When it comes to conversations about the art of comics, you could hardly ask for a better intergenerational pairing than David Mazzucchelli and Dash Shaw. Mazzucchelli is known in the Direct Market for his collaborations on Daredevil and Batman with Frank Miller, in indy circles for his Rubber Blanket series, and in bookstores and libraries for his comics adaptation (along with Paul Karasik) of Paul Aster's City of Glass. He recently released his first solo graphic novel about, as Charles Hatfield says in his review in this issue, "an intellectual run to ground." The well-received Asterios Polyp manages to be both an impressively constructed work and a critique of the structuralist perspective. He even taught Shaw at the School of Visual Arts. Shaw, 26 years old, has had a meteoric rise to literary acclaim with the his formally ambitious 2008 graphic novel Bottomless Belly Button, which examines the impact a divorce has on a family — and led to a gig animating shorts for the Independent Film Channel, among other projects. The two grappled with color theory, art history and the cartooning possibilities for electronic media over coffee and horchata.

Transcribed by Brittany Kusa and Jessica Lona.

I started working with Ho Che Anderson when he answered a call Fantagraphics put out for sex comics; the result was a five-issue series, later compiled into a graphic novel, I Want To be Your Dog. Ho then launched into a serious graphic biography of Martin Luther King, originally published in three volumes and later compiled into a big single book in 2005. He's also published with DC's short-lived imprint, Milestone Comics in the '90s, where he wrote and drew Wise Son. Hoods in Love (published by Fantagraphics in 1995) is a compilation of noirish urban short stories, On top of his comics work, Anderson has a successful career in commercial art, and dabbles as a filmmaker as well.

Over the course of working with Ho, we'd often talk about cartoonists and at the top of Ho's pantheon sat Howard Chaykin. No matter how hard I tried, he could not be disabused of this lapse of discrimination, so when the time came to think of generational pairings for this issue, I thought, who better to talk to an artist who loves talking about himself?