We wrote about the announcement of Dave Baker's eagerly anticipated Mary Tyler MooreHawk back in June of last year. Here is more about the book from the press release:
Who Is Mary Tyler MooreHawk? How did she save the world from a dimension-hopping megalomaniac? Why was her TV show canceled after only nine episodes? And what happened to the reclusive genius behind her creation? These are just a few of the questions that young journalist Dave Baker begins to ask himself as he unravels the many mysteries surrounding the obscure comic book Mary Tyler MooreHawk. However, his curiosity grows into an obsession when he discovers that the artist behind his favorite globe-trotting girl detective… is also named Dave Baker.
"Like Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, this book playfully and suspensefully uses footnotes to build multiple layers of story and setting," said Top Shelf Productions Senior Editor Leigh Walton. "While we cheer for our gee-whiz cartoon heroine to beat the bad guys, we're also piecing together addictive glimpses into how 'intellectual property' gets turned into comics and cartoons and the real creators who get hurt in the process. Readers will go nuts exploring this book, then sharing and debating it with friends!"
As the release date (February 13) edges ever-closer, Boing Boing was given a sneak peek.
And Dave Baker shared this with us about one unique feature of this beautifully conceived book:
Credits sequences in movies are often given so much narrative real estate. George Lucas left the Directors Guild over the simple fact that they wanted him to have the credits before the movie started playing. And yet, in comics, that's not the case. Most comics produced today don't even have a full page dedicated to the credits, and for the initial few years of the existence of the medium, artists weren't even allowed to sign their work.
That's why, with Mary Tyler MooreHawk, I wanted to make something akin to the opening of a James Bond movie or the end credits of Buckaroo Banzai. A stylistic and narrative breathing point that would allow the reader to experience a pause within the story. It also allowed me a means by which to do a little world building by giving back stories to characters… some of which we've seen before, and some of which we probably won't ever actually see do anything more than just be in these credits pages. All that is to say, I like drawing crowd scenes. So, maybe this is all just me justifying the two days it takes to draw all of these weird characters.
