Link: Salt Water Taffy Author Interview

Go read this interview with Matthew Loux, author of the Salt Water Taffy series. The books are so much fun - I'm sad they weren't nominated for an Eisner.

Exerpt from the interview:

O’Shea: What’s the appeal of writing an all ages book? What’s the biggest challenge of writing an all ages book? Do you wish there was another term than all ages, so that adults might pick up the book rather than unfairly pigeonholing it as something just for children?

Loux: A great appeal for writing the Salt Water Taffy series for the all-aged is that in a lot of ways it frees me from the expectations Indie comic artists often have to do serious or emotionally challenging stories. I love that kind of work when it’s done well, but it will be a long time before i attempt anything super deep in my own career. Kids comics might be the only avenue for purely fun and silly adventure stories in the industry today, and that’s what i love to do. It is incredibly enjoyable to create stories for the Salt Water Taffy universe because of it’s freedom to be fantastical, funny, action pact, and often making no sense at all. And though the series is aimed for kids, I really did write them to be enjoyed by all ages. I try to follow the lead of master creator, Carl Barks in writing age appropriate comics that are just enormously enjoyable to everyone. On the flip side, ‘all ages’ or children’s comics’ can turn off many who think it isn’t mature enough for them. That’s probably true, because i certainly don’t write mature stories. Doing all aged material has freed me from having to do mature stories. I think also, the industry has tired so hard to be taken more seriously as a genre that it can’t handle comics that are trying to be less serious, so there’s very often this stigma among main stream comic fans against kids comics.

Not Comics: Odd and the Frost Giants

Neil Gaiman's Odd and the Frost Giants will be released in the US in the fall by Harpercollins. Yay! The book was written for World Book Day, which means it was written and published for free and children in the UK could buy it for one pound. Amazon lists the US release date as Sept. 22.

From Gaiman's website: "Odd's luck has been bad so far. He lost his father on a Viking expedition, his foot was crushed beneath a tree, and the winter seems to be going on forever. But when Odd flees to the woods and releases a trapped bear, his luck begins to change. The eagle, bear and fox he encounters reveal they're actually Nordic gods, trapped in animal form by the evil Frost Giants who have conquered Asgard, the city of the gods. Can a twelve-year-old boy reclaim Thor's hammer, outwit the Frost Giants and release the gods"

Twittering the Eisner Nominees

I'm twittering about each Eisner nominee in the Kids and Teens/Tweens categories. It's tough to keep the reviews so short!

@TracyEdmunds on Twitter