McCarthy malarky

"I've always liked that camp Bowie-esque, early Hockney, early Roxy Music, New York Dolls, Morrissey, dodgy glam-rock thing that surfaces from time to time in popular culture. Teenage misfits are always gonna put lipstick on."
link to another interview with Brendan McCarthy, in which he discusses SOLO #12:

WHY