Frank Santoro, Comic Book Judge

In the wake of this year's just announced nominations, Rich Johnston asked Frank Santoro whether or not the feelings related in a recent blog post suggesting that we blacklist all of the creators involved in Before Watchmen had affected his decisions as an Eisner award judge. Santoro responded this way:

I’m glad this subject has come up. I definitely had strong feelings about Before Watchmen when it was announced. However, once I became an Eisner judge, I took my responsibility seriously, set my feelings aside, and considered the books that were submitted—as did all the other judges. (And I don’t believe any of the other judges had actually seen that particular blog post.) These titles and creators were up against strong competition in all the categories for which they qualified, and ultimately none of them made the final nominations list. I actually went to bat for Steve Rude and Darwyn Cooke specifically. Some of the creators I listed in the posting, like Cooke, are indeed nominated for Eisners for other work they did. So no, it did not affect the judging decisions.

All of which seems perfectly reasonable to me. I don't really have anything to add, I just wanted to recognize that Santoro's opinion on the issue had evolved. 

Strange Surfer

Yesterday, the above preview from Strange Tales II accompanied an interview with writer/artist Frank Santoro- suggesting that at least some of the stories that we'll see in the second iteration of the anthology will be serious rather than comic. Santoro had this to say about his Surfer story:

It plays into my fascination with romance comics and this sort of romantic, universal idea. The other thing I was really interested in doing, and I don't know if I pulled it off or not-I don't know about you, but whenever I look at a Surfer comic, it never really looks like he's surfing through space. There's always this splash page or big panel where he's got an arm forward; he's surfing in a way that you would never really surf. If you ever look at people surfing, they're barely moving their bodies. They're sort of just lilting with it, you know? They might duck down, but they're not posed with their arm forward and their leg back. Usually there'll be this one big panel in the spread, but there's no real sense of motion. I never get the feeling that he's soaring through space. Maybe for that one panel, but it's too over the top. I was trying to have a more quiet approach to it, and I hope I pulled it off. Hopefully people will agree. My intent was to show that motion, to show how he could move across the spreads. And I only had four pages, so it was like, "Do I have two two-page spreads? Do I have one spread with a right side and a left side?" I bookended my story-you'll see what it is-so that it's a Moebius strip, honestly. It just goes in and out. With four pages, you really have to pare it down, so hopefully it worked.

Read the rest of the interview here.