Tim Lane is the creator of the comic book series Happy Hour in America (2011-2021) and the Fantagraphics books Abandoned Cars (2008), The Lonesome Go (2014) and Toy Box Americana (2020). His new series, Mythologies & Apocrypha, will see its 32-page debut issue arrive on April 24, also from Fantagraphics. Tim and I have worked together for over two decades, with me in my role as an art director at Print, The Nation and The New York Times, and him as an illustrator. He is currently a design teacher at The Field School in Washington, D.C., while working on his magnum opus, Just Like Steve McQueen, due out in 2026.
What follows is from an ongoing conversation we’ve been having over the years.
-Steven Brower
STEVEN BROWER: It's been an interesting journey. It's taken us in many directions. We've been discussing film, literature, sequential art and Jack Kirby quite a bit; high art, low art. And so, what I wanted to talk to you about is: you've had a great career, both as an illustrator and a sequential artist. What's the difference between those two, and which came first for you?
TIM LANE: Oh, comics came first. Illustration was just a way to make a living while I was working on comics. It actually started with an interest in literature. I wanted to be a writer, but I was also a draw-er, or a visual artist. I just kind of slowly moved toward comics, but I wasn't sold on the idea right away. I remember being in college-- I was at Pratt Institute, which is an art college, and every semester I would ask myself, “Am I gonna stay here? Am I gonna pursue visual arts? Or am I going to enroll at a liberal arts college and pursue writing?” It was a very different kind of academic environment back then, where the idea of interdisciplinary programs didn't exist, at least not to my knowledge. Things were much more limited - you either did one thing or another, and comics were not a part of the curriculum. Outside of Joe Kubert’s comics school, I didn’t know anybody else who was really teaching comics. It turns out that SVA had a robust comics program at the time, one in which both Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman were faculty. But I didn’t know that, and anyways my storytelling interests at that time were more driven by literature than comics. So it was after college that I really started to pursue my storytelling interests specifically in the medium of comics. And it was because of two books that I read. One was Daniel Clowes’ Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. And the graphic adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass [by Paul Karasik & David Mazzucchelli] that had been produced through Neon Lit. And those were two books that showed me that you could really tackle more mature and nuanced subject matter through comics.
That's fascinating, because you did very well as an illustrator.
Well, I did better at illustration than comics if immediate financial response is your barometer of success. There has never been an immediate financial response with comics.
Right. Is the thinking different in a single image, or multiple-but-fewer images for a magazine?
Oh, absolutely. Comics have more and more become, for me, a decade-long process simply to complete a single graphic novel. One of the things that always drew me to comics was that—and I kind of laugh about this now, because you take on so many responsibilities doing comics that nobody really appreciates—you are a director, a screenwriter, an art director, you are essentially everything down to the research that goes into a particular story environment, or the kind of clothing that a character should wear. I think every comic artist you meet is gonna have a different take on that. If you put a bunch of cartoonists together in a room there would be a lot of different personality types and different approaches to the work and creative process. They wouldn't all be the same. And that's kind of one of the things that comics celebrate. I celebrate that too. Comics are open to so many different points of view, so many creative ideas and attitudes. But for me, I wanted to tell stories that were grounded in the real world, or at least my experience and interpretation of the so-called “real” world. So, it requires a lot of research. Each story requires a lot of research.
And with an illustration job-- let's see, the longest one illustration job I've ever had took maybe four months. And on the average, though, they can be a week, they can be a month, they can, you know-- like with the New York Times, they can be the day after tomorrow. So, you don't have the same amount of time to think about things and work things out. And then, also, as we were talking about before the interview, with comics there's nobody telling you how you're supposed to do things. Right? Having said that, my experiences in the world of illustration, as well as design and advertising, have had a huge influence on my life and work.
Although it's true that illustration was always a way to support working on comics, it became a creative pursuit just as enlivening and exhilarating, albeit in different ways, as comics have been. The visual problem solving required to make strong, conceptually compelling illustration is a wonderful experience in its own right, and my love and admiration for illustrators and designers has grown astronomically from when I was first practicing illustration. In fact, I'm very thankful to illustration and the world of communication design for broadening my understanding of the multitudinous ways in which text and image creates story and communicates ideas. All of these things are like a drug that you become addicted to. Or a love affair that ends up more about the work than the pay. As an example, often after a challenging illustration is completed, I find the billing process, and actually getting paid for the work, almost a secondary thing that I drag my feet about. That recently happened with a job from the New York Times. The experience of producing the work, from concept to final art, was so rich that getting paid for it was like icing on the cake. It's a difficult thing to express to non-creative people. And I recognize how backwards the thinking is; you're doing this to get paid, aren't you? All that to say that, despite my ostensibly offhanded comments about illustration, I really love and value that work and practice. And beyond that, design and illustration increasingly inform my comics, and vice versa. In the end, it’s all about communicating meaning through words and images. It’s all storytelling.
