Comics News
Happy 10th Birthday Tripwire Online Part One
Celebrating A Website Milestone
2025 is the 10th anniversary of Tripwire’s online home and here’s the first of our 10 quotes taken from some of Tripwire’s most notable interviews and features created for online over the past decade…
- Raising The Flagg. Paul Neal spoke to comics legend and Prince of Comics Howard Chaykin in 2022 for the site about a career in comics and more:
TW: What were the first comics you remember enjoying?HOWARD CHAYKIN: In the summer of 1955, coincidentally the year in which the Comics Code Authority infantilised the product and the audience in one stroke, I was four years old. Two somewhat older cousins, both well-spoiled, had been instructed by their mother, my aunt, to get rid of the massive pile of comic books that had accumulated in their finished basement. They dumped them all into a box that had once held a refrigerator, half filling it, and gave it to me on my grandmother’s lawn. I climbed in, and luxuriated on this pile of paper, colourful in a way I’d never seen before. The box contained every genre then imaginable in comics. I knew, not of course in so many words, that this was work product, that someone made this. I knew as well that I wanted to be one of those people. Within a year, I was reading on a fourth-grade level. My parents, idiots both, identified this phenomenon as the result of some sort of genetic anomaly. I have no recollection of what I first read in that box. I do recall that the only genre which held no interest to me was horror, a distaste that persists today. I also recall that a few years later, Blackhawk was the first comic book I ever stole.
Read the whole chat here.
https://tripwiremagazine.co.uk/headlines/tripwire-speaks-to-comics-legend-howard-chaykin/
2. Inside The Mind Of A Fine Art Original. Joel Meadows spoke to illustrator and fine artist Jeremy Mann back in 2017 about a career in art and his two monograph books:
TW: The second volume definitely seems to focus more on your portraits than your landscapes and cityscapes. Does this reflect more where you currently are as an artist?
JEREMY MANN: Indeed. Artists need to grow and change and artists need to create the things which resound to them the most in the changing times of their lives. Having gone from suburbia to the big city at the time when I was studying art, the excitement of those new surroundings infused themselves into the paintings I was creating. An artist can paint anything they desire in their own style, or voice, and find it not only liberating, but exciting through the struggle to that realization. And, secondly, an artist should paint mostly the things they love (in terms of: inspired by, interested in, and infused with a passion for). The last few years, having moved from the city to a house in suburbs again, living in a more solitary state, my desires have turned inward to the worlds of emotional connection, dreams, stories, and all the mish-muck our torrid little dramas play during our time on stage. Cityscapes have qualities I love to paint for reasons other than figures and will forever be a large part of me, but these days the balance has shifted to these beautiful creatures of melancholy, a shift which I am aware of in self-reflection which lets me know I’m on the right bumpy path.
read the whole interview here.
3. Chuck Palahniuk Talks Fight Club 3. Joel Meadows talks to modern writing legend Chuck Palahniuk about Fight Club 3 for Dark Horse Comics back in 2018.
TW: This is the second sequel to Fight Club and once again it’s a comic series rather than a novel. What are the advantages for you as a writer to create this as a comic rather than as a prose novel?
CP: Both the novel and the film have established their audiences. They’d both be tough acts to follow, that’s why the third interpretation had to be as a comic. I’ve since fallen in love with the ordeal of writing a comic script, and the license it allows me. I can depict things that would be forbidden in film — the army of dying kids from FC2 — and depict things that would seem too unreal and phony if presented in just prose. It’s that ability to portray a Little Nemo in Dreamland fantasy that prompted me to do Fight Club 3. Picasso said something like Art is the lie that tells the truth better than the truth. I wanted to use comics to depict an Art Bell, Ground Zero, late night-radio type of story using the established Fight Club characters. Our fantasies tell a greater truth about us.
read the whole interview here
4. Walter Simonson Talks Ragnarok: The Breaking Of Helheim. Back in 2019, Tripwire spoke to comics legend Walter Simonson about his third Ragnarok series,The Breaking Of Helheim.
“The first issue is almost a standalone issue where it’s really Thor having a vision that actually allows me to draw the actual events of Ragnarok. These are pretty much the events in the myth except for Thor’s lack of participation.
So at the end of it the bad guys have won, the gods are dead and Thor having had this vision decides that he needs to go to Helheim which is the realm of the dead to do one thing and find out two things,” he explains, then draws a breath and continues to explain what is happening.
