Who's Who In The CBU Update 2008

Who are... Park and Barb?

Barbara Lien-Cooper writes the comic GUN STREET GIRL at Panel 2 Panel, was an original founder of Sequential Tart, is the managing editrix of the 2004 Eisner award-winning print magazine COMIC BOOK ARTIST, and was named by Mark Millar (The Authority, Ultimates, Wanted) as one of the three most promising new talents in the next wave of comics writing.

Park Cooper started writing about comics at the now-defunct DC FANZINE website.

The Secret Origin of a Certain Hairy Comic-Book Character With Claws Revealed: Ursula Vernon Interview, Part I

By Park Cooper

Introductory blurbs CONTINUE to be for losers, man. Ursula Vernon does the webcomic DIGGER at http://www.graphicsmash.com just like Barbara’s GUN STREET GIRL. Get over there as soon as you’ve read this.

Ursula Vernon: I arrive!

Me, for Silver Bullet Comics: Good. So are you early or late?

UV: [grin] By my reckoning, I'm half an hour early.

SBC: Barb's reading Knights of the Dinner Table [also known as KODT], a collection we picked up at Half-Price Books. The interview has begun.

UV: KODT is great! Err, sorry. Begin interview!

SBC: So continue to talk in complete sentences and be interesting. Or should that be continue to be interesting...

UV: Yes, sir! My grammar shall be flawless, sir!

…

Damn, whenever anybody tells me to be interesting, my mind dries up...

SBC: I was just contemplating what a one-book man Jolly Blackburn is. You want a man with that grasp of characterization to have this insane level of variety and prolificness, but what could he do? Space opera? High fantasy? Gen X realism?

SBC: He's had enough trouble, a couple of years ago anyway, doing this one book on time. But he does it so well.

SBC: Barb cares about the characters in this comic more than any other comic she reads in the last few years that's populated by humans.

UV: Well, some people can do one thing really, really well.

SBC: I was just telling someone on the Gun Street Girl forum about how it's okay to speak to us as one person; we practically are, and if one needs her specifically and not me, I channel her voice from the other room

UV: Hey, works for me. I'll use the royal "you" as in "y'all."

SBC: ::mimicking the weird Germanic accent of the Fremen Mother from Lynch's DUNE::: "De voice vrom der outer vorld."

SBC: Actually I've always felt that y'all was a very appropriate linguistic option.

UV: Despite not being from the deep south, I keep hearing myself say "y'all."

SBC: How's your forum going? Are you pleased with it?

UV: Had a Japanese professor once who claimed that it was a perfectly legitimate pronoun for others-plural.

UV: The Digger forum? It's pretty good! People are very enthusiastic about Digger, and very creative, and they're not afraid to start speculating wildly on things like where a wombat civilization gets refined sugar and so forth, so it's fun.

SBC: They're creative, you say? Where DOES it get refined sugar? The surface? An underground variety of cane? Root sap?

UV: Well, they have that kind of creative...thing...going on, where somebody mentions urban tree-dwelling centaurs, and a few minutes later we've worked out the ecology of the tree-centaur and so forth.

SBC: Sweet, sweet cave beetles? URBAN TREE-DWELLING? Wait... actually I can see that. They must be huge trees, though.

UV: Well, I doubt they have tunnel bees, so I imagine they either use beet sugar, or just trade for it. Or very agile centaurs. Ooh, albino cave bees.

SBC: Say, that's a point... no one says these specialized centaurs have to have hooves. You're good.

UV: Great! Actually, I was noodling around with an article--just saw Return of the King last night, and was trying to pin down why it worked for me visually as a fantasy epic.

SBC: Hm, beets. Or sweet potatoes...

SBC: Ah, good, new article.

UV: Well, sugar beets are the major source of refined sugar for us...

UV: Yeah. Actually, as strange as it is, the Lord of the Rings reminds me most of Alien.

SBC: Hm... I'm still having a vision of lil wombats stealing vegetables from Daffy Duck's garden...

SBC: Hmmmm... visually you mean.

UV: Because you got to the alien in Alien and did not, as with almost every other movie on earth go "Meh, is THAT all?"

UV: You went "HOLY MOTHER OF GOD! That's so much worse than anything I could have come up with!"

UV: And I got a similar jaw-dropping effect in the Lord of the Rings movies--they'd pan across the cities of Baradur or Minis Tirith, and instead of "Meh, the one inside my head was better," I went "Dear lord, that is so much better than anything I could have imagined."

