[Above Lars expresses himself in the third dimension, below the Dispatch lines up your weekend.]

1. Did you enjoy the teaser? Soon you can watch the whole thing: Lars Martinson is featured on an upcoming episode of MN Originals that debuts tonight on Twin Cities Public Television. A viewing party has been scheduled for tonight at 3 Monkey’s Pub & Grub in Minneapolis.
2. Chester Brown’s latest book Paying For It will have its official launch and party this weekend at Goodhandy’s in Toronto. Bring your best maypole puns.
3. The Comics Journal has launched a new bi-weekly podcast series called “Talkies” featuring interviews conducted by Mike Dawson. Check out the first episode with Evan Dorkin!
4. Just Add Ink, a comics cooking anthology, is looking for submissions. No one’s work is turned away! Easily add to your list of publishing credits and exercise your right to make some forking jokes. Deadline is June 15th.
5. Hey nerds, let’s help out this Wikipedia page listing all comics that were ever released, by year, and add some indie comics to the list. Surely one or two came out in 2009, right?
6. Fresh Meat 2011, presented by Cartoon Allies and the Illustration & Cartooning BFA Department at SVA, is happening this Friday, April 29, from 6-9pm. Don’t be afraid to spread the word, you vegans!
7. Congratulations to Phil McAndrew who not only achieved his Kickstarter goal but also sold his first comic to MAD Magazine! Watch out for this kid, he’s about to blow up!
8. Minnesota cartoonists will be on-hand to draw your spirit animal this Friday at Altered Esthetics Gallery’s 7th anniversary party. Come from 6pm-midnight and enjoy an art swap, raffle, silent auction, and games among other things. (Beer? Please be beer.)

Submit a news item for the Dispatch via email: crosshatchdispatch [at] gmail [dot] com. Use “Dispatch” in the subject line, if you would be so kind. Or add us to your mailing lists. You heard me.

- Sarah Morean

Congratulations to Aron Nels Steinke who correctly guessed our mystery cartoonist! It was in fact MIKE DAWSON, he of Ink Panthers and Troop 142 Fame.

Aron was just the third person to respond with an answer to our contest — and it was the right answer!  I admit, I was pretty stunned.  I thought this would take awhile.  Aron says:

Well, I just do lots of people watching when I do conventions. I for some reason noticed Mike Dawson walking around all over the place and each time I took note of how dark his outfit was and that his bag was black as well. I too wear lots of black and when I saw the photo I thought, that has to be him. I don’t know him and nobody tipped me off. I was just lucky that I noticed him. I’m a creepy observer.

Aron Nels Steinke: He’s watchin’ you. And winnin’ stuff.  Congratulations again, Aron!

Please check out Mike Dawson’s Troop 142 comic online and in print this fall from Secret Acres.  Also subscribe to his wonderful podcast The Ink Panthers Show! which he produces with Alex Robinson.

Check out Aron Nels Steinke’s Neptune (which will be available in French next year) and Balloon Toons: Super Duper Dog Park due out this fall from Blue Apple Books.

- Sarah Morean

[Above, Eleanor Davis gets Stinky. Below, the smell of Dispatch in the morning.]

• Freddie and Me creator Mike Dawson, who also has an OGN titled Ace Face on the way from Adhouse, is back at the webcomics collective Act-I-Vate on February 17th with Jack and Max Escape from the End of Time.
• Picturebox Inc. extends its celebratory Yes We Can sale for another week, ’till February 8th.  Highlights include Lauren Weinstein’s oversized The Goddess of War for $7.95, and the typically $95 Gary Panter marked down to $30.  Take advantage now before inaugural hopes and unbelievable markdowns are dashed by the march of time.
• The Louvre moves into the 21st century with its exhibition “Small Design: The Louvre invites Comics.” Currently underway at the famous French museum, it includes live digital drawings and displays of both traditional comics and manga.  Biff! Pow! Comics aren’t just for fine art philistines anymore!
• Eleanor Davis, at the tender age of just 25, was recently recognized with a 2009 Theodor Seuss Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss) Award for her Toon Books beginning reader graphic novel Stinky, about overcoming prejudice towards the differently monstrous.
• The Alternative Press Fair takes place in London on February 1st from 12 PM to 6 PM, with the added bonus of being free, free, free!

–Laura Hudson

Mike Dawson has been tooling around the world of indie comics for some time now. After years of self-publishing minis, the artist been work on the six issue mini-series, Gabagool back in 2002, chronicling the life of three Bronx-based nerds in their early 30s. It was the publication of this year’s Freddie & Me: A Coming of Age (Bohemian) Rhapsody for Bloombury, however, that really put the artist on the map.

The book is as much a love letter to  Dawson’s life-long musical obsessions as it as the autobiography of a young British transplant growing up in the States during the height of Reganomics.

In this second and final part of our interview, we talk about the reaction of Queen fans, the catharsis of autobiography, and how having a kid has affected the artist’s output.

[Part One]

Is your new work geared toward younger readers, at all?

No, actually, quite the opposite. The boy scout thing is a horrible thing about horrible people. It’s about men vying for power within the hierarchy. The adults, who are the dads, and the kids, who are the teenagers both parallel in their dynamics, even though there’s a big sort of gap in their ages. They behave the same way. And the superhero stuff is pretty humorous.

Do you feel compelled to do work for younger readers, now that you have another one coming into the world?

Uh, no. it’s funny, because the child was coming and then I started working on these stories about these brothers fighting, and they fight so viciously and the dad is always hitting them and telling them to shut up. People are like, “wow, Mike, fatherhood is really bringing out a nice side in you.”

It’s a way of getting out aggression.

“Shut Up!” Yeah.

When Freddie and Me came out, you got some sort of feedback from Brian May, didn’t you?

I got feedback from people tangentially connected to Brian May. The person who runs his Website posted about it. I got a lot of feedback from Queen fans. The official Queen archivist who also knows Brian read the book and gave me the blurb for the back of the book. I also interacted a bit with their manager, but Brian never gave me a phone call…

What’s the reaction been like, among Queen fans?

In generally, very positive. In general it did pretty well over here, it did pretty well in the UK, it just came out in Italy. But there are one or two people who don’t really like that I’ve taken their thing and done my own thing with it. but that should be sort of expected, because we all kind of feel like we own it.

It’s always interesting to take someone else’s art and try to tell your own story through it.

I know I’d feel the same way if someone else took Queen—“that asshole. What does he know? I’m the real fan.”

Is the book easier to read as a Queen fan or a non-Queen fan?

Uh, I feel like I’ve got a bit of a hook with the Queen fans, but I’ve never really had a sense that non-Queen fans have and issue with it. what I try to do with my autobiorgraphy is, I try to make the people I know and myself into real characters. I don’t do a lot of narration. Some autobio—which I like—have a central character, which is clearly the cartoonist sort of describing to you the events that are going on.

Like a diary strip.

Something like that. I wanted to make it like my parents were real characters—sort of the Joe Matt style.

It took you so long to work up to an auto-biographical book, and now you’re already moving away from that style. Is there a sense that a weight has been lifted, now that the story has been told?

Yeah. What I found interesting is, all of these things that were big events in my life, once I put them on paper, they sort of evaporated from my head. I never tell those stories of things like how I moved to America anymore. I put it on paper, and now I’m moving on.

Because it’s redundant to tell a story you’ve already written?

No, I think when you work on it, you sit down and take a couple of days on a page, so one sequence takes a couple of weeks of intense concentration, so, once I’m done with it, I’m kind of out of it—but not in a bad way.

It seems like one of the primary reasons for doing autobio for a lot of artists is a sense of catharsis. Did you get that out of Freddie and Me?

I feel like it sort of helped me think about things in different ways, to really concentrate on something and make more of an effort to understand it. And having done this book and read it, I’ve learned a lot about other people’s perspectives on things.

–Brian Heater

Most of us are content to abandon our childhood obsessions, in pursuit of more “grownup” fare. For Mike Dawson, however, being a Queen fan has proved a lifelong commitment, something inexorably linked to his own story, growing up as a British immigrant in the United States in the mid-80s. When Dawson first sat down to document his devotions, he expected little more than a quick one-off.

Four years and 300-odd pages later, Freddie & Me was finally complete. When it came out, earlier this year, the book proved surprisingly touching in its exploration of the lives of both Dawson and Queen frontman, Freddie Mercury.

We sat down briefly with Dawson to discuss the birth of the book and the power of autobiographical comics.

How long did it take to complete Freddie and Me?

It took me about four years exactly. I started it thinking that it would be more like a 70 page joke book. I just thought it would be amusing to do a book about what was sort of a universal topic. And then it took about four years, from start to finish.

Why did it morph into such a massive project?

I just think I had more story to tell. At first I was just going to list every memory I had of Queen. I started to realize that there’s more to it as a story about how we all have these things that we can relate tell. Many people, I think, whether you’re a child or an adult, have something like this in their life.

Is it safe to say that this is your first major work?

Yeah. I had done a series called Gabbagool, which I collaborated on, with a friend of mine. I serialized it.

Was it autobio?

No, Gabbagool was about three guys living in the Bronx. They don’t like their jobs or their lives, so they go on a hedonism trip. It’s very different than Freddie and Me.

Was autobiography something you felt you needed to work up to?

I had a lot of friends who did autobio, so I didn’t do one. I thought one day I might show up in their work, but I never did, so I finally did an auotbio book [laughs].

For selfish reasons.

Yeah. No, but really, I’m a huge fan of autobio books, though I’m sort of starting to move away from it.

The book isn’t just straight autobio, though—it’s Freddie & Me. In some sense it’s as much about Freddie Mercury as it is about you. Would it have been tough to do an autobio piece without such a tangible entry point for you?

What I realized is that the actual events of your life are not as important as how you tell the story. The unusual aspects of my life are being an immigrant, having that immigrant experience, and that’s a lot of what the book is about. But really, I haven’t had an outrageous, unusual life. Obviously, having the Queen aspect gives the book a little bit of a focus and broadens the concept at the same time. I think we all like bands [laughs].

Your latest piece seems to have elements of autobio, as well.

At the moment, I just recently had a child, and that has made me focus more on short stories. Hopefully I’ll be coming out with a collection of superhero themed short stories, next year. I’ve got this new manga-style strip about brothers with superpowers fighting each other that I put on the Website. There’s a new graphic novel that I’m working on that’s about a bunch of boy scouts. I want to work on a longer book, but I can’t right now, with the baby. These stories tend to be about eight pages each.

[Concluded in Part Two]

–Brian Heater