SPOTLIGHT ON JONATHAN AMES & DEAN HASPIEL
"Jonathan Ames is an unusual novelist and essayist; Dean Haspiel is an uncommon cartoonist. They’re quintessential Brooklyn artists, and they’re friends. Their collaboration so far has produced the Vertigo graphic novel The Alcoholic (highly recommended), some memorable cartoons in Ames’ recent essay collection The Double Life Is Twice As Good (also recommended), and the current HBO show Bored To Death. (You must watch this show.) I’ve seen these guys at readings before and they’re always entertaining, to say the least. Ames’s work is unparalleled in its ability to meld the urbane and the literate with the emotionally perceptive and the stingingly melancholy and the unapologetically and gleefully scatological. He can write or say some of the most graphic and perverted things and somehow give the observations a gentleness and an innocence. It’s a great counterpoint with Haspiel, who in person is the most gregarious guy in the room (Zach Galifianakis’s character on Bored To Death is “loosely” based on him), and whose drawings (of which I am a tremendous fan) are full of energy and life and character. His boisterous work has been compared to that of Jack Kirby, the legendary Marvel Comics artist, but Haspiel is far less concerned with the cosmic and much more attuned to human relationships and interactions. Even though I’d heard some of the stories recounted at the panel already, when these guys are talking you can never be bored. Watch Bored To Death, please."
originally posted at: http://www.mapcidy.com/king-con-brooklyn-day-one