convention and people walk up to me with, “I love The Guardians of the Galaxy but I hate A Touch of Silver” or “I love Touch of Silver, but I hate your superhero stuff” or “I loved normalman, but I really hate this.” I don’t care. If you liked something I did, it’s a win. That I change audiences so much, and have such little crossover from one to the next is okay with me. I’m following my own muse and if they want to follow along, they are more than welcome to. If you don’t, well, maybe next time I’ll do something you like.
DRE:
Would you want to do Guardians of the Galaxy if Marvel offered it?
Jim:
Absolutely. I miss The Guardians of the Galaxy very much. On my messageboard, I posted what I would have done for the ending if I hadn’t been fired from the series. I sent it to Marvel as a revitalization of it, but I don’t think it was hip enough for them.
DRE:
I guess that was the end of it.
Jim:
Yeah, they know how to get in contact with me if they wanted to. I could certainly understand if they wanted to pass it off to someone else. It’s been a long time since I’ve done The Guardians of the Galaxy. My sense is that [Editor in Chief of Marvel Comics Joe] Quesada and others think my stuff is too old-fashioned or not cutting edge enough, which is probably true.
DRE:
Other creators have thought that and then they end up coming back.
Jim:
It comes around. Everything is cyclic. But if I did the Guardians again, I would want to start from scratch. I would want to correct the bad science I had to deal with.
DRE:
So even canceling out the stuff you did?
Jim:
Yeah, day one because current Marvel readers weren’t even born when that stuff was coming out.
DRE:
So I’m a big fan of Bomb Queen, which I know you do something with but I’m not sure what.
Jim:
[laughs] I publish it more or less.
DRE:
Are you the one that discovered Jimmie [Robinson]?
Jim:
Jimmie had done eight issues of a book called CyberZone and we met at a convention and talked for a little while. He had this thing called Amanda & Gunn that I published for him, which was sort of a continuation of CyberZone but wasn’t really CyberZone. We got along great and we’ve been publishing him ever since. I think everything he’s done, with the exception of a story he did for Marvel, has been published through me. I’m a big fan of Jimmie’s. I think he’s a great cartoonist, has novel ideas and he’s fun.
DRE:
When I first read about Bomb Queen, I thought it sounded fun but I didn’t think it would be as interesting as it is. He hides it behind her big boobs.
Jim:
Yeah, it just looks like a titty book at first glance, but really it’s a psychological satire more than anything. There’s plenty of sex and violence and all that other stuff in it, which again leads to psychological satire. But if you look below the surface, you are going to see an awful lot. I call the new trade paperback Dirty Bomb, 128 pages of just plain wrong.
DRE:
Are you bringing anything else of yours back into print?
Jim:
Normalman will be a giant, 432-page book that will look like the Marvel showcase books. A big, thick phonebook thing. Probably some time next year, we’ll repurpose Vignettes with some of the newer stories in it, but I’m going to do it in chronological order. There will be a reason for that, but it won’t become apparent until I finish A Touch of Silver. We may be seeing the finishing of Touch of Silver next year, I think. Other than that, I’m working on a Twilight Zone companion guide for the 1986 Twilight Zone series, which will be like an episode guide with interviews with the prominent writers.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
If you grew up in the 80’s reading Marvel Comics you sure as hell know how talented Jim Valentino is. He had a great period at Marvel through the early 90’s with runs on Guardians of the Galaxy and several awesome issues of What If? He left Marvel along with many of their top creators to establish Image Comics, one of comics’ premiere companies. But throughout the independent comic book community Valentino has been hailed for his highly personal books, like the autobiographical Valentino and the satirical normalman. Just a few years ago Valentino dipped his two back into semi-autobiographical work with A Touch of Silver. But now he’s come completely back into autobiography with the special, Drawing from Life. I got a chance to talk with one of my favorite creators from his home in California.
Check out the website for Drawing from Life
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?
Jim Valentino: Today we are looking at some proposals and editing a cover mock, trying to get the colors right.
DRE:
Is it for one of your books?
Jim:
This is for one of the books that Shadowline is publishing.
DRE:
Which book?
Jim:
It’s called “Parade with Fireworks.” It hasn’t been announced yet.
DRE:
Is it by someone we know?
Jim:
It’s a new guy. He’s put it up on the web. It’s about his grandfather and the takeover of Italy during Fascist World War II.
