Released in 2007, The Blot easily made my year-end top 10. The largely silent book was steeped in certain comics  traditions, owing a lot to the works of pioneers like EC Segar, while managing to be something entirely its own. And as far as most of  us were concerned at the time, its author, Tom Neely came seeming out of nowhere.

It’s taken a few years for the cartoonist to issue a proper follow up, finally releasing the self-published The Wolf this summer. Of course Neely has kept plenty busy, through a slew of minis, design work, and collaborations—perhaps most notably the Igloo Tornado Rollins/Danzig tribute, Henry & Glenn Forever.

We sat down with Neely to discuss the genesis of his latest book, the importance of imagery, and taking long walks in the forest.

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In this second part of our interview with the Cleveland artist, we discuss collaborating with Harvey Pekar and how the process of drawing the book changed once its author passed away.

[Part One]

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[Above, some surprisingly clean jokes are told at the Jim Woodring pen demonstration. Below, you kiss your mother with that Dispatch?]

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Later this year, Top Shelf and first-time publisher Zip Comics will release Cleveland, the first posthumous book from Harvey Pekar. The work is a combination autobiography of the writer and an biography of the city he loved, drawn by Joseph Remnant, marking the cartoonist’s graphic novel debut.

Remnant has been releasing work for a few years now, including his debut self-published short story collection Blindspot and a number of collaborations with Pekar, as part of the online Pekar Project. I first met Remnant a few years back, when we took a trip to Cleveland to celebrate Pekar’s birthday.

Meeting Remnant, it’s difficult to believe that he’s the artist behind the work, with a style that belies his years, steeped deeply in the work of Pekar’s own contemporaries and subjecting him to fairly consistent comparisons to Robert Crumb—there are, of course far worse things in this world to be compared to.

The cartoonist insists, however, that while Crumb and his fellow underground artists did factor heavily into his early influences, his style has evolved gradually away from that style, a shift that he says is evident in his longest and more ambitious work to date.

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Simon Moreton is a cartoonist and zine maker living in Bristol, UK. He has been writing, drawing and self-publishing comics since 2007. To date, he has released three issues of his semi-autobiographical comic zine Smoo and a bunch of other minicomics and zines. Smoo #4 will be out later this year.

Along with fellow guest-stripper Nick Soucek, Simon is also one half of Things in Panels, a joint publishing venture. In May 2011, Things in Panels published its first title, an Indie-Go-Go funded newsprint anthology called The Sorry Entertainer. This black and white, tabloid sized newspaper featured contributions from Jarod Rosello, Noah Van Sciver, Sam Spina, Rob Jackson, and Brad Foster amongst others. He thinks it’s pretty awesome.

In July 2011, Simon launched Better, Drawn, a website where readers can share their experiences of living with long-term mental or physical illnesses in the form of short comics. In addition to this project, Simon and Nick, along with a group of illustrators, comics artists and writers based the South-West, also collectively founded the Bristol-based Bear Pit Zine. Bear Pit #2 will be released later this summer.

Simon’s current series, The Escapologist, is a gentle, abstract comic dealing with the lightness and the weight of things (it also has some pretty pictures in it). The first issue was released in May 2011, and you can read the first three pages HERE. Issue 2 will be out very soon.

Simon and Nick will be appearing at the Thought Bubble Sequential Arts Festival in Leeds, UK November 2011.

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[Above, mural mural on the wall, who's the fairest of them all? Below, it is the Dispatch. Of course.]

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We wrap up our interview with Fantagraphics’ Eric Reynolds by discussing book distribution, how not to be precious, and the publisher’s online future.

[Part One][Part Two][Part Three]

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[Above, King Mini takes aim. Below, the Dispatch dodges a bullet.]

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[Above, we learn that some books with very little action are incredibly labor-intensive. Below, the action-packed Dispatch is surprisingly lazy.]

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In this third part of our interview with Fantagraphics’s associate publisher, we discuss the importance of new cartoonists, losing artists to competing publishers, and the importance of the number 22.

[Part One][Part Two]

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