You’ve also worked as an art director in advertising. What was that experience like?
Working in advertising was another example of finding ways to support myself while making comics which ultimately wound up influencing my comics. In fact, I got my first job in advertising because I was schlepping my portfolio around to get illustration work, and an agency hired me as an art director. It was a true education. I learned nearly everything I needed to know about the industry of communication design working as an art director. I’ve noticed that other illustrators had similar experiences, having either worked in design, advertising or art direction of some kind before going solo into illustration. I always recommend to students to consider working this way before jumping into freelance illustration.
I also met some incredible people in advertising, some of whom I am still close with today. “Fayette,” the last story in Mythologies & Apocrypha, is actually the first in a series of new stories. It came about because my former copywriting partner in advertising, who now lives with his wife and family on a farm in rural Missouri; he started sending me these amazing historical newspaper articles from his local paper. These “on this day in history” type articles. This all started about five years ago. We started interpreting them verbatim to comics—just roughs, you know—and after a while we had compiled a substantial amount of them. So, finally, I’ve found an outlet for these comical, often bizarre and mysterious little keyholes into the past of a rural midwestern town. The visuals are of course our interpretations of events, but the copy is exactly what was printed. The thing about advertising, at least how I experienced it, is that in the creative department you work with these quirky, intelligent, creative, humorous people who are also very talented. Again, like comics, oddity and individuality is celebrated. Often some esoteric interest someone has might prove to be a key to a killer campaign. It’s an interesting industry. My only real problem with it is that I couldn’t spend my life coming up with clever ways to sell people things they don’t really need.
Advertising, or at least the language of advertising, comes up all the time in my work. In fact, all of my books pay homage to advertising in some way, from cut-out figurine ads to absurdity posters. Advertising is a language we know inherently. We’re raised on that language. I like using its tenets as vehicles to communicate ideas. An example of that is the back cover to Mythologies & Apocrypha, which is designed to look like an old advertisement for radios, circa the 1950s.
You produced an incredible book called Comics Ad Men [Fantagraphics, 2020] that started a new ball rolling with that same copywriter friend. During our tenure in advertising, we had struck out on our own to do what we thought was “cool” ad work for a client we could feel proud to support outside of the agency, and the work we produced largely focused on using comics. After we read your book so many years later, we were both surprised to discover that we actually fell into a tradition of using comics in advertising. So now we are thinking about opening a shop like Johnstone and Cushing. So, thank you for that, Steven.
What made you decide to [put together that book]? I remember Daniel Clowes’ OK Soda work back in the '90s, and Charles Burns’ Altoids ads, which were amazing. I didn’t realize that there were actual shops established specifically for ad agencies to tap when comics were required. How did you find out about that?
I fell down the rabbit hole researching From Shadow to Light [Fantagraphics, 2010], my Mort Meskin biography. He and fellow comic artist contemporaries Marvin Stein and George Olesen worked in advertising, which intrigued me, so I continued to dig deeper. I’ve always been interested in artists that worked across disciplines and I’ve been lucky enough to write and produce books about those who did: Meskin, Woody Guthrie [Woody Guthrie Artworks; Rizzoli, 2005], Louis Armstrong [Satchmo: The Wonderful World and Art of Louis Armstrong; Abrams, 2009]. I believe this was the result of my attending the High School of Music & Art in Harlem in the 1960s, where the best musicians were the art students, and vice versa.
What were your early influences? And then, also, what influences you today?
