STUFF SAID episode 58 features Erica Henderson, artist of Marvel Comics’s UNBEATABLE SQUIRREL GIRL and more. Listen to it here.
I’ve gone and started a podcast. It’s called “Stuff Said with Gregg Schigiel” and it’s a show of me talking to people in and around the world of comics, cartooning, etc.
Where can you learn more and hear it? Right HERE. (where you can also follow a link to subscribe via RSS and/or iTunes)
The first episode’s available now, with more to come…enjoy!
I was recently a guest on the podcast Drew & Mike Save the World, which would fall under the category of “conversational podcasts”. Some parts are informative, several parts are funny, and some of it’s a lot of three dudes talking over each other. So if you have an hour and a half and want to hear me chatting about comic book based movies, food creations, Harrison Ford, playing Pyramid, and more, check out Drew & Mike Save the World, episode 0009: “Topless House”, available on iTunes or at this link here.
I’m still going on and on about X-Babies out there. And in the event that you don’t regularly do web searches of my name, I’ve gathered a few here so as to share.
First up, an interview on the appropriately named site, Lots of Interviews.
Next, I had a brief chat with Rachelle up in Nova Scotia from the always pleasant and comics-positive blog Living Between Wednesdays.
Thirdly, the audio of my appearance on Comic Book Club (along with Jacob Chabot) is available on iTunes or here, should you care to give that a listen (though for those not familiar with comics and without the visual, it could be…challenging).
Jesse Thorn over at Maximum Fun (PRI’s The Sound of Young America and a series of podcasts) kindly posted the reference I dropped to his “Jordan, Jesse, Go!” podcast in X-Babies #2.
And finally, a couple of video interviews, both from the weekend spent at Acme Comics in Greensboro last month. The first of these is an interview with Dylan O’Connor, a very savvy interviewer despite his age:
And here’s my post-show, wrap-up interview with Julie, who helped out at the event and brought us delicious cookies and brownies.
I can’t explain the color changes to my flesh in the two videos, though it might have something to do with the different cameras used. I can explain, however, my seeming ignoring of the camera in the second video, as I was working on the last sketches of the night and people were waiting on us to get dinner.
Oh, and that fella sitting to my left in the video, that’s Jacob Chabot, artist on X-Babies.
And if all that weren’t enough: G-MAN: CAPE CRISIS #4 is on sale today, 11/17. The penultimate issue (and it’s got not only three more pages of PIX: TEENAGE AMERICAN FAIRY, but an all-new SAFARI JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL comic in there too). It’s a good one!
So X-BABIES #1 has been out for just over a week and reviews have popped up here and there. Some have been formal reviews, others discussions on newsgroups.
Reviews tend to range from the “this is fun” to “what’s the point of this?”. But overall reviews have been positive, mostly focusing on Jacob’s fantastic art and its uncanny cuteness. Phrases like “oh, and there’s a story too” were usually what followed a thorough heaping of praise upon Jacob (which he deserves). The occasional negative seemed more to question the motivations or reasons for the series less than the content. Hopefully they’ll stick around for the next three issues to find out. Though the other common negative was the cover price of $3.99, to which I cannot disagree. That four dollar price tag tightens my jaw, too.
So to that end, I thank each and every person who bought the first issue and thank in advance anyone who buys the next three.
But if you’re bored and want to follow along, here are links to all kinds of reviews:
One of the little joys of conventions is putting faces to names and meeting people who you until then only knew over the phone or e-mail, etc.
At this past Comic-Con in San Diego, I finally put a face to a name I’d first encountered nearly 10 years ago: Jamie Coville.
At the end of 1999 I was an assistant editor at Marvel Comics. I had pencilled a series of anti-drug Spider-Man comics that appeared in every Marvel Comic for several months. I was going to both write and draw a recently approved special project for Marvel. And shortly thereafter I was offered a job as a full-time illustrator for Nickelodeon in their licensing department. Lots going on. And amidst all that, a guy in Canada e-mailed me asking to interview me for his web site.
