Interviewed: Terry LaBan on Edge City
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Terry LaBan, co-writer and artist for Edge City talks to Comic Book Resources about his feature.
An excerpt:
Q. In what ways does the daily format work to your advantage in telling stories and to what degree is it frustrating?
A. I don’t think it’s often appreciated what a unique and cool way a daily comic strip has of telling stories. It’s this unassuming thing that people only read for a few seconds, but they read it every day, and, just as a comic strip becomes part of the cartoonist’s internal dialogue, it can become part of the reader’s as well. Because strips exist within the larger context of the newspaper and the overall comics page, appreciation of them becomes almost unconscious — like life, they never end, but go on and on. I don’t know of any other medium that really works this way, except maybe soap operas and sitcoms, but they operate on a completely different scale. Comic strips can only have this effect in print newspapers, which is why the fact that people read newspapers less and less is, from a comics standpoint, so sad.
On the con side, there’s definitely a limit to the kind of subject matter you can do and the kind of stories you can tell, and sometimes you have to do some contortions to stay within those limits. But everything has rules.
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