“One thing he wants to do is stop the dead, the draugar, from coming out into what’s left of the nine worlds into the Dusklands. He also wants to know what happened to Hel herself, Loki’s daughter who was a ruler of Helheim. In the mythic poetry it describes all of these events, but Hel herself is not really mentioned again after the beginning of Ragnarok. So we don’t know what happened to her or what her fate was. That gave me plenty of room to answer loads of questions. So he wants to find out what happened to her. After all, she was responsible for allowing the great ship Naglfar to be built which brought the dead, so many enemies of the gods, into the final battle. He also wants to find out what happened to his brother Baldur. Baldur’s death was engineered by Loki although it wasn’t actually Loki’s hand that killed him. And that’s really the beginning of the event of Ragnarok.”
Read the whole thing here.
5. Artists Talk About The Right Way To Draw Batman. In August 2024, Tripwire’s contributing writer Paul Neal talked to a number of artists about how they approached drawing Batman.
Bo Hampton
Artist, Batman Castle of the Bat, Batman Legends of the Dark Knight, Saga of Swamp Thing.
Bo: My preference for The Batman’s cowl and ears is the way Mike Kaluta did it. I believe the ears were inverted for the first time at that point. As far as the actual head it’s a toss-up between Mike and Bernie Wrightson. I fall squarely into the white eyes and protected thick neck Neal Adams used. My painting approach was watercolour and purely my own take on it.
Denys Cowan
Artist, The Question, Detective Comics
DC: There are times when I draw Batman’s “face” when i’m thinking about it as a whole unit..not a mask on a guy. Other times, It’s bruce Wayne in a mask which is different.
TW: Also should he be a practical superhero, or a spectre that lurk in the shadows?
DC: Batman is a nighttime hero, he should always operate in the shadows!TW: Also could you say who your personal favourite Batman artist is?DC: There are so many who were great: Dick Sprang,Neal Adams,Walter Simonson and Garcia Lopez’s Batman is incredible.If I have to pick a favourite it would probably be Jim Aparo!Read the whole feature here6. Tripwire Speaks To Veteran Film Writer And Holmes Author Nicholas Meyer. Just over a week ago, Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows just spoke to veteran Star Trek film writer/ director and Sherlock Holmes writer Nicholas Meyer about his long career.TW: So I want to talk to you about, well, you can guess some of the subjects, but I want to start with the Wrath of Khan, because I know everyone talks about it, but I have to ask you about it.
NM: Ask away.
TW: So how did you get onto that project from the beginning?
NM: Well, a lot of the answers to these questions can probably be found in my memoir. It’s called The View from the Bridge, Memories of Star Trek and a Life in Hollywood. I believe it’s published by Penguin. I had a friend who was an executive at Paramount and she had come up to my place one Sunday and we were barbecuing hamburgers, as I recall. And she said that they were going to make a second Star Trek movie. I said I had never seen Star Trek. And she said, well, the first one was a runaway production, 1979, cost $45 million.
And whatever one thought about the movie, it made money. So Paramount was going to make another one. And I said, “Yeah, but that’s the one with the man with the pointy ears, is it?” And she said, “Don’t be such a snob. The guy who’s going to be producing it is a man you might like. His name is Harv Bennett.’
She said, “Why don’t you at least meet him? Yes”. So I went and met Harv and was surprised to find how famously we got along and how much I enjoyed him. So he showed me the Star Trek movie. I didn’t know what to make of it. And then he showed me some of the episodes.
And I wasn’t sure what to make of them. But as I thought about it, and I’m a very slow thinker, I thought vaguely, this does remind me of something that I do rather enjoy. What is it? And at my snail’s pace, I suddenly woke up in the middle of the night and said, Ah, Captain Horatio Hornblower. This is these stories by a man who called himself CS Forrester, who he also wrote The African Queen. And The Hornblower series of novels is about a captain in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars.
He’s not always a captain. He’s a midshipman and so forth. He gets promoted. And he has lots of adventures. And he has a girl in every port. And when you’re 13 years old, this is sounding pretty good.
It still sounds pretty good, if you want to know the truth. So I thought, oh, this is Captain Hornblower in outer space. I could get into doing that. I think it’s fair to say that I missed everything significant about why Star Trek is of value. I didn’t spot that it was an interracial cast.
I didn’t spot that there were women in positions of power. All the things that people understand and responded to, I just couldn’t get past the cheesy costumes and the sets. I didn’t see what was in front of me. What I did see was Hornblower in outer space. So I said, OK, this is a movie about the Navy. I can do that. And I would love to do a Hornblower movie.
And that’s what I went after. So it’s like a boy’s own adventure.
Read the whole interview here
Tripwire Speaks To Veteran Film Writer And Holmes Author Nicholas Meyer
7. Tripwire Talks To Veteran US Crime Writer Linwood Barclay. This summer, Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows spoke to veteran US crime and thriller writer Linwood Barclay.
TW: And you had a correspondence with Ross McDonald.
LB: I did.
TW: I have to talk to you about that. How did that come about?
