H Hardie is featured in the text pieces for next week's The Black Diamond #1, and coincidentally reviews “The Last Sane Cowboy & Other Stories ...by Daniel Merlin Goodbrey is both a typical and atypical AiT/Planet Lar publication. Typical in that it is high concept – the graphic novel contains five stories set on an 'unfolded earth,' a conceit to let readers know that bizarre settings, characters and plots are to be expected. Atypical in that it is not meant to be a story with a beginning and end, but is instead a showcase of Goodbrey’s imagination.”

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Speaking of Daniel, Lisa Fary of Pink Raygun gets him to make a rather shocking admission: "I didn’t know him until I started doing stuff then people said 'oh, your stuff looks like Bendis' and I devoured everything he did. My art style was literally me mucking around on the computer until I found something that kind of worked. I was trying to rip off Frank Miller. I was like 'that’s really high contrast, I wonder if I could do that?' But, yeah. It does look very Bendis-y."

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... which makes a good segue to Lisa's interview with Matt Silady about his debut with The Homeless Channel, and more shocking admissions: "I really enjoy Aaron Sorkin’s shows, like Sports Night, West Wing, and Studio 60. On Studio 60 they’ve ripped on reality TV a lot, and the book is patterned more after Sorkin’s type of characters dealing in the world of reality TV."

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...and lets me wind it up with Justin Giampaoli comparing Matt's art to that of Jeremy Haun.

Our man at the CSAA, Ash Aiwase, interviews The Homeless Channel miscreant Matt Silady for Your Mom's Basement, and our pals at The Isotope reveal themselves to be throwing ol' Matt a bash:

Tim O'Shea, over at Silver Bullet Comics, has an interview with Matt Silady about just-available-today's The Homeless Channel:

TOS: I'm curious about your use of white space, at first I took it be an element caused by your use of photos mixed with art, but after awhile it clearly seemed as you were using the white space for dramatic effect. Could you speak about your use of white space/sparse backgrounds in some scenes and your thinking behind it?

MS: You caught me trying to turn a limitation into an advantage. Early on, I realized there were going to be some issues with the process I was developing to illustrate the book. One of the byproducts of using the photos was a real high-contrast look to the art. That's when I figured I'd try to make the best of it by playing with the negative space in different ways. Some pages really pop. Some are a little sparse. Either way, it was a lot of fun to just play. Trust me, it was never out of laziness. As much as I was trying to figure out how to draw a nose that looked right, I was also trying to learn about the physics of the comic book. How time works within the context of each page. How the spaces between the panels matter as much as what's in the panels themselves. And how the dialogue really needs to be considered part of the art itself. I mean, the amount of white space around a word balloon can actually suggest a certain tone of voice. How cool is that?

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Shawn Woz, at The Outhouse: "Channel Zero is one of the best political graphic novels to grace the medium. Set in a dystopian New York, the US government has passed the Clean Act, effectively ridding the United States of our right to Free Speech and turning our country into a place of controlled media and information. The book is prescient to today’s era of ‘truthiness’ where anything said by any media source becomes truth without fact-checking and with little criticism and where politics are a taken as a matter of opinion and preference in the same vein."

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More Silady, this time with Caleb Monroe from LA's Meltdown, over at Scryptic: "Probably the most difficult moments came when the first reviews for the original minis started to come in. Most of them were very positive. But some of them just didn't get what I was going for and I couldn't blame them. The story was always meant to be read all at one time and not serialized with long gaps between issues. There just wasn't any way I could afford printing a big book like that right off the bat. That's why I'm so excited about the AiT collection that's coming out. Not only does it offer the reader the opportunity to experience the story the way I always intended it to be read, but it's also being put out by a company that values the spirit of self-publishers. Larry and Mimi have really valued my input concerning the final product and they've made it a priority to help me tell the story the way I've always wanted it told."

Happy birthday, Meem. All we are say...ing... is give-those-names a chaaance...


"There are those who call me... Tim."

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Also: good ol' Tom Spurgeon.

Scott Cederland has got a review of The Homeless Channel up on his blog: "With the dual nature of the book, The Homeless Channel is strangely sweet and cynical at the same time. This is a book that you can read a few different ways. It could be a romantic story about a professional working woman who finds something like love when she wasn’t looking for it. It could also be a commentary about the levels that networks and viewers will stoop to for entertainment. As if American Idol and Survivor aren’t bad enough, it’s not too far of a stretch to believe that if someone could make money off of it, the Homeless Channel could be showing up on your basic cable package next month. You can even read it both ways at the same time, which makes The Homeless Channel seem a bit more real since life doesn’t compartmentalize into easy categories like romance and social commentary."

Also, apparently you can read a third of the thing online already, which I learned from a Transformers site, of all places:

Publisher: AiT/Planet Lar

By: Matt Silady
When Darcy Shaw starts a twenty-four hour cable network called The Homeless Channel, she thinks she's got everything figured out. But confronted with an unexpected romance, a sibling out on the streets, and corporate sponsors who think they know what's best for her network, Darcy starts to wonder which is more important: saving the world or saving herself. Check out Matt Silady's intriguing debut graphic novel.

View:
The Homeless Channel, Cover (from Newsarama)
The Homeless Channel, Page 1
The Homeless Channel, Page 2-3
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The Homeless Channel, Page 49 (from Newsarama)
The Homeless Channel, Page 80 (from Newsarama)
The Homeless Channel, Page 145 (from Newsarama)

Related Links: The Homeless Channel website, The Homeless Channel trailer