SBC: It's because of Giger... and because it jumped out of John Hurt's chest, says Barb. Do you feel that awareness of the amazing things they can do with computer tech now visually hurts your amazement level in such movies? Or does it just make it better for you...?

UV: It's entirely 'cos of Giger, yeah. He had this staggeringly good vision.

SBC: Because it hurts me...

UV: [grin] If it's done badly, it hurts. The too-rubbery figures in the Harry Potter movies, say, made me yawn. Then again, those bloody Quidditch matches went on forever, so that didn't help.

But if it's done well, I don't think it does--I know the huge, epic battle scenes in LOTR were done with computers, but it doesn't matter to me because I'm still sitting there just watching this sprawling, massive anthill-style battle and going "Man, this makes Braveheart look like a school play."

Giger is an odd guy. But very, very talented.

SBC: See, my awareness of the tech does hurt me. I'd have to say it hurts Barb a lot too. It's one of the reasons why she couldn't bring herself to see HULK.I haven't seen it either.

UV: [laugh!] Well, I couldn't bear to because I heard it was terrible.

SBC: There's that, too. But before she saw the reviews, Barb was like, well that looks fake.

UV: I think part of it may be that I watched a lot of kung fu movies, and even if you know it's all done with harnesses, you've got to get into this kind of headspace where you suspend the disbelief.

SBC: It hurts our Matrixness too... although of course, like HULK, there's lots of other problems going on there, too. See, CROUCHING TIGER was fantastic... except for being a bit too long for Barb.

UV: Still haven't seen the third one. But I'm such a sucker for Hugo Weaving, I probably will, despite the reviews. [Talking about Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon] Loved, loved, loved that movie. Cried my eyes out, and I never cry at movies. Spent most of it wanting to bitch-slap the young heroine around, though. But I think that was a pretty universal reaction.

SBC: Oh, I was okay with that... People are young and stupid, and that's just the way it is. I rather liked her.

We watched PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN on DVD lately... had some good points, but was way too long (even with me operating the fast forward) and the special effects were the worst part... besides a little too much talk, talk, talk, when Johnny wasn't on screen.

UV: Still haven't seen it. Saw "Master and Commander" though, which, if you want a naval epic, is pretty good.

SBC: Yuck, what's-his-name. We don't like him.

UV: Russell Crowe?

SBC: Give us Hugh Jackman anyday. "Now that's one Hugh Jackman!"

UV: 'E was pretty good. Thing is, they had one of the hobbits--Merry or Pippin--as a crewman, and I spend the whole time thinking "Hobbit off the starboard bow!" Those poor guys are typecast for life.

SBC: That's what they get.

UV: Oh, well, it was worth it.

SBC: LOTR is way, way, way, way too long for Barb.

UV: I wanted it to be longer. But I have a bladder made of tempered steel.

SBC: She could only watch #2 the way she watched Matrix 2: with me picking out key cool scenes.

SBC: And only showing her those.

SBC: It wasn't about peeing, it was about narrative pacing. We wanted to cut, cut, cut things.

UV: I generally don't mind long movies at all.

SBC: Barb does. A lot.

UV: Then again, I'm a rambler. Brevity is not my strong suit. [grin]

SBC: Resent might be a better word. Well, sure, that's not the end of the world for talking to people... But it is in storytelling.

UV: I dunno. To a certain extent, maybe, but I think there's room for the sprawling epic as well as lean mean prose. Within limits. Robert Jordan, for example, is just ridiculously long.

SBC: Yes he is.

UV: [laugh] Oh, well.

SBC: I tried listening to him as CD book on tape, and after a while I'd push the button for Next Track... And then I'd try it again... and sometimes again... And you know, after 5 CDs of talk, talk, talk, no one accomplished anything. This is a recent book in the series, you understand.

UV: I tried to read them, and got maybe three or four books in. Then I decided that his women were acting absurd, the main character was an idiot, and the only ones I cared about were the werewolf and the Aragorn-clone.

By contrast, George R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire is lengthy, but I'm completely hooked.

SBC: Rand is in trouble somewhere and using a lot of the Power! I can sense it! What's-her-name's been kidnapped! There are spies in the White Tower! Someone tried to assassinate Lord Whoever! And you know what? I think I got to the end, and I don't think we found out what happened to Rand, started rescuing what's-her-name, found any more Black Ajah, or learned exactly who assassinated Lord Whoever.

UV: Rand did entirely too much navel gazing.

SBC: They all do.