LB: Well, when I was in university, I guess it was my third year, I wanted to write… First of all, I discovered Ross McDonald’s books when I was 15. And I just adored them.
And I found everything he had done, I was just reading it all. And he was my absolute favourite writer. And so I had some freedom at university. I was going to do a thesis on the detective as an iconic figure in literature. But featuring a lot on Lew Archer, Ross MacDonald’s creation. And so I wrote a letter to him, care of his publisher, that hoping that it forwarded and said, hey, are there things that have been written about you I might not know about?
So I got a letter back. And he said, “yeah, there was a Newsweek cover story and there was this and there was that.”
And then I did this really awful thing, because now I had his home address and I wrote him back and I said,…I would have been 19, 18, 19? I said, “I’ve written a novel, can I send it to you?”
And he wrote back and said, “okay.”
So that began a very lengthy correspondence back and forth, back and forth, to the point that he was going to be coming to Canada, and he invited me to have dinner with him.
So on May 1st, 1976. And I had this astonishing evening with him and his wife Margaret Miller was there. I guess his real name of course was Kenneth Miller. And I brought with me a hardback edition of his novel Sleeping Beauty. And he wrote inside it:” for Linwood who will I hope someday I write one.”
It’s my most treasured book.
TW: Did he become like a mentor for you as a writer?
LB: Yeah, I mean, it’s not like I saw him every day, because I was in Canada and he was in California.
But we had a lot of correspondence, and the books that I wrote, which were never published, and we can all be grateful, I guess, for that. But he said, you know, this one needs a subplot.
And it needs to be longer, maybe working on some subplot, and that’s what it needs.
But he thought enough of them that he wrote a letter to his publisher and suggested they have a look at my stuff.
But perhaps the publisher was wiser than he was, or more discriminating. But he was very nice. he was a very nice man, he was very generous with his time.Read the whole interview here
8. JM DeMatteis Talks About Moonshadow 40 Years On. Back in May this year, Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows spoke to JM DeMatteis about the acclaimed comic series he created with artist Jon J Muth back in 1985: Moonshadow.
TRIPWIRE: What was the original genesis of Moonshadow?
JM DEMATTEIS: It was an idea I’d been nursing for years, long before I got into comics professionally. In its original form it was a kind of mash-up between a Kurt Vonnegut science fiction novel and a Kirby/Starlin cosmic superhero comic. As the years passed, and I returned to the story, it continued to deepen, expand and become its own thing…although you can certainly see the shadows of those influences in there.
TW: Archie Goodwin was one of the greatest editors in comics. How closely did you work for him?
JMDM: Archie was in charge of the Epic Line. Not just smart and extremely talented—Archie was very nice man, always a pleasure to work with. Although our day-to-day interactions were with our editors, Laurie Sutton and Margaret Clark (who were both terrific), Archie was always there, looking over everyone’s shoulders, offering advice, making sure things were progressing smoothly.
Read the whole thing here
9. Mike Perkins Reveals All He Can About 2000AD’s Death Of A Judge. In April of this year, Tripwire contributing writer Paul Neal chatted to artist Mike Perkins about his work on 2000AD’s Death Of A Judge.
TW: While you have illustrated stories for 2000AD in the past, you are more well known for your work with a number of American publishers. How did your return to the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic come about?
MP: I’ve been asked in the past to illustrate more for 2000ad, but I’ve been exclusive since 2001 – first with Crossgen, then Marvel for 14 years, followed by DC for another 6. After the most current contract wrapped up I wanted to pursue some other work such as the collaboration with Garth on Freddie The Fix and I approached 2000AD about a possible return should my schedule allow it. It, kind of, didn’t but then John suggested a collaboration. How could I refuse?!
Read the whole interview here
Mike Perkins Reveals All He Can About 2000AD’s Death Of A Judge To Tripwire Exclusive
10. Joel Meadows Talks Sherlock Holmes And The Empire Builders The Gene Genie Volume 1. Back. in January 2024, Tripwire’s contributing writer Ernie Estrella talked to Sherlock Holmes And The Empire Builders co-creator Joel Meadows about herlock Holmes And The Empire Builders The Gene Genie Volume 1.
Joel, could you share what Sherlock Holmes means to you?
Joel Meadows: I have always been a huge fan of Holmes ever since I was a kid. Watching things like The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes by Billy Wilder and the ITV show with Jeremy Brett, I have always been struck by the iconic and adaptable nature of the character. Also, films like Young Sherlock Holmes by Barry Levinson, the two Robert Downey Jr movies and more recent films like Mr Holmes with Ian McKellen have also shown just how flexible the world that Doyle created is and how rich it is for writers.
Read the whole interview here
Joel Meadows Talks Sherlock Holmes and the Empire Builders The Gene Genie Vol.1
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