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Something for the Weekend

Down the River — An interview with Sean Howe, author of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, at The Phoenix:

Marvel is this narrative tapestry that all of these people have worked on and passed on. It’s sort of like television soap operas, but there’s something about that creative ownership that somebody has that’s not lasting, and the proprietary feeling that they have when something that they are a collaborator on doesn’t belong to them at all. It’s due to the way that Marvel ’s storytelling worked — Marvel Comics was this river that rushed by all these people, and they would throw their ideas into this river, and the river would just keep going on without them, it was bigger than any of them. And I think that Marvel is just an extreme example of that kind of thing which exists in the comic book industry.

See also: Sean Howe interviewed at Publishers Weekly; a review of the book at the A.V. Club; and for the (even) nerdier among you, a more critical review at The Hooded Utilitarian.

And on a semi-related note… Chris Ware interviewed by Tavi Gevinson for Rookie Magazine. It’s a little different from all the other interviews I’ve read with Ware recently:

Our memories are all we have, and even those we think of as “real” are made up. Art can condense experience into something greater than reality, and it can also give us permission to do or think certain things that otherwise we’ve avoided or felt ashamed of. The imagination is where reality lives; it’s the instant lie of backwash from the prow of that boat that we think of as cutting the present moment, everything following it becoming less and less “factual” but no less real than what we think of as having actually occurred.

Dead Comrades — D. J. Taylor on the writer Julian Mclaren-Ross, for The Guardian:

In strict category terms, the author of Bitten by the Tarantula (Maclaren-Ross’s titles nearly always leap up at you from the library catalogue) is a classic English literary bohemian in a tradition that goes back at least as far as Marlowe: one of those people who really do live their lives out of suitcases, whose books are ground out in a procession of rented rooms with the landlord’s boots resounding on the carpetless stair and whose best work appears in a brief window of opportunity before the milieu in which they operate rises up and drowns them. Certainly the form of Maclaren-Ross’s fiction seems intimately connected to the circumstances in which it was composed: written at night, Benzedrine tablets (“My pills”) to hand, in seedy west London hotels after a day spent bar-propping in the Soho drinking dens.

And finally…

Little SunJon Gray on his cover design for The Yellow World by Albert Espinosa, at Design Week:

The brief was: ‘read this amazing book and please give it an interesting cover’. I’m really lucky in that Jim Stoddart, the art director, gave me pretty much free-reign.
.. I thought that there was something appealing in the big yellow ball. Rather like Olafur Eliasson’s giant sun at Tate Modern a few years back. It’s warming and comforting on the eye. I also thought it would stand out against other books and without type would make you want to pick it up and find out more.

(via Theo Inglis)