In comics, Will Eisner was my first big influence. When I was 13 and 14 years old, I tried to draw just like him. At the time, I had no idea who he was other than the talent behind this comic from the 1940s called The Spirit, which was being reprinted by Kitchen Sink Press in the 1980s. Now, it was very strange to find this obscure reprint, because you'd go to comic book shops like the ones I knew back then and they would have mainly superhero comics. But they would also have a variety of used comics and other stuff. And then, next to all these very, very modern things coming out—like Batman: Year One, which was great—were all of these reprints of this comic from the 1940s. And I remember being at the comic shop with my friends. They'd be buying Daredevil or Superman. Friends never understood my interest in The Spirit, but it really spoke to me. I was hooked. I just ate that stuff up. It wasn't until later that I realized that Will Eisner was the big deal that he turned out to be. Another big influence even before Eisner was Joe Kubert. He was huge to me. I loved Sgt. Rock. I thought that work was incredible. And then also there were reprints of EC comics, like Crime SuspenStories from the 1950s. So, in a way, I was growing up in the '80s, but I was also growing up in the '50s too. This is the stuff I was reading, but it wasn't for some pretentious reason. It's just what I gravitated toward. The stuff I thought was cool.
With the EC stories, which of the genres were you attracted to?
The crime stories. The crime stories were my favorite. I love this idea that, you know, if you read those stories-- it's like, nobody's happily married. [Laughter]
There are all these nasty plots to murder the wife or murder the husband. Couples two-timing one another. Just terrible situations. I was aware that these were comics produced in the 1950s. As a point of comparison, in the '80s, TV channels would play reruns of Leave It to Beaver or Father Knows Best in the afternoon, which were also depictions of 1950s domestic scenarios. And what those TV shows were suggesting about 1950s culture was very different from what EC Comics were suggesting. I remember kind of thinking, hmm, there's a disconnect here.
[Laughs]
I don't think Ward and June Cleaver were quite as satisfied with one another as maybe Leave It to Beaver suggested.
[Laughs] But of course, then, they tried to censor the comics in the '50s.
Yeah. Right, right, right. True. True. Yeah. And so, and I never really read any of the stuff post the Comics Authority ban. I only know through the early 1950s up to, what was it, [1954] that the Comics Code Authority came about? So, there was a lot of the stuff that was produced in the later part of the '50s that I was unfamiliar with back then.
And you were never into superheroes, right?
No. All except for one. I remember when Batman: Year One came out, and thinking it was pretty cool. I especially loved David Mazzucchelli’s art. I had a friend who was into Batman, and he turned me onto Year One. But no, I just could never get into the superhero thing-- and you're gonna hate me, as so many people do for this: I've never seen what people like about Jack Kirby.
[Laughs] Well, have you read him?
I've tried. [Laughter]
Although recently I picked up some early Jack Kirby work that I'm trying, I can't remember the name of the-- it was the Patriot? Some character he produced in the early 1950s with Joe Simon, I think.
The Fighting American.
The Fighting American. Yeah. And the reason why I got into him is because I've been really fascinated by comics that were communicating anti-red sentiment during the Cold War. Comics that specifically deal with the Cold War. I've been really fascinated by comics that specifically deal with that. And so, I found this anthology of the Fighting American, and it's terrible. [Laughter]
Terrible. It's pretty bad. [Laughs] But it's interesting. As you’re someone who really gets into a subject, you can appreciate the process of going down all these rabbit holes when you’re into something. You find yourself reading stuff that ordinarily you probably wouldn't read, right? Because there is the backdrop of, in this case, the Cold War.
Right.
That fascinates me.
Now, Fighting American started off serious, but it rapidly turned into a parody.
Yeah, it did. I think somewhere along the line, they realized that nobody was taking it as seriously - or, I think they did so many things just based on sales that maybe they made a lot of moves because it wasn't selling like they had hoped it would. I'm not sure. My sense of the comics industry at that time is that, with few exceptions, their interest was completely motivated by the marketplace.
Well, I think that's true.
I wish you’d enlighten me about Kirby. For someone like me, where would you suggest I start to help me come around to seeing Kirby the way you and that vast majority of comics fans do? What am I missing?
You should start with his crime comics. The In The Days of the Mob hardcover reprint [DC Comics, 2013], from the '70s, is unadulterated Kirby. The Ma Barker story especially is quite good. And Kirby’s stories in all the Simon and Kirby produced crime comics from the '50s. Next, I would say all his romance work. There’s the two Young Romance volumes from Fanta. I think you’ll find Kirby’s work is quite singular.
Yeah. And I don't think there were a lot of artists out there who were really, you know, screaming for their voice. Except for Will Eisner. I think he was.
He was unusual, as he also didn't stay in comics.
