James Harvey
01-17-2002, 10:30 AM
Next week, Volume 1 and Volume 2 of 9-11 volumes will hit comic shops. Produced by Dark Horse/Chaos/Image and a coalition of publishers, and DC Comics respectively, the two volumes offer up reactions and responses from comic creators throughout the industry to the attacks or September 11th in New York and Washington, D.C. The comic website <a href="http://www.comicon.com/newsarama">Comic Newsarama</a> talked to DC Publisher Paul Levitz to discuss the process behind such a volume of work, what went into the volume, and hopefully, what will come out of it in the minds of readers. Below is an excerpt from one of the best interview (in my opinion) ever conducted:
<a href="http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=12&t=000108"><img src="http://www.comicon.com/gallery/categories/DC_Comics/thumbs/Superman911_t.jpg" align="right" border=0></a>PL: There were creative people immediately agitating for doing something. The office was back up to some sort of functionality by maybe Thursday or Friday of that week. Certainly by Friday, there were either phone calls to us form people either wanting to do something, wanting to know what we were going to do, how they could help, what could be done. The discussion rolled from there.
NRMA: One of the core questions that comes from seeing these tribute books for a lot of fans is why? You touch on this issue a little in your introduction when you talk about the need for creative people to express themselves in this manner. Can you elaborate on that?
PL: Historically, when comic guys have gotten together to do tribute books, usually the primary goal has been, “There are kids starving in Africa, let’s all do an extra day’s work and see if we can have one less kid starve.”
That’s a wonderful and noble goal, and I’ve participated in projects like that over the course of my life as a writer. This was fundamentally a different one. This was so unsettling to everyone’s sense of the world in which we live, that writers and artists needed to react. They needed to say, “Look at the courage this person had” or “Oh my God, don’t lynch that person just because they have some genetic connection to someone who did something awful” or “This is how I see the world.” They wanted to reach out to people and tell that story. Writers and artists aren’t always great conversationalists, they’re not great people at standing up on the stage and doing a one-man show, they’re writers and artists. This is what we do. This is how we get that stuff out of our soul and out there for people to share. It’s what drives us. The stimulus here was so extraordinary, that it pulled everyone together in a very short period of time.
My old alma mater is down there, and the high school students who witnessed all of this, and who participated in it felt the same kind of urge, and managed in the course of a similar period of time to put together a magazine issue, talk the New York Times into running it as an insert, and talk a foundation into funding the money necessary to do it to get 800,000 copies out of a set of photo essays about their feelings and perceptions. I think these are two sides to the same scale. One, the sense of personal witness to what’s gone on, and the other the sense of storytellers witness of trying to add meaning from a distance.
To read the entire interview, click the image or click <a href="http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=12&t=000108">HERE</a>.
<a href="http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=12&t=000108"><img src="http://www.comicon.com/gallery/categories/DC_Comics/thumbs/Superman911_t.jpg" align="right" border=0></a>PL: There were creative people immediately agitating for doing something. The office was back up to some sort of functionality by maybe Thursday or Friday of that week. Certainly by Friday, there were either phone calls to us form people either wanting to do something, wanting to know what we were going to do, how they could help, what could be done. The discussion rolled from there.
NRMA: One of the core questions that comes from seeing these tribute books for a lot of fans is why? You touch on this issue a little in your introduction when you talk about the need for creative people to express themselves in this manner. Can you elaborate on that?
PL: Historically, when comic guys have gotten together to do tribute books, usually the primary goal has been, “There are kids starving in Africa, let’s all do an extra day’s work and see if we can have one less kid starve.”
That’s a wonderful and noble goal, and I’ve participated in projects like that over the course of my life as a writer. This was fundamentally a different one. This was so unsettling to everyone’s sense of the world in which we live, that writers and artists needed to react. They needed to say, “Look at the courage this person had” or “Oh my God, don’t lynch that person just because they have some genetic connection to someone who did something awful” or “This is how I see the world.” They wanted to reach out to people and tell that story. Writers and artists aren’t always great conversationalists, they’re not great people at standing up on the stage and doing a one-man show, they’re writers and artists. This is what we do. This is how we get that stuff out of our soul and out there for people to share. It’s what drives us. The stimulus here was so extraordinary, that it pulled everyone together in a very short period of time.
My old alma mater is down there, and the high school students who witnessed all of this, and who participated in it felt the same kind of urge, and managed in the course of a similar period of time to put together a magazine issue, talk the New York Times into running it as an insert, and talk a foundation into funding the money necessary to do it to get 800,000 copies out of a set of photo essays about their feelings and perceptions. I think these are two sides to the same scale. One, the sense of personal witness to what’s gone on, and the other the sense of storytellers witness of trying to add meaning from a distance.
To read the entire interview, click the image or click <a href="http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=12&t=000108">HERE</a>.