Alex Abad-Santos has a couple of interviews in Vox with the creators of God Loves, Man Kills, the seminal X-Men graphic novel that debuted 35 years ago. For many avid comic readers at the time –including myself– this was an eye-opening paradigm shift in what stories “comics” could tell.
(For ardent comic/graphic novel historians raising their hands to point out the work of Will Eisner, I was too young to read A Contract with God when it came out in ’78 and only learned about it and its follow-ups in the 90s).
While I dislike the conceit of mixing the two interviews so they could be misconstrued as one joint interview –and I hope this doesn’t become a norm– both writer Chris Claremont and artist Brent Anderson have several great insights into the work and their approach to storytelling in general.
One of my favorite quotes:
“Comics produced through avoidance of the real world are hardly satisfactory on any meaningful artistic level.” ~Brent Anderson
The whole piece is well worth a read.