O'Shea Interviews Cho, Ostrander

One of TGC's fine faithful readers (who we greatly appreciate, because without you all we're merely a collective blog talking to each other) e-mailed me an interesting question yesterday. The reader was wondering why I had not linked to my Frank Cho interview at SBC. The reason why, partially, was because I hate to leave the impression that I'm using TGC to hype my work elsewhere. Secondly, I knew I was running a John Ostrander interview today and if I was going to hype myself, I might as well combine my references to the two pieces in one post. (I appreciate feedback from TGC readers, as it let's us know how we're doing, so please keep it coming.)

Cho and I discussed his work on Marvel's Shanna, The She-Devil, the first issue of which goes on sale today. I found his answers to be rather fun (not surprising, given the creator's nature) and was hard-pressed to single out any one exchange as more notable than the others, yet still I could. In discussing the fact that the book went through some changes (after going from a mature format to a more mainstream format), I particularly was struck by this Cho observation:

To be honest, it wasn’t the nudity that I was afraid of being censored. It was the violence. Much to my relief, Marvel didn’t tone down any of the violence. (I guess that says a lot about this country.)

As for my John Ostrander piece, not surprisingly we discuss the return of GrimJack. Ostrander and (co-creator/artist) Tim Truman are going full steam in promoting GrimJack, even going so far as to launch a website in the past few days.

Ostrander is one of those creators I could interview on a weekly basis. It's not just because I like his writing, but rather I love the fact that his perspective is clearly more grounded in the real world than the average creator. Consider this quote when asked the distinction between glorifying and documenting violence in storytelling.

I don't think they see the ramifications because they aren't shown any. The badass shows up, pulls the trigger, sprays bullets, leaps and goes on. He suffers no consequences, we get no glimpse of the other lives -- for all the gore, it's still sanitized. It's a video game. You have no emotional connection to the killer or the ones killed aside from an adrenaline rush. Don't get me wrong -- we'll supply that rush as well. But, before the end of the series, you're going to have an emotional kick with it all as well.