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Episode 188 – Hayley Campbell

Virtual Memories Show #188: Hayley Campbell

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“I love finding people who are obsessed with things. People who devote their lives to things are my obsession.”

Writer and Twitter provocateur Hayley Campbell joins the show for a conversation about her inability to describe her job (don’t call her a “content provider”). We talk about growing up in comics royalty (her dad is the great cartoonist Eddie Campbell), Alan Moore’s magic tricks, nearly losing a comic-shop job because of her lack of a college degree, the celebrity retweet she’s proudest of, and having an accidental career path, no fixed home, and a traumatic brain injury that gooses with her memory (and whether those three things are somehow connected). Also, we get into how she recently embarrassed Jonathan Safran Foer, and more! Give it a listen! And go buy her first book, The Art of Neil Gaiman (Ilex/Harper). And for God’s sake, go follow her on Twitter!

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“I think I’m more of a loser in real life than I am on the internet.”

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We also get into her obsession with obsessives, becoming the oldest person at her BuzzFeed office in her early 30s, the insanely creepy Moebius comic she read as a kid, the glories of Australian dentistry, digging through old girlie magazines to research her book on Neil Gaiman, and why she loves writing about boxing. We also compare notes on doing interviews with people whose work you love. Now go listen to the show!

“Dad won’t join Twitter because he’s afraid I’ll have more followers than him, and he’ll be ‘Hayley Campbell’s dad.'”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! You might like:

Follow The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!

About our Guest

Hayley Campbell writes for a bunch of places but then who doesn’t. She’s written a book about Neil Gaiman (The Art of Neil Gaiman, Ilex/HarperCollins) and if her face looks familiar it’s probably because she sold you comics once. Find her stuff on BuzzFeed, New Statesman, VICE, McSweeney’s, the Guardian, The Debrief, The Comics Journal, The Rumpus, Channel 4 News, Front, Planet Notion and Boing Boing.

Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, used with permission of the artist. The conversation was recorded at a pal’s apartment in NYC on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 Microphones feeding into a Zoom H5 digital recorder. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Mackie Onyx Blackjack 2×2 USB Recording Interface. Photos of Ms. Campbell by me.

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Episode 172 – Glynnis Fawkes

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Virtual Memories Show #172:
Glynnis Fawkes

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“A lot of how I draw comes from Greek vases. They’re like ancient comics.”

AlleEgoCover_400wGlynnis Fawkes joins the show to talk about archeology, comics, dig romances, Homer and more! We celebrate her award-winning new comic, Alle Ego, figure out how to make art while raising a family (hint: mine your family to make the art), explore the correlation of Greek vases to comics, lament the savage history of Troy and Gallipoli, while embracing the comics-centric world of Angouleme, and more! Give it a listen! And buy Alle Ego, the new installment of her book, from her store.

“We’re here now, but human experience goes so far back. Relationships, love, death: this has all gone on so long.”

We also get into her journey from the Pacific Northwest to the Middle East, her senior thesis on satyrs & maenads, the demands of drawing urns based on fragments, the best way to learn drawing comics, her move away from fine art, her life-changing experience at the Maison des Auteurs, and bumping into Alison Bechdel at the supermarket. Give it a listen!

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Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! You might like:

Follow The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!

About our Guest

27026892976_7bb45c8368_mGlynnis Fawkes is a cartoonist, painter, and archaeological illustrator. Her current project is a memoir about working as illustrator on digs in Greece and the Middle East. She drew many of the pages for this book at a residency at La Maison des Auteurs in Angouleme, France in the summer of 2015. She recently completed 50 illustrations and cover for John Franklin’s Kinyras: The Divine Lyre (Center for Hellenic Studies Press, 2016). Glynnis’ background is in art and art history: a BA from University of Oregon, a BFA from the Pacific NW College of Art, and MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Tufts University. During a Fulbright fellowship to Cyprus, she published a book of paintings, Archaeology Lives in Cyprus, and a book of cartoons, Cartoons of Cyprus. She spent almost 10 years working as an illustrator on archaeological projects and excavations in Cyprus, Turkey, Syria, Israel, and Lebanon, and continues to work in Greece. She began a doctorate at the University of Wollongong in Australia, but instead of finishing, married the famous archeo-musicologist John Franklin and had some children (now in school). She has exhibited paintings in Boston, London, Nicosia, Wollongong, at the Laura Russo Gallery in Portland, OR, and in Burlington, VT, where she now lives. She teaches a course in Comics at the University of Vermont and drawing at Champlain College. Glynnis is a member of the NY-based web comic collective Activatecomix.com and publishes on Muthamagazine.com.

Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, used with permission of the artist. The conversation was recorded at the Toronto Marriott Bloor Yorkville Hotel on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 Microphones feeding into a Zoom H5 digital recorder. I recorded the intro and outro on a Blue enCORE 200 Microphone feeding into a Mackie Onyx Blackjack 2×2 USB Recording Interface. Processing was done in Audacity and Logic Pro. B/w photo of Glynnis by me. Not sure who to credit with the color pic at the top.

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Episode 137 – Scott McCloud

Virtual Memories Show #137:
Scott McCloud – Tumblings

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“I want to be working, making comics, and knowing that the thing I’m doing right now is the thing I should be doing and I shouldn’t feel guilty about doing it. I’ve been able to keep that going much of the time for the last 20 years, and it’s kinda great.”

Is Scott McCloud comics’ leading theorist or a deranged lunatic? Find out in this lengthy conversation we recorded during SPX 2015! Scott talks about applying (and forgetting) the lessons of Understanding Comics in his new book, The Sculptor (First Second), the massive implications of crowdfunding for cartoonists and other creators, the problems with ‘balance’ in comics pages, his rebellion against Facebook, the Laurie Anderson model of comics, how he defines success, how to keep a happy marriage inside the comics world, and more! Give it a listen!

“We’ve never seen the consumer dollar at full strength. In traditional print markets, somebody spends a dollar on my work, and I get 10 cents at the end of that chain, that massive army of middlemen. Now we’re seeing what kind of world happens when the consumer dollar stays closer to a dollar. That army of consumers really has an enormous power to put your boat afloat.”

We also talk about his next book (on visual communication and education), his strengths and weaknesses as a cartoonist, making a 500-page comic book that readers could tackle in one sitting, why Reinventing Comics was like “trying to eat 10 lbs. of potato salad”, how every success story in cartooning is unique, the differences in working in print vs. working for the screen, and trying to be a scholar for the first time. Now go listen!

“Craig Thompson’s Blankets is probably off the hook now, because I finally did a comic even more sentimental. So now I made Craig look like Gary Panter.”

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We mention a few books in this episode. Here they are:

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! You might like:

Follow The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!

About our Guest

Scott McCloud is the award-winning author of Understanding Comics, Making Comics, Zot!, The Sculptor, and many other fiction and non-fiction comics spanning 30 years. An internationally-recognized authority on comics and visual communication, technology, and the power of storytelling, McCloud has lectured at Google, Pixar, Sony, and the Smithsonian Institution. There’s a more extensive and funny bio at his site.

Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, used with permission of the artist. The conversation was recorded during the Small Press Expo at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel on a Zoom H2n Handy Recorder and a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom H5 digital recorder. I recorded the intro and outro on a Blue Yeti USB Microphone. Processing was done in Audacity and Logic Pro. Photo of Mr. McCloud by me.

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Podcast: Feeling Gravett’s Pull

Virtual Memories – season 4 episode 5 – Feeling Gravett’s Pull

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“Comics is a medium that isn’t going to go away. It may just now finally be coming into its own in the 21st century. In this internet era, there’s something very special about what comics do, no matter how much they get warped and changed by technology.”

More than 30 years after taking on the role of British comics’ Man at the Crossroads, Paul Gravett remains at the center of the global comics scene. We had an in-depth conversation about the growth of comics as an art form, the surprise of seeing local manga in Algeria, why he considers himself less of a comics historian or curator than a comics activist, how it feels to have been the first publisher of some of the finest cartoonists of our time, and why he should be called Paul “Mission To Explain” Gravett. Give it a listen!

“I’m probably slightly insane for wanting to go on looking and searching and questioning and provoking myself, trying to find stuff that doesn’t give me what I know already.”

