Interviews

Nine hours a day, I stare at a computer monitor. I'm surrounded on three sides by cloth-covered panels that are nearly as tall as I am. My doorway cannot be closed. My neighbors' conversations (and, indeed, my neighbors themselves) drift in and out throughout the day.

Stuck to the walls with thumbtacks are the office worker's one sine qua non: Dilbert cartoons. Culled from newspapers, Internet printouts, and calendar pages, these business environment cartoons are sometimes the only anchors of sanity in an otherwise insane setting. They help us to laugh, lest we should cry.

It's the perfect place from which to call Scott Adams, creator of the funny pages phenomenon known as Dilbert, and wrest away a few precious minutes of his time. Hey, anything to break the monotony of creating yet another way to look at the same sales figures, right?

An introduction of sorts will go here, for which I am completely and utterly far too immersed in Gaiman-speak to get into right now, for fear I'll present the whole thing up as some sort of unintentional parody. Suffice it to say, I'll give it the short introduction, something a bit longer than "Ladies and Gentlemen: Winston Churchill." And I'll probably be rather emphatic that the interview was conducted over the phone on May 5, 2001, for purposes of putting into perspective certain things like where the writers' strike talks were, and how this all fits into events surrounding the recent Miracleman brouhaha, and so forth. It will be a dandy introduction once it's finished, and it will actually mention, at least once, that the whole thing was done largely to talk about Neil's new novel, American Gods, which will be released on June 19th. So there's nothing really left but for the writing of it.

Which, oddly enough, it seems I have now done.

After having a conversation with Mark Alessi, it's not uncommon to come away feeling as though you've just attended a Tony Robbins' seminar. Throughout the halls of CrossGen Comics, everyone--from the receptionist through the top management--exudes a confidence and enthusiasm generally seen in small town crowds after a tent revival or traveling medicine show.

But these aren't yokels, and it's no snake oil salesman's spiel they're buying into. They're veterans of the comic book industry, and what's drawing them into the CrossGen fold is the time-proven business principles for achievement, principles Alessi practices with as much conviction as he preaches them.

Wouldn't it be nice if, whenever your friends gave you the usual line about how comic books are "less than literary," you could point to some comic-reading role model? A doctor, maybe, or perhaps a minister?

How about an attorney?

Bob Ingersoll is the writer of the weekly column The Law is a Ass. If your friends point out the poor grammar of the title, you can confidently 'pooh-pooh' their lack of literary education. According to Bob: "The phrase 'the law is a ass' is from Charles Dickens' 'Oliver Twist' -- chapter 51 to be exact. In said words, Mr. Bumble, an ungrammatical and vulgar character, is told that he is legally responsible for the wrongs of his wife, because the law presumes a husband can control her actions. Mr. Bumble's ungrammatical and vulgar response was, 'If the law supposes that, the law is a ass -- a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor.'"