No, that's the interesting thing. That's what I'm finding really fascinating about comic artists. Less so in America, but even in Japan - artists who just, at a certain point, said this isn't what I want to keep doing, because I don't get to do what I want to do. Right? And so they'll take a hiatus from it for years.
Yeah.
I don't think Eisner ever took a hiatus, but he did go into educational comics, and comics for the military. He just kind of stopped doing The Spirit.
Well, it's a tough business.
Yeah.
And, you know, for journeyman like Kirby who's stayed in there, it was hard. I mean, he did not have an easy time with it.
Yeah. Well, I think that's probably been the one consistent thing about comics.
[Laughs] Has it improved?
I don't think it's improved greatly. I mean, I think the circumstances have changed, but I think the monetary aspect to it hasn't much.
Right. Yep.
I mean, it has changed greatly as an art form. And I think the way the public thinks about it and consumes it has changed greatly. I think that there have been enormous changes in a lot of ways. But I think you could ask some very well-known cartoonists, to this day, and they will say it's been a hard ride without a great deal of financial success.
I'm sure that's true.
Any current influences? What are you reading now?
The stuff that influences me the most is literature. That’s been true since I was in my 20s. Right now, the work I’m paying the closest attention to is the writing of Ron Rash, Denis Johnson, and I’m starting to get into Alice Munro. I love the short story form. I really see myself as a short story writer who uses comics as my storytelling medium. The biggest influence over the last 15 years has been the short stories and plays of Sam Shepard. "The Junkman" [from Mythologies & Apocrypha #1] is an example of that influence, I think.
As for comics, I've been really fascinated by Japanese gekiga comics. Especially two brothers, Yoshiharu Tsuge and Tadao Tsuge, who are just phenomenal storytellers. Drawn & Quarterly has been publishing work of theirs for the first time in the United States, dating back to the 1960s. I'm finding a real sense of connection to what they were doing - especially Yoshiharu Tsuge. And then Yoshihiro Tatsumi, he's another one that’s been really influential lately. He's considered kind of the father of this alternative manga. There's a contemporary Belgian cartoonist named Olivier Schrauwen, and he's done some really fantastic work. I was recently really knocked out by Jason Lutes’ Berlin. And then I always keep coming back to Kim Deitch.
Amazing work.
He's just such a phenomenally gifted storyteller.
Yeah.
His work has got everything in it. It's got a little American history. It's got pop culture. It's got his crazy idea of reality. He does this beautiful thing by making you guess whether or not he's telling the truth, or if the historical aspects of his world are true or not. I think the answer is both, which is partly why his stories work so well for me. He's just an incredible storyteller. Somebody I continue to go back to.
I think you can read comics from a couple of points of view. You can read it for just the stories. You could read it as a way of communicating visual information - which I think is valuable, especially if you're a designer conveying visual communication, which is paramount. But also, as a filter and an expression of the times at which they were produced. So that's one of the things that I love about comics especially, is that often, I think, you can best access the truth about an era and time through its pop culture ephemera and artifacts - including advertisements and comics. I think that comics play a really strong role in that regard. So, you know, I think you can look at it through the prism of storytelling or historical artifacts. These things broaden the enjoyment of it.
For me it's the most complicated art form for all the reasons that you mentioned; it takes in so many different disciplines. You are also a great designer. Your layout and typography are always excellent. And you're telling a story in between the panels. Unlike cinema. It really is a remarkable discipline.
I think that's something that Will Eisner knew right away. And it took me a while to realize that. Comics is a form of storytelling distinctly separate from any other artistic storytelling medium. I think often I tried to infuse my early comics, especially, with the writer I wanted to be, or the filmmaker I wanted to be. And I still find myself doing that. You can do that in comics, but I think it's important to recognize it as a distinctly separate medium as well. And so yeah, it's got pictures, but it's not moving pictures like film; yes, it has words, but it's not literature. You can't use words in the same way in comics as you can with literature-- I won't say "can't," because that's a very dangerous thing to ever say with any creative medium, I think. But you would do well to look at it for what its unique, valuable aspects are, and not compare it too much or too grossly with mediums that have similarities. They might be, you know, of the same family, but not the not the same individual.
Right, right. It’s funny that Eisner was a singular creator, yet he ran an assembly line shop that included Kirby, Meskin, Lou Fine, Bob Powell, Dick Briefer, even Bob Kane; they all worked for Eisner & Iger, and it was really done like a pants factory.