DRE:
So it’s a lot different from the stuff you’ve been doing.
Jim:
We try to do everything different.
DRE:
It’s good to see you doing autobiographical work again. I’m a big fan from way back of that stuff. I bumped into you at Midtown Comics in Manhattan a few years ago. I think I asked you if you were going to do anymore Touch of Silver and you said that you weren’t sure because those books were really hard to do.
Jim:
Books like A Touch of Silver, Vignettes or Drawing from Life are the ones that touch a little closer to home. They are really hard to do because it’s almost self-evisceration if you will. They sort of tell me when they are ready to come, and that’s it, and I just go with it. I can’t force them.
DRE:
But it’s your choice to stop, right?
Jim:
Yeah. I’ve had a couple friends for the last several years bugging me to get back to it. I kept putting it off, probably giving them the same answer I gave you, “Oh, it will come when it’s ready, blah-blah-blah.” Then I moved up here to Portland, Oregon and within a month of being here, it just came. I went, “Okay, I’m going to do this book now.” The biggest problem was deciding which stories to tell and deciding what to title it because I didn’t want to call it Valentino because I always hated that name. I didn’t want to call it Vignettes because that was the name of the book. So I came up with Life Drawings or Drawings from Life and I settled on the latter.
DRE:
But Valentino’s your last name.
Jim:
Yes it is.
DRE:
How do you hate that?
Jim:
It just seems weird naming the book after yourself. I know people do it with albums all the time, but I felt very weird about it. Dave Sim insisted we call the book Valentino, and I wanted to call it Vignettes, but he told me people would mispronounce it. I was like, “Yeah, so.” He insisted on Valentino because he thought it was more powerful and would stand out because it’s a pretty powerful name.
DRE:
Didn’t he do a book that no one was sure how the name was pronounced, about an aardvark?
Jim:
[laughs] Maybe having gone through that experience once, he didn’t want to go through that again.
DRE:
How do you decide which stories to do?
Jim:
I tend to do the big, weird funny stuff. All the autobiographical stories are verbal stories first. So I say them verbally to friends, like over drinks and then get the timing down correctly and stuff like that. But a lot of times with these stories, you need some time to gain that perspective on them. I have a list of 10 to 15 different stories. I went through them and whichever ones felt right, those are the ones I did. It’s very organic. There’s nothing planned about it at all.
DRE:
How many kids do you have?
Jim:
I have three step kids and two sons.
DRE:
Do you ever do stories for them to eventually see?
Jim:
[laughs] They’ve seen them all. The youngest is 20 so they are all grown up. There’s a story in Drawing from Life called “First Day” that’s about Aaron’s first day at school and what happened, which was a parent’s worst nightmare for your child’s first day at school. Of course, it had to happen to me. There’s another story “A Day at the Beach,” which is about the step-kids when they were younger. None of them mind. They all think it’s crazy. When Aaron was a freshman in high school, his English teacher was taking roll call on the first day of school and stopped at his desk and read his last name and said, “Are you any relation to Jim Valentino?” Aaron goes, “Yeah, he’s my dad.” The guy paused and said to him, “Please tell me you’re nothing like him. I’ve read every one of his comics.”
DRE:
[laughs] What did Aaron say?
Jim:
He laughed and he said, “No, I’m not.”
DRE:
Either in the introduction to the Touch of Silver collection or the Vignettes collection, you wrote that these stories are difficult to write and they don’t really make that much money, so what do they do for you?
Jim:
I think they are the better stories I have to tell. Drawing from Life opens up with a two page story called “The Talk with Deni.” It’s about this conversation Deni Loubert and I had before the first Valentino book came out. She was apprehensive because she didn’t know if I should tell such personal things so publicly. I quoted a line from an old David Crosby song to her, something about how these are the difficult ones but they are the only ones worth singing. That’s true I think.
DRE:
Also in one of those introductions you call superhero comics “adolescent male power fantasies” and I use that line on a lot of comic book creators I talk to. Ed Brubaker is the only one to ever give me a good answer. He said, “No more than 24.” I thought that’s a really good point. I’ve read some of your more recent Shadowhawk line and they do seem to be geared more toward a younger audience, definitely more than the backbreaker Shadowhawk comics.
