Long-form comics, as I have now learned, are a slow business. Where a novelist will write the words “he sat in the living room and looked out of the window”, the cartoonist has to work out exactly what the living room looks like, where the window is in it, what the window looks like, what time of day it is, what ‘he’ is even wearing, etc. Comics are second only to animation in terms of its glacial pace of production versus a shockingly quick speed of consumption (my book of two years’ work takes about 45 minutes to read). It is an obsessive’s art form – stultifying, maddening, labyrinthine, torturous – and I absolutely love it.
Stephen Collins has put together a Director’s Commentary on how his book, The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil, came together. Head over to the Forbidden Planet website to read the rest!
The book is published next week, on May 9th. If you’re in London then, do come along to the launch party at Gosh! Comics - it’d be nice to meet y’all!