Along the way, Paul and I also talk about his new book, Comics Art (Yale University Press), the new exhibition he’s curating for the British Library, Comics Unmasked: Art & Anarchy in the UK, the history of comics and his history within it, and the way virtually every lifelong comics reader’s home winds up resembling an episode of Hoarders. Paul Gravett is  one of comics’ finest ambassadors, and it was a pleasure to talk with him during my recent UK trip. (Oh, and here’s a link to that Richard McGuire comic we effuse about!)

Paul Gravett Talks Comics Art on The Virtual Memories Show

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Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! Related conversations:

Follow The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!

About our Guest

Paul Gravett is a London-based freelance journalist, curator, lecturer, writer and broadcaster, who has worked in comics publishing and promotion since 1981. Under the Escape Publishing imprint, he co-published Violent Cases in 1987, the first collaboration between Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, three volumes of Eddie Campbell’s Alec between 1984 and 1986, and London’s Dark in 1988 by James Robinson and Paul Johnson. Since 2003, Paul has been the director of Comica, the London International Comics Festival. His very extensive bio can be found at his website.

Credits: This episode’s music is The Boy With the Jigsaw Puzzle Fingers by Karl Hyde. The conversation was recorded at the Hilton London Euston on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom H4n recorder. The intro and outro were recorded on Blue Yeti USB Microphone. Processing was done in Audacity and Garage Band. Photo of Paul Gravett by me.

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What It Is: 8/16/10

What I’m reading: I finished Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, the Scott Pilgrim comics, and The Playwright, a comic written by Daren White and drawn by Eddie Campbell. I enjoyed The Playwright a lot more than I enjoyed Campbell’s last big comic that he wrote himself, The Fate of the Artist, and it was a much more satisfying book than the ill-conceived adaptation of The Black Diamond Detective Agency. I need to go back and re-read The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard to see if I was judging that one too harshly. Anyway, I also re-read Wilson, which I enjoyed just as much as I did when I read it in May, and went back to Matt LaBash’s essay collection, Fly Fishing with Darth Vader, but that’s partly in the interest of clearing off my nightstand. I haven’t thought about what book I want to commit to next.

What I’m listening to: A random mix of singles and albums, none of which are coming to mind right now.

What I’m watching: Greenberg, Notting Hill, Matchstick Men, and District 9. I’ll try to write about them tomorrow.

What I’m drinking: Whitley Neill and Q-Tonic.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Visiting their golden retriever cousins in Connecticut, then taking a long greyhound hike the next day up at Wawayanda state park.

Where I’m going: Nowhere! Amy managed to get Monday and Tuesday off, so I tweaked the remainder of my vacation schedule to match that, but I think we’re just gonna stay in and do some house stuff and otherwise try to take it easy.

What I’m happy about: Learning that one of my pals is the subject of a new Paris Review Writers at Work interview. And clearing out a shelf and a half of books by admitting to myself that I will never write a novel about the epistemological implications of the Enigma machine and what it means to decode something. Even though it means I have to give up on using the title Tales from the Cryptanalyst. Which I still think is awesome.

What I’m sad about: One of the people on our grey-hike learned she has throat cancer and is getting what sounds like pretty aggressive radiation treatment.

What I’m worried about: What I may find when I’m cleaning out the attic today.

What I’m pondering: How you separate the questions, “What is the meaning of life?” and “Do you believe in an afterlife?”, both of which were posed to me by another person on our grey-hike on Sunday. She’s “conducting an informal poll,” as she put it, on the former question, and it struck me that it’s difficult to talk about that without making assumptions about the latter question.

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Lucky Seven

On this day seven years ago, I was

Now I’m

  • married,
  • living in my ancestral home, with lots of room for books,
  • keeping my weight around 40 lbs. below its peak,
  • retired as a book publisher,
  • working on the 100th issue of my magazine,
  • not planning any major trips,
  • starting Eddie Campbell’s Alec: The Years Have Pants, and
  • glad that I finished reading Gould’s Book of Fish, even though the other two books fell by the wayside.

And seven years ago today, I started this blog.

The world and I have gone through plenty of changes since that day. I’m happy that I’ve had Virtual Memories to help me try to chronicle it. To paraphrase Tony Kornheiser, I’ll try to do better next time.

Bonus: And we’re celebrating by having some glass guys remove the big smoked-mirror wall in our living room (installed by my dad, c.1989). Good thing they didn’t break any of those panels, or it’d be seven years of bad blogging ahead!