Latinx Press (Ce)REAL Podcast Guest: Jeff May!
Eisner nomination for The Creepshow! Is Fantagraphics ribbing us?!
Jeff May is one of the funniest people I know, so I asked him to be a guest on Latinx Press Podcast. He’s a master podcast and convention panel host who cares about comics and the people that make them. We talk about food, comedy, weight stuff, struggling, and what kind of cereals get us going in the morning.
You can listen to the 11th episode via Spotify or your favorite place to listen to people talk a lot. But don’t forget to subscribe to Jeff May’s socials and Patreon while you’re at it!
The last time I had something to do with an Eisner-nominated project was when I interviewed a mass shooting survivor for the Where We Live: Las Vegas Shooting Benefit Anthology in 2018. I am proud of the story Isaac Goodhart, Kelly Fitzpatrick, and myself got to tell. J.H. Williams III & Wendy Wright Williams were kind enough to give me the chance to meet take Stephani'e’s personal story and retell it with pictures and words. In many ways, that was what started “my career.” I didn’t want to make that project about me but about Stephanie and her harrowing story. I still keep up on Stephanie and her life that could’ve been taken just being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
But The Creepshow is different. That’s some of my best work. My good friend Jon Moisan gave me a shot to tell this haunted lucha libre mask story. I swung for the fences. I learned a lot working on Batman and some of the more known properties. The biggest lesson was “less is more.” But when it was time for blood and guts: peddle to the metal, baby! Big shout out to Alex Antone for helping me write a script that was worthy of Dani, Brad Simpson, and 2023 Eisner Nominated letter artist: Pat Brosseau. I have signed copies of The Creepshow Vol. 1 TP for sale on my official website.
Now for the ugly part.
I think awards are problematic and never is it perfect. But there is a conversation to be had about Thomas Woodruff’s subjectively racist “labor of love” and alleged behavior recounted by many former SVA alumni. The Beat ran Woodruff and Fantagraphics’s responses to the public criticism, but I don’t buy it. It feels like Fantagraphics is actively publishing “comics” to invoke the bad press. Lest we forget the Joe Rogans of comics, Jim Rugg and Ed Piskor, were forced to pull the insensitive Maus parody cover for Ed Piskor's Red Room Trigger Warnings published by Fantagraphics. They solicited the antisemitic cover back when white supremacist propaganda and violence against Jewish people increased in the US and the world, according to ADL. Not to mention that Maus was in the national conversation due to it being banned by bigots in banned in a Tennessee school district on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Now we got Woodruff. Woodruff, Woofy, Woody. Yikes, mate.
Woodruff, a former SVA department head, received the second most Eisner nominations next to Zoe Thorogood this year. I have never read Francis Rothbart! The Tale of a Fastidious Feral—and nor will I ever read it. This is neither a public nomination nor a dissuasion. Make your mind up. But in true New York Times fashion the pull quote says Francis Rothbart is “…a 300-page hand-drawn masterpiece of the form.”
But you have to ask yourself: Am I going to pay $75 for a comic about a vague Indigenous Asian character by an alleged racist and sexist SVA teacher?
The upsetting allegations come from some of the best working artists and editors in the industry who have bravely shared their horror stories. I stopped reading when I got to Woodruff using a shared student scanner to scan his Portrait of Potus in Poop drawn with his own feces. It’s wild that people like that get to keep their jobs, get unified support from their peers and colleagues, and possibly win some of the most prestigious awards in comics.
But, hey, vote for Creepshow Vol. 1 TP if you’re Eisner eligible.