That guy was the aforementioned Jamie Coville and from the time of that request to the time the interview was posted (March 2000), I had officially left Marvel Comics to start work at Nickelodeon and the special project that was approved was summarily cancelled as I was drawing page six.
But the interview remains online as a kind of archival relic of where I was nearly 10 years ago. For those interested, patient, or bored enough to read it, it’s quite thorough, covering everything from how I got started to the day-to-day of an assistant editor to influences and long-terms plans/dreams. As this was the first time anyone had really shown any interest in me as a professional, I was quite a chatty Cathy.
And there was this now hard-to-believe-in-2009 question: “What kind of cartoon is SpongeBob SquarePants?” and my answer. Hard to believe there was a time where people didn’t know what is now the phenomenon of SpongeBob SquarePants (who is currently celebrating 10 years of being on Nickelodeon). Weird to realize I was kind of, in a way, part of that so early on.
So, if you’re bored and want to read more of my ramblings (albeit from a while back – though much of my thoughts still ring true to me), check it out here.
And more to the initial point, finally meeting Jamie Coville was great. I’m not sure in the moment at the con that I was properly able to convey what that time was like for me and how much fun and how flattering it was to be part of that interview. Jamie has, over the years, established himself as a comics historian with several web sites documenting the history of comics. You can find a couple of those here and here. and I guess I’m happy to be even a small blip in that history, thanks, in part, to Jamie Coville.
It was a pleasure to finally meet him face to face. Thanks for stopping by to say hi, Jamie.
Every year it comes, and every year you think you might be ready for it…but you never are.
The crowds and the scene in San Diego and at Comic-Con were once again bigger and more intense than the year prior. And again the same refrain was uttered: “It’s not even about comics anymore!” But, from where I was sitting in Artists Alley, comics were very much what it was about. Comics, comic art, superheroes… Way back in the southwest corner of the San Diego Convention Center – hundreds of feet from the big booths and displays set up by the various television and movie studios and video game companies – people were into getting sketches drawn of their favorite characters and meeting and chatting with the guys and gals who create the comics.
At least, that’s how it felt from where I was sitting:
(POV from my table in Artists Alley – A moment of calm – Sunday, 7/26/09)
With the announcement of the X-BABIES mini-series coming out October of this year, there was a flurry of press releases and interviews on a number of sites. For easy access, here’s a rundown, complete with links, so you can read a bit more about it and see the way my name has been misspelled (sometimes in the body of the same article).
First up, there’s this piece from Marvel.com, where my name was only misspelled once.
Next, here’s a bit from the Robot 6 blog, short and sweet with a link to the marvel.com piece above.
Newsarama.com posted an interview I did with them. They only got the spelling of my name wrong in the headline.
The article at comicbookresources.com attributed one of my collaborator, Jacob Chabot’s quotes, to me (the one about having read EXCALIBUR: MOJO MAHEM a million times).
Here’s a Q&A up at ign.com…who somehow credit Jacob and I for works we’ve never done (Deathlok for me and 2000AD for Jacob – never happened).
My friends Rob and Craig hipped me to this piece at io9.com, which also reports off the marvel.com release.
Someone even blogged about it at their blog, Full.Body.Transplant.
And here’s a site, superpouvoir.com, translated from French, talking about it (they don’t seem to excited…and apparently Jacob Chabot translates to Jacob Chub, which made me chuckle).
And here are some folks on a newsgroup talking about it, not all of it in glowing terms.
So that’s a whole lot of X-BABIES stuff right there. Soon, I might even talk about some of the other stuff I’m working on…
I’ve been interviewed by the internet! Rebecca Buchanan at Sequential Tart conducted an e-mail interview recently and it’s up for viewing/reading now. Check it out HERE if you’re interested in what I think of things.
Gregg.