THE BLOG AT THE CROSSROADS
Virtual Memories Podcast Interviews Paul Gravett!
Posted: February 5, 2014
Gil Roth’s 80+ minute interview with me on The Virtual Memories Show went live yesterday. Take a listen - here’s Gil’s intro and some quotes!
“Comics is a medium that isn’t going to go away. It may just now finally be coming into its own in the 21st century. In this internet era, there’s something very special about what comics do, no matter how much they get warped and changed by technology.”
Decades ago, cartoonist Eddie Campbell immortalized Paul Gravett as The Man at the Crossroads of the British comics scene. More than 30 years after taking on that role, Paul remains at the center even as the scene has gone global. We had an in-depth conversation about the growth of comics as an art form, the surprise of seeing local manga in Algeria, why he considers himself less of a comics historian or curator than a comics activist, and how it feels to have been the first publisher of some of the finest cartoonists of our time! Give it a listen!
“I’m probably slightly insane for wanting to go on looking and searching and questioning and provoking myself, trying to find stuff that doesn’t give me what I know already.”
Along the way, we also talk about his new book, Comics Art (out this week in the USA from Yale University Press), the new exhibition he’s curating for the British Library, Comics Unmasked: Art & Anarchy in the UK, the history of the British comics scene and his history within it, and the way virtually every lifelong comics reader’s home winds up resembling an episode of Hoarders.
The new episode of The Virtual Memories Show with Paul Gravett is available on iTunes and at our website, where you can download it or listen through the in-browser player. This one’s about 80 minutes long. You can also visit the archives for past episodes, or subscribe on iTunes so you’ll never miss an episode! (or skip all that and download the 43mb MP3 file directly from here).
Read The Blog At The Crossroads here.