Jim:
One of the many reasons I stopped doing the Shadowhawk series was that it was getting more violent than I could handle and I was getting letters from kids saying, “Make him kill. Make more blood. Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.” I had a plague of conscious with it. I decided if I went back to the character, I would want him to be a bit lighter, more fun and that’s what I tried to do. The old Shadowhawk had no humor in it whatsoever and I wanted to change that.
DRE:
Do you still feel that they are adolescent power fantasies?
Jim:
Sure. Superheroes are misplaced sexual frustrations. Come on, guys in panties punching other guys in panties. How much more blatant can it be?
DRE:
I don’t read a lot of mainstream books, but Grant Morrison says he always tries to appeal to the intelligent 14 year old with his superhero books. But are these newer grittier mainstream superheroes all different aspects of the adolescent male?
Jim:
Yeah and I don’t say that as a negative. Therein lies the problem. In saying that, you understand what the genre is and what describes a hell of a lot of action movies, if not all of them. They are all the same way. But you can still walk into an action movie let’s say, The Terminator or Terminator II or Spider-Man 3 and you can sit down for two hours and fill your face with popcorn and enjoy the ride. You’re on a rollercoaster, so enjoy the ride. There’s nothing wrong with that. I was out the other night with some friends and I said I think I grew up at the perfect time. I was 10 in 1962, so I was right there at the cusp of the Silver Age. In 1972, I was 20 years old, I was right there at the cusp of underground comics and in 1982, I was getting into the field at the alternative comics. I was equally influenced by Curt Swan and Robert Crumb, by Vaughn Bode and Jack Kirby. There’s no difference between Justin Green and Gil Kane to me. I enjoy them both equally.
DRE:
I remember your story Snakes back in Vignettes and it had that wild inking style. For each autobiographical story you do, how do you decide what art style to go with?
Jim:
It tells me how to draw it. I just did the first story for Drawing from Life II, which I think is going to be called Still Drawing from Life and it’s done in sort of this Eddie Campbell-ish scratchy way. That’s the way I sketched it out when I wrote it out. It comes out exactly the way it wants to come out. I have very little control over it. I know that sounds weird, but it’s true.
DRE:
Are you planning any prose stories like you used to do?
Jim:
No, actually once I get the next issue of Drawing from Life done, I might tackle Touch of Silver again. If I do, that will probably be a prose ending because the story has an ending. So maybe a weird mixture of prose and illustrations with a few comics thrown in. I’m not really sure yet; it’s gelling into more of a prose story than anything. A Touch of Silver is basically about my parents’ divorce, but when I was writing it, I was going through my own divorce. So by the issue six, I was about ready to put my head in an oven. I was like, “Okay, time to stop this now.”
DRE:
Do you remember how many books you used to sell of those autobiographical books in the ’80s?
Jim:
No.
DRE:
Do you have expectations for this stuff?
Jim:
No, I don’t care. If it sells, it sells; if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. It doesn’t matter to me.
DRE:
Is stuff like Shadowhawk out there to support books like this?
Jim:
Not really. When I feel the urge, I like superhero comics. I don’t have an objection to them as a lot of people do and I like alternative comics too. Different things will hit me at different times and knock me upside the head and say, “Okay, time to a superhero story.” I do. Or time to do this, or time to do that and I just go with it.
DRE:
Is Drawing from Life going to be black and white?
Jim:
Yeah, I think pretty much all alternative-type or underground-type comics should be in black and white.
DRE:
What makes you say that with such confidence?
Jim:
They are just drawn differently. They are told differently, they are presented differently and they are just different books. Drawing from Life is drawn in a cartoony style with lots of crosshatching and stuff like that. There have been a few exceptions. There are a few underground color comics, but not too many. I also like black and white comics. It’s an aesthetic choice just as much as color or 3D or whatever is an aesthetic choice. You service the art; you service the story.
DRE:
Does anyone art assist you with this stuff?
Jim:
Nobody touches it. I send the dialogue past Kris Simon and she corrects my terrible spelling. [laughs] That’s it.
DRE:
I first discovered your name, though I probably had read your books before, with the Guardians of the Galaxy series. Then I went back and got involved in your older stuff. What was the reaction from the comics community when you went from being this guy who did very underground comics to doing mainstream Marvel work?
