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J.B. Winter — featured creator
Our next Midmococo featured creator is J.B. Winter who recently self-published Izzy Challenge #5, an ambitious comic jam with contributions from fifty artists from every state in the US. You can see samples from the book and order your own copy for a buck at his store.
What are you working on now comics-wise?
I’ve just finished up the 50 States Jam, and I’m still promoting that a bit at the moment. After that I need to pick up a story I’ve abandoned for a while and see if I can fit it into Noodle #3.
How’s your comic output been the last year? What’s helped or hindered your output?
My output has been fairly lousy. The 50 States Jam would occasionally take some time, but the “occasional” aspect of the project really wore on me after a while. It was a bunch of stopping and starting, and I wasn’t able to work on my other projects effectively. I enjoyed doing the jams, but I think it’ll be good to concentrate on a project where the pace of it is essentially up to me again.
Read any good comics/graphic novels lately?
I liked Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan. It’s by an artist who’s from the illustrion side of the art world, but unlike most illustrators who try to make comics, she really does a decent job. I like her style of art, but the writing and pacing is also equally interesting. She currently has a weekly serial running in the New York Times Magazine that’s also pretty good.
How about other media … anything good you like lately? (video, music, books, etc.)
I really latched on to the webcomics weekly podcast this year, and I also recommend the book that they put out called How to Make Webcomics. Some of the material that they cover is fairly basic, but some of it is pretty useful. What I love the most about their approach is that you get four different opinions on how to create things. Most “how to” books are from one cartoonist or a cartoonist team, but these guys are all independently successful artists. Their backgrounds are all fairly different too, so you get a lot of different perspectives on how to look at things. While I’m probably not going to create a webcomic, I think a lof of what they talk about applies to cartoonists in general.
You are always working on comic jams. What got you into that type of collaboration?
I picked jams up from other comic artists I hung out with, but I wasn’t that into them at first. I think I got excited about jams when I started getting some interesting jam endings from other artists that I would have never come up with. Comic artists can be real control freaks, and I found that jams are a way of loosening up that control and getting things out of yourself and other artists that wouldn’t exist otherwise.
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