Yeah, yeah.
As Joe Simon used to call it.
To talk about Eisner from the creative point of view is just one way of talking about Eisner and his impact on comics. That's to say nothing of his impact on the business of comics and Eisner as a businessman.
You know, we were talking about Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast (of Push Pin Studios) before this interview started, and you gotta think: everything had to be right in the universe to allow for their artistic visions to be rewarded. It’s not just about them, it's about the art directors and clients who said, “Yeah, let's try this completely new thing,” so different from the popular styles of the moment. And so, I think in the same way, you had to have these people at that time who were all being nourished by the same creative air. [Laughs]
No, it's true, things do seem to happen at a certain time. Push Pin came on the heels of representational illustration, Bernie Fuchs, Al Parker and Bob Peak, etc., and opened things up. And then exploded in the ‘60s.
Things were working so synchronously at that time.
Well, it's really interesting because Milton was known for saying art is work. There's good work, there's bad work, but it's work. And I think that's how Kirby thought of it too. I mean, he was a creative genius. You may not agree. Or Will Eisner. But it was work. It was a way of making a living. And I think that's how they looked at it. I know from my research on Meskin that it was a very painful job for him. And he did better in advertising. Some handled it better. I had the honor of interviewing Joe Kubert, who you mentioned, and he was much more upbeat about it. But it was tough living.
Yeah.
They were making $10 to $20 a page. If that.
Right, right. And then you know, there are stories of certain EC artists being terrible drunks, and hating the work. I read this somewhere about some of the EC staff artists, I forget which ones. But they would be drinking the whole time because it was just a back-breaking experience for them, right? I think it’s a grueling thing to do. And especially now that I'm a father, I'm becoming more and more aware of the amount of time in my life I have spent at the drawing board. The one thing about comics is that it is enormously time-consuming.
You’re talking 8 to 10 hours when you've got time. But I don't know, I'm just— I don't know why, what is it specifically about my experience now that I'm noticing this more? That's a lot of time to not do other things. Like developing relationships with friends or family, or whatever - experiencing life. And that's sort of the irony, I think, that I've experienced this where you're sitting there drawing for hours and hours and hours and you're telling stories, which is suggesting that there is an active part of a story to tell, when in fact you're spending the majority of your time actively drawing; you're not actually involved with life. You're trying to communicate a story about life. And so, you gotta go, “Hey, get off your drawing stool and actually go out there and live a little bit and experience things so you have something to write about.”
Right? Unfortunately, I think that's the artist’s life?
Well, there are a lot of illustrators out there whose work looks like it was done so fast, and they can do more gestural work and more minimalist work, and they may lead healthier lives. I don't know. But I do know, the more complicated you make your work, both in terms of the stories you're trying to tell and the type of drawings you do, the more you're backing yourself up.
Right.
That's been my experience. I'm now penciling and inking stories that are not the most recent stories I've written, you know? You'll write the story and it will be years before you get around to actually drawing it, because you're already backed up. And it might be that you'll get to a place in your life where the story you wrote just doesn’t have the same meaning anymore. And so you'll skip it. It’s for this reason that I wish I worked faster. I don’t like skipping them. They’re a chronicle of something.
You have been working on your Steve McQueen graphic novel for years.
You know, it just dawned on me it might only take you a day or so to read it, but maybe all that work will be made worthwhile if the resonance of it lasts with you longer than that.
Some stay with you for a lifetime.
Right, right. I think that's the ultimate goal, right? The best we can do. [Laughs] Tell a story that sticks with you for a lifetime.
The first issue of my new comic series, Mythologies & Apocrypha, hits the shelves this April. I don't know how interested the greater comics community is in that, or in comic books in general, but in my own meager way, I'm trying to bring back the comic book as a valued entity. I love the tradition of comic books. They were, in their origins, such an interesting blending of low-brow art and commerce, hucksters and often marginalized artists. An interesting American phenomenon. Then, through to the underground comix movement in the 1960s and ‘70s, into the ‘80s and ‘90s, when the comic book became the material that would later be compiled into graphic novels by the Hernandez Bros, Clowes, Tomine, Burns, Ware, etc., it entered a new phase as a kind of place where independent and alternative artists could use 24 to 32 pages to experiment with new ideas and work on their longer material in chapters. That's what I use it for. There are still a lot of us out here who care less about the money received in sales than in having a regular opportunity to submit our work to the public for an affordable price. At least in my case, that's what I love about the comic book form - a person can get the best work I can produce at a reasonable price.