Jim:
[chuckles] I started out doing small press comic books. They used to be called NewWave Comics back in the mid to late ’70s. When I went to Aardvark-Vanaheim, I was called a sell-out. Didn’t bother me. [laughs] When I went from doing alternative comics to Marvel comics, I was called a sell-out; that didn’t bother me. When we left Marvel and started Image, we were called sell-outs again and again it didn’t bother me. I do what I want to do. If anybody has a problem with it, tough. I’m a true believer in whatever lifts your skirt. Have fun, do what you want to do and don’t worry about other people think. Who cares? It’s not their life, it’s yours.
DRE:
You sound very confident when you say this, but when you do a story about people calling you a sell-out you’ll be crazy and neurotic.
Jim:
If I had a story like that, I would.
DRE:
So there’s no secret story? [laughs]
Jim:
No. [laughs] I really didn’t care. My goal in life was to become a professional artist and a professional cartoonist and to feed my family by it. I didn’t want to stack tires at Sears. That was my goal in life. It wasn’t to be famous and it wasn’t to be rich and it wasn’t to make TV shows or movies or toys. It was just to make comics, that’s all it was.
DRE:
I read an interview where you said that people are bugging you to do more normalman.
Jim:
Yeah there were friends bugging me about. I go to a convention and people walk up to me with, “I love The Guardians of the Galaxy but I hate A Touch of Silver” or “I love Touch of Silver, but I hate your superhero stuff” or “I loved normalman, but I really hate this.” I don’t care. If you liked something I did, it’s a win. That I change audiences so much, and have such little crossover from one to the next is okay with me. I’m following my own muse and if they want to follow along, they are more than welcome to. If you don’t, well, maybe next time I’ll do something you like.
DRE:
Would you want to do Guardians of the Galaxy if Marvel offered it?
Jim:
Absolutely. I miss The Guardians of the Galaxy very much. On my messageboard, I posted what I would have done for the ending if I hadn’t been fired from the series. I sent it to Marvel as a revitalization of it, but I don’t think it was hip enough for them.
DRE:
I guess that was the end of it.
Jim:
Yeah, they know how to get in contact with me if they wanted to. I could certainly understand if they wanted to pass it off to someone else. It’s been a long time since I’ve done The Guardians of the Galaxy. My sense is that [Editor in Chief of Marvel Comics Joe] Quesada and others think my stuff is too old-fashioned or not cutting edge enough, which is probably true.
DRE:
Other creators have thought that and then they end up coming back.
Jim:
It comes around. Everything is cyclic. But if I did the Guardians again, I would want to start from scratch. I would want to correct the bad science I had to deal with.
DRE:
So even canceling out the stuff you did?
Jim:
Yeah, day one because current Marvel readers weren’t even born when that stuff was coming out.
DRE:
So I’m a big fan of Bomb Queen, which I know you do something with but I’m not sure what.
Jim:
[laughs] I publish it more or less.
DRE:
Are you the one that discovered Jimmie [Robinson]?
Jim:
Jimmie had done eight issues of a book called CyberZone and we met at a convention and talked for a little while. He had this thing called Amanda & Gunn that I published for him, which was sort of a continuation of CyberZone but wasn’t really CyberZone. We got along great and we’ve been publishing him ever since. I think everything he’s done, with the exception of a story he did for Marvel, has been published through me. I’m a big fan of Jimmie’s. I think he’s a great cartoonist, has novel ideas and he’s fun.
DRE:
When I first read about Bomb Queen, I thought it sounded fun but I didn’t think it would be as interesting as it is. He hides it behind her big boobs.
Jim:
Yeah, it just looks like a titty book at first glance, but really it’s a psychological satire more than anything. There’s plenty of sex and violence and all that other stuff in it, which again leads to psychological satire. But if you look below the surface, you are going to see an awful lot. I call the new trade paperback Dirty Bomb, 128 pages of just plain wrong.
DRE:
Are you bringing anything else of yours back into print?
Jim:
Normalman will be a giant, 432-page book that will look like the Marvel showcase books. A big, thick phonebook thing. Probably some time next year, we’ll repurpose Vignettes with some of the newer stories in it, but I’m going to do it in chronological order. There will be a reason for that, but it won’t become apparent until I finish A Touch of Silver. We may be seeing the finishing of Touch of Silver next year, I think. Other than that, I’m working on a Twilight Zone companion guide for the 1986 Twilight Zone series, which will be like an episode guide with interviews with the prominent writers.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
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