Eldritch Kid production diary
Sunday, December 10th, 2006 at 11:20 amIn my humble view, too many comics and graphic novels are let down by ho-hum writing. The art looks great but the characters are talking McDialogue. Not so Eldritch Kid, the occult western brainchild of Christian Read and Christopher Burns. I love westerns. I love them even more when the characters are intelligent and the writing is infused with the muse. EK is a trip but its dusty boot-heels are on the ground. The artwork is stylish, robust and clear, and the art and writing are very happily married. The Read-Burns team now has an Eldritch Kid production diary online, which I’m going to be keeping an eye on. Clap your hands if you believe in cowboys, and check out Christian’s personal homage. As a fellow Aussie, I know what he means here:
“Cowboy movies reminded me of where I lived. Frontiers. Look one way, schools and shops. Turn the other, scoria and heat as far as I could ever see. Its funny, so much early Australian art, done by pale Victorian Englishmen involves pallid, overdressed figures staring into illimitable horizons, overwhelmed by scale. John Ford and Sam Fuller movies have that same feeling of overwhelming scope of land. Cowboys were there from the start for me and living big inside of my brain.”
December 10th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
I amma gonna read THE SOUND AND THE FURY for my english class!!!!!!!!!!!
I LOVE NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE TOO!!
December 11th, 2006 at 7:03 pm
It’s weird, I’ve never liked many traditional westerns - Louis L’Amour or old Clint Eastwood movies - something about them just bugs me. The movies make my eyes hurt and the whole cowboys and Indians routine I always found boring. But the more modern interpretations on the theme, especially fantasy westerns, I utterly adore.
Eldritch Kid looks interesting. I’ll have to see if they’ve got it in stock at my bookstore.
December 11th, 2006 at 10:02 pm
Hey, yeah, I love westerns. My great-grandfather came to the Colorado rockies for the gold-rush, and now the family is in…ahem. Tourism. But while I didn’t grow up in the West, I spent a lot of time out there, drenched in the dusty mystique. The Old West is sort of the collective American fantasy, I think.
December 13th, 2006 at 10:57 am
And I think Australians kind of share in the fantasy. At least, there are overlaps between our own wild gold rush days and the Old West. Unfortunately, we didn’t preserve out history so well; a lot of the characters from that time in Australia have been forgotten. Our government prohibited “bushranger” films on account of being worried that they’d corrupt public morals. So generations of Aussies grew up watching American westerns instead.
The first westerns I ever enjoyed were the Clint Eastwood ‘Man With No Name’ spaghettis. Before that, though, I loved the Mad Max films, which invent an Australian frontier mythology but locate it in the future, where, I suppose, there’s more room to play. This was back when Mel Gibson’s masochism manifested harmlessly in him wearing leather and getting beaten up a lot, long before he got into the crucifixion kink.
December 13th, 2006 at 9:31 pm
Oh, and the aforementioned Colorado goldmining relative started out in Australia. Well, he was English, worked for the Bank of England somewhere in Western Australia, returned home for a brief time, then headed out for the goldfields.
December 14th, 2006 at 7:13 pm
I can imagine the ‘Bank of England somewhere in Western Australia’ at that point in history. Probably a very handsome neoclassical building in the middle of a small favela in a dry creek bed.
Some of my relatives ended up in the States, too. According to Mark Twain, there was no difference between Australian and American accents back then. Wonder what we all sounded like…
December 14th, 2006 at 9:33 pm
Seriously, the same accent? Accents are kind of my thing, or one of my things. I’m going to have to think about that…