Several of the pop culture figures in Mythologies are from my generation, and even my father’s (Sinatra) and not yours. What is it that draws you to these older celebrities?
That’s a pretty hard question to answer. From what I can tell, the Steve McQueen book seems to be some kind of dream I’m having about 20th century pop mythology and the idea of celebrity. Or how someone becomes a legend, and what that even means. Or it’s some kind of conversation I’m having with myself about the masculine identity I grew up with. That’s one aspect of it. I guess there are several ways to answer that question, or at least attempt to answer that question. One way of looking at it is, with the McQueen book, I’m trying to take a close look at the evolution of American masculinity, and come to terms with what I believe still has value or is still applicable, relevant, still evolving in a healthy way. I’m not talking about American culture broadly, but within myself. “What am I going to pass on to my son?” is a driving question for me. Steve McQueen is the celebrity that most closely represents the type of men who raised me - my dad, my uncles, my dad’s friends, that kind of thing. I see echoes of McQueen in their behavior and worldview to varying degrees. But Sinatra represents something important about my grandfather’s generation, and in Sinatra’s swagger, sense of humor, his aura, I see the worldview of my grandfather and his friends, who were also important influences on me too. This is a delicate thing for me because I loved both generations very much. I was very lucky in that the men who helped raise me were wonderful people. Exceptional role models, despite their flaws. We are also living in a time when the word masculinity is under extreme scrutiny and criticism. I think people imagine the word toxic in front of the word masculinity, even if the two words aren’t said together.
But I’m also interested in legendary characters, and how they become mythical as time passes. I’m interested in what they represent to us. A big influence on the McQueen book is Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid [1970] which I think is an amazing, poetic riff on the myth of Billy the Kid and the American West as seen through the prism of pop culture and the movies.
It’s a tough question to answer, Steve, but Sinatra, Elvis, McQueen - they might’ve lived during a different era, but their influence is still felt, or at least was still felt, by succeeding generations. Or at least by me. They are a part of the recipe in the soup. One thing influences another. Besides, who am I supposed to write about? Eddie Vedder? Tom Cruise? I can’t see that happening.
Sinatra , Elvis and McQueen represent an aura of ‘40s / ‘50s pop culture male cool. Yet you seem to see these forms of cool at odds with—and I believe in stark contrast to—the downtrodden cool of the Beats, which you have also been attracted to, particularly in The Lonesome Go, and which you revisit in the “Junkman” chapter of Mythologies. What is it about the concept of cool that you are engrossed with?
I’ve never really thought of it in terms of cool. As for the Beats, although Jack Kerouac has been a critical influence on my life and work, I’ve never really thought of him as cool. What Kerouac did for me was give me license to live my life the way I chose to live it, and to pursue my work honestly and ferociously and to somehow make my life a part of that work. He opened up something about America that sent me looking for my own version of it. His work also introduced me to the great tradition of the hobo or the tramp, and I have seen versions of myself in that tradition too. Having said that, I do think there were stark contrasts between Elvis and Sinatra that were at odds with one another. Those odds were lived and played out by the friction caused between my grandfather and father. It was a living thing. But it wasn’t specifically Sinatra and Elvis that caused the rift, they were just personifications or representatives of something deeply embedded in the zeitgeist of their generations. Those differences are trying to find a resolution within me so I can pass on the best of it to my son. So, it’s still a living thing..
But that’s only one way of looking at it. Another way is that I’m essentially like a little kid playing with the action figures on some kind of playground landscape in my head. There they all are: McQueen, Sinatra, Elvis, Johnny Cash, Wolfman Jack, Johnny Carson, Walter Cronkite action figures. Sometimes it’s just riffing on an idea and playing it out with these imaginary action figures. But all of these action figures are real to me. I remember Cronkite and CBS News fondly, Carson and the Tonight Show fondly, because their memories are wrapped up in the fond memories I have of my grandfather.
All this to say I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m feeling my way to knowing - like you might grope through a room blindfolded, guided by an instinct. Trying to explain it always falls short of the truth and feels preposterous. It’s a big mystery to me why I or anybody else does these things. It’s an itch you can’t stop scratching.
The post “You Can Best Access The Truth About An Era And Time Through Its Pop Culture Ephemera”: An Interview with Tim Lane appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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