Retro Thursday: Andi Watson
I think Andi Watson is one of the great, underrated comic-book creators of the past decade. For a while there, it was if he was writing comics just for me: the screwball-inspired newspaper comedy “Slow News Day,” the superhero relationship drama “Love Fights,” and “Little Star,” possibly the best graphic novel ever written about parenting. All of those were written and drawn by Watson, who moved from a manga-influenced style in his first comics, “Samurai Jam” and “Skeleton Key,” to a more European-influenced design in “Geisha,” which came out from Oni Press.
You can see a recent project of Watson’s, “Great Uncle George’s Will,” at Tor.com.
I talked to Andi in 2001, as he was working on “Slow News Day” and “Breakfast After Noon,” an Eisner-nominated tale of unemployment.
Nearly everyone has had to deal with losing a job. Andi Watson, writer/artist of “Geisha,” explores the life of a suddenly out-of-work couple in the Eisner-nominated “Breakfast After Noon.”
Rob and Louise are engaged to be married when they both lose their jobs at a British factory.
“Breakfast After Noon” follows the different reactions they have to being laid off and the pressure it puts on their relationship.
While Louise returns to school, Rob refuses to give up on getting his job back – until the company shuts down.
“It’s about the decline of the manufacturing industry, the effect of unemployment on a life, love, work, money and social change,” Watson said.
“I started with the desire to try and capture what it feels like and what happens to someone without a job,” he said. “There is a stigma attached; there is an effect on self-esteem. … Most people want to work. It goes beyond the financial and into the moral. Most of us want to feel we’re of use to the world, we do something – being on the dole is not easy. People who say that usually haven’t been unemployed.”
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