A LONE VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS

...All John the baptist metaphors aside, (and we all know how he ended up, right?)......

Barry Windsor -Smith is a very nice man. Well spoken, honest and fiercely dedicated to being an adult in a retarded environment. He's also funny as hell. A craftsman, in the best sense, and artist of simply awe inspiring focus and intensity.

We started corresponding in the very last days of the millennium or there abouts. In many ways he is responsible for my continued life as an man of art. Without his advice, gentle kicks in the ass and concern, I well may have melted down into a very bad parody of myself.

I bring this up simply to point out there is , at least to my knowledge, a new interview with Windsor-Smith at his website that is pure Barry. If, as I do, you love the medium of comics I urge you to go there and read it....here's a taste.......

"Here, take a real step forward and break the chains of doom: DC, Marvel, Dead Horse, whatever’s left of Image, let’s challenge them all to change everything overnight or just admit once and for all that they are utterly incapable of preventing the demise of American comics publishing. Wipe clean their super hero schedules for just four weeks, and during that one month period publish comic books that are . . . let’s see . . . personal, that are sincere and honest portrayals of themselves. Or perhaps some person or persons that they know, or know of. Or the topic could be a whole nation, or perhaps their parents, or children, or themselves as a child, or what happened last week in a restaurant, or how they feel about a lost love, or a great writer, or anything at all that each individual creator or editor feels might be of interest to other people if your personal story or perspective was made available to them through the comics medium. If you can draw and write you can be the sole author; if you are just a writer or just a penciller seek collaborators like you always do. The golden words here are sincerity, honesty and openness and, given these gentle parameters, it will not matter one wit whether you cartoon as wonderfully as Travis Charest or string pearls [of prose] like Neil Gaiman. All you’ll need is an friendly editor to help you along, give advice and a bit of polish if needed. Imagine this: for just one month all of you laborers in the fields will step out of the pre-fabricated not-so-gilded cage of the comics corps of engineers to face the reality of . . . yourselves. It’s a dizzying thought, isn’t it? Scary! Could you do it and remain sincere at all times or do you envision a boy’s club joke fest like Not Brand Echh!, or those immature eccentricities largely initiated by Neal Adams in the early seventies?"

I laughed, I cried, I bought the tee-shirt.

Thanks Barry.

M.Z.

it's almost seven in the morning and I'm late for work.

m.z.