Why this blog? There are several reasons. First, some background.
I started publishing my own comics magazine at the age of 15 (Arken Sword, later just ARK), and then co-founded the crime fiction magazine Crime Time (still going strong thanks to the current editor), and then created the Pocket Essentials series of film and cultural books (again, new titles still being published). For many years I have (allegedly) been researching a biography of author Gerald Kersh, but have been too busy to work on it because of the day job editing film books for TASCHEN. My primary aim for each of these projects is to share my enthusiasm for comics, books and films with other people.
As a result of my endeavors it has been my privilege to meet and interview with quite a few artists and writers over the years. During the 1980s, I interviewed comics people like Jack Kirby, Dave Gibbons, Alan Moore, Kent Williams, Dave McKean, Will Eisner, Moebius, Dave Sim, Alan Davis, Alex Toth and many others. In the 1990s, I interviewed Edward Bunker, Patricia Cornwell, James Ellroy, Lawrence Block and George V. Higgins. In the Noughties, I have visited the archives of Michelangelo Antonioni, Roman Polanski, Ingmar Bergman, Michael Mann and Pedro Almodóvar.
Since most of the interviews are out of print (and some have never been published), I have decided to start this blog to share them with you. However, because of time and economic constraints there have to be some ground rules. First, I think I'll only have time to find, edit and upload about an interview a week. Secondly, I'm not going to have time/space to include everything, so I'll offer PDFs and text files which I can email to you directly for a minimal fee to my PayPal account.
I guess the first interviews I should find and post are those with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.
In addition to posting interviews, I'll also post any curious notions that pop into my head, and perhaps even bore you with some fiction. Let's see what develops...