I love George R.R. Martin, but haven't read much of him lately.

UV: I think he's working on the next book. I hope.

SBC: I read the first 3 books or so and let it go. I thought, this'll be a harmless thing to help speed the commute, but you know, there was nothing speedy about it. Yeah let's get back to George for a sec.

I first learned of him on the WILD CARDS series. What a boy-fest that is for a young fanboy.

UV: Didn't read those, myself. [grin]

SBC: I understand. It's so fanboy.

UV: I never thought of that, I just wasn't that interested from reading the backs in the bookstore. Actually, I think the cover was what sold me on the first of the Song-of-Ice-and-Fire.

SBC: Barb knew him for his vampire novel and his sci-fi story "A Song For Lya", one of the saddest things she's ever read… Fevre Dream is the vamp novel.

UV: It's a terrible cover. The horse's neck looks broken in half. I passed it a half dozen times and it irked me every damn time, which is the peril of being an illustrator.

SBC: But you picked it up.

UV: It was like a sore tooth! I was so sick of rolling my eyes every time I passed the M section that I finally grabbed it.

SBC: Like dry-cleaners who post their signs upside down so your eye doesn't pass over it.

UV: Exactly!

SBC: Okay now... let's talk webcomics.

UV: Sure!

SBC: Read any besides Graphic Smash?

UV: Oh, well, the usual...PvP, Penny Arcade, Something Positive...

SBC: I read Bobbins/Scary-Go-Round for a while...

UV: Used to read Megatokyo because the art is so lovely, but the storyline eventually made me want to tear my hair out. It's just not my genre.

SBC: Then there was one about online gamers, but I can't recall the title. Lots of Everquest-addiction jokes.

UV: Nodwick, because I'm a geek, and Raistlin vs. Elminster jokes actually make me laugh. God, there's a shameful admission.

Tried a couple of furry comics, some of which had okay stories, but the art was usually so bad that I'd give it up. I'm an art snob.

SBC: Lord. Recently KODT did a "you know you're old school when..." and I actually knew about 5 of them. "Oh god, I know who Wormy and Yamara and Snarf are."

They didn't mention Phil and Dixie, maybe they thought that would be too easy.

UV: Snarfquest!

SBC: Let's not go furry...

SBC: Hey Snarfquest was the Howard the Duck of gaming. That's a complement.

UV: [laugh] Well, mine's about a talking wombat, I keep getting told that I'm either furry, or not at all furry, and I'm so conflicted...

SBC: Hmm, I hadn't thought of that. I don't think of Digger as being furry-related. I think it's because of her realistic wombat physique.

UV: A lot of people don't.

SBC: If she looked like Minerva Mink...

UV: And no hot wombat lovin'.

I guess it's based on your definition of furry--anything with a talking animal, vs animal-humanoids and so forth.

But anyway, you said you didn't want to go furry. [grin]

SBC: Hmm... yes, no local wombat colonies discovered in new location so far... That'll be the 2006 storyline... Digger: Single Wombat Seeks Companion.

UV: [laugh!]

SBC: Well we can if the point is to make fun of furryness... Or is that too easy a target?

Digger good, furry... much less good.

UV: In my weaker moments, I am tempted to introduce a noxiously gorgeous Legolas-style elfboy and have Digger utterly non-interested, but I already vowed never to have elves.

SBC: Good.

UV: I dunno. I don't think furry's inherently bad, but I think the word "furry" gets used to cover all the Bad Parts...

SBC: I know, I'm ashamed of my prejudice, and yet, how can I possibly overcome it when the bad makes it all look so bad...

To talk about other GS for just a second, have you tried Mnemesis?

UV: God, I started to. Haven't gotten all the way through the archives yet. There was just so much of it. Haven't gotten through the Fans archives yet, either, alas.

SBC: whaaaa? Started to? I found it a bit hard to stop.

UV: I had to work! I had paintings that needed to get done! It's on my list.

SBC: Crap, Ursula, if you haven't read all of Mnemesis' archives, you may as well give up on ever finishing all of FANS right now...

UV: Next to Fans, and the Sluggy Freelance archives...

SBC: Okay... so do you have a nickname?

UV: "Urs"

SBC: "Urss?" "Urz?"

UV: Hmm, sort've like "Errrss" if we're getting phonetic.

SBC: But not a z at the end, huh.

UV: I am used to a mangled name, comes with the territory.

SBC: Oh come on, my name is Park. I think I win by a small margin.














Your New Mantra: LET US REASON TOGETHER