Condition of Mr. Segundo: Jittery of Gittis.

Author: Berkeley Breathed

Subjects Discussed: The disparity between illustrating a daily strip and audience reaction, blond-haired boys named Milo, The Phantom Tollbooth, literary references in Bloom County, receiving a onionskin letter to Harper Lee, picture books and moral dilemmas, film influences, the importance of fun background details in illustrations, foreshadowing, how screenwriting has shaped Breathed’s storytelling, the strengths and weaknesses of moving from hand illustration to Photoshop, pink and purple color schemes, 300, self-editing vs. producing art, beating the procrastination impulse in middle age, chasing the FedEx truck during the Bloom County days, the infamous Opus couch strip, on not being able to get away with certain forms of humor in today’s newspaper age, the generational gap between print and digital, and trying to lure younger readers to the comics page.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Breathed: Certainly, in the ’80’s, when I had fifty to seventy million readers, it was virtually impossible to put it in context that meant anything. And it begins to happen when you go from city to city and you meet people and they talk about your work in ways that you don’t think about it yourself. And it puts it into a different kind of context and it’s good. Because you come back home with a renewed sense of responsibility in some ways. Without getting maudlin about it, you do not take it for granted sometimes, as often happens, when there’s a lot of deadlines. Things almost become rote. And you forget that there are people waiting to read it and what they read, they take very seriously. Even in a funny way.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Scared of Larry.

Author: Austin Grossman

Subjects Discussed: Retconned culture, the human qualities of superheroes, origin stories, the postmodernist trappings of comic book continuity constructs, grad school vs. superheroes, writing while driving, how Grossman’s work on video games influenced his work as a fiction writer, Max Allan Collins’s A Killing in Comics, the relationship between prose and illustrations in a novel dealing with superheroes, the mainstreaming of geek culture, the unusual domestic living arrangements of Superfriends, secret identities, the problems of making video games based on superheroes, and reconnecting with 19th century literature.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Grossman: I feel like superheroes debuted as the sort of archetypical gods and every once in a while, they get retconned back to that — just to kind of refresh them. But I like them — I like them now! When they’ve had so much layered onto them. When archetypes have been established and now they can sort of start to live inside them and be a little more human. But I feel that, in liking them that way, I’m caught in some kind of cultural cycle. That that’s why I like them now and that, twenty-five years from now, people will like them as archetypes again. So I can’t really understand why I like them that way. It’s just that I do. I like to feel like they have a consciousness that I can relate to, that I can live inside, and yet are also godlike in some way.

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