Changing Notions of Quality

Things keep moving along, that's for sure. Heard back from Francoise Mouly's assistant who said she won't have time for an interview while in Chicago. Not exactly surprising, but a bit of a bummer. It is interesting to start to see (and feel) the different stratification within the cartooning world. There's the populists, the socialists, the brahmans, and on and on.

I've finished importing all the interviews, which is good. It will be exciting to really get a chance to start playing around with editing John P. clips with interviewee's thoughts and so on, though it might have to wait until this weekend or Monday to really get into it.

The interview with Jeffrey Brown got bumped into next week again -- not surprising, as he really is one of the hardest working guys in the field with non-stop projects. Add to that a sick kid, and it's a recipe for interview postponement. He's always been super friendly and nice though, so I do look forward to sitting down with him.

In the 'wicked exciting news' category, I went to the bookstore yesterday to get some postcards to send to people who've done interviews so far, and guess who works there? Lilli Carre! Yah, it was a really great, funny, and slightly awkward meeting (awkward on my part because at first I didn't recognize her name). I told her about the film project, and she seemed excited, so I was going to go back today and see if she'd do an interview.

Lastly, today's clip is Ivan Brunetti talking a little bit about obscurity/popularity and the great equalizer of the internets. I've mostly been posting funny little outtakes, but this was a thought provoking piece of commentary, and I thought good to include it too so people don't just think I'm doing a comedy here.

In the 'funny news' category, this clip also marks Chris Ware's appearance in the film. Sort of. Chris, as you can imagine, has a tremendously busy schedule, and isn't available for an interview while I'm in Chicago. (ed. note -- I have the impression he has become -- whether he wants it or not -- the national poster boy for independent cartooning for folks not super into comics.As such, I'm sure he's deluged with requests every day, and I can certainly understand not being able to take each and every one on.)

But, he and Ivan are friends, and you'll see on the wall behind Ivan the original artwork for one of Mr. Ware's Rusty Brown strips. I should add, Ivan's office was really a dream for nerds like me. Julie Doucet drawing, Archer Pruitt s/n poster, not to mention scads of his own random doodles on loose pages across his desk. Anyway, enough with the fanboy crap, on to the clip: