{"id":24677,"date":"2019-02-04T11:16:30","date_gmt":"2019-02-04T19:16:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rachelswirsky.com\/?p=1419"},"modified":"2019-02-04T16:27:20","modified_gmt":"2019-02-05T00:27:20","slug":"silly-interview-with-barry-deutsch-jew-jew-jew-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=24677","title":{"rendered":"Silly Interview with Barry Deutsch, jew jew jew"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few years ago, I decided that I wanted to know some silly information about my fellow authors. So I put together some silly interviews full of silly questions. A number of them fell through the publication cracks then, so I\u2019m running them now with updates. (If you\u2019re interested in the prior features, including ones with people like Ann Leckie<\/a>, you can find them on my blog here<\/a>). Enjoy!<\/p>\n

\"Barry<\/a>Barry Deutsch<\/a><\/p>\n

RS: Would your hero-fighting, Orthodox Jewish preteen, Mirka<\/a>, ever fly a hot air balloon<\/strong>?<\/p>\n

BD: If I can figure out a story that makes sense for, I\u2019d love to do it! Hot air balloons are fun to draw. Also, I have this friend who writes science fiction stories, and who always reads over my Hereville scripts and makes great suggestions, who has been suggesting a hot air balloon Hereville plotline for\u00a0years. So maybe if I ever do that, it\u2019ll provide her with some satisfaction. \"\ud83d\ude42\"<\/p>\n

RS: Your brand of humor is so distinctive that I can spot it not only in your own work, but in the kind of drawings you pin on pinterest, and that sort of things. What would you say have been the biggest influences on the development of your sense of humor?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BD: Honestly, I have very little idea of what my brand of humor is, so it\u2019s a little hard for me to pin down.<\/p>\n

But I think that I\u2019ve probably borrowed a lot from Harvey Kurtzman\u2019s MAD stories, from Walt Kelly\u2019s\u00a0Pogo, from\u00a0Doonesbury, and from Dave Sim\u2019s\u00a0Cerebus; at least, those were the funny works that I remember rereading a thousand times in my formative years. In movies and TV, I think the Marx Brothers were very important to me, and so was Buffy the Vampire Slayer.<\/p>\n

RS: Did you ever seriously write prose with an eye toward publication?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BD: I never have. It\u2019s something that I\u2019d like to try to do someday.<\/p>\n

RS: Do you remember why I asked you question 1?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BD: Did my science fiction writing friend with the obsession about seeing Mirka in a hot air balloon put you up to it?<\/p>\n

RS: From a purely \u201cfun to draw\u201d perspective, why should people draw more flawed characters?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BD: Actually, I don\u2019t know that they should. A lot of cartoonists rarely draw characters that don\u2019t fit into a very narrow sort of attractiveness, and I assume the reason they draw that way is that this is what they find fun to draw.<\/p>\n

But from a storytelling perspective, I think flawed characters are clearly better, because it\u2019s so much easier for a cartoonist to make characters distinct and recognizable if they break out of that narrow \u201cperfect pretty people\u201d mold. In a lot of mainstream comics, it\u2019s really hard to tell the characters apart. There are also really interesting stories to be told about people who look like ordinary people.<\/p>\n

RS: What\u2019s the funniest response you\u2019ve ever gotten to a cartoon?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BD: In response to an anti-racist political cartoon, some infuriated racist emailed me calling me \u201cjew\u201d this and \u201cjew\u201d that (I am Jewish, but I\u2019m puzzled why he thought I\u2019d find this to be an insult) and finally, in an apparent fit of rage that put him beyond writing coherent thoughts, just ended the letter by saying \u201cyou jew jew jew!\u201d That totally cracked me up.<\/p>\n

RS: If you had to appoint zombie Scalia to an infinite (for he is undead) term on the supreme court, or Donald Trump for a finite term, which would you pick?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BD: Trump. The system has lots of vetos in place; we can survive four years of Trump. I hope.<\/p>\n

Wait, no, now I feel guilty because of all the people who\u2019d die in the needless wars Trump would start. Sigh. Zombie Scalia it is. But we need to have him chained up or something so he doesn\u2019t bite Ruth or Sonya.<\/p>\n

RS: If you had the opportunity to do your room up in any wallpaper from any time period regardless of expense or probability, what would you pick?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BD: I\u2019d hire a British Artist named\u00a0Charlotte Mann<\/a>\u00a0who hand-draws walls for people. I mean,\u00a0look at this<\/a>!\u00a0That would be incredible. I\u2019d be accosting strangers in the street and demanding that they come into my house and look at the walls.<\/p>\n

2019 update: So what are you up to now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been working on three main projects lately.<\/p>\n

First, thanks to my wonderful supporters on Patreon, I\u2019ve increased my output of political cartoons from six a year to forty-eight a year. People can read all those cartoons for free on my Patreon<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Second, with my co-creator Becky Hawkins, I\u2019m working on \u201cSuperButch<\/a>,\u201d a webcomic about a lesbian superhero in the 1940s who protects the bar scene from corrupt cops. We\u2019ve got almost a hundred pages done already, and why yes, we do have a patreon<\/a>, thanks for asking.<\/p>\n

And finally, I\u2019ve been writing graphic novel adaptions<\/a> of\u00a0Tui Sutherland\u2019s amazing \u201cWings of Fire\u201d series for Scholastic. The graphic \u00a0novels are being drawn by Mike Holmes, who has an unbelievable facility for drawing hundreds of dragons. It\u2019s a fantasy series about a group of young dragons who believe they are destined to save the world. Of course, you already knew that, since you\u2019re co-writing the adaptations with me, but pretending to explain that to you was a handy way of getting that exposition across to your readers. Hi, readers!<\/p>\n

I have a couple of other big projects that I plan to work on in 2019, but they\u2019re not yet at the discuss-in-public stage.<\/p>\n

(This interview was originally posted to my patreon<\/a> on January 25, 2019<\/a>. Thank you to all the patrons who make this possible!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few years ago, I decided that I wanted to know some silly information about my fellow authors. So I put together some silly interviews full of silly questions. A number of them fell through the publication cracks then, so … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[171],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24677"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24683,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24677\/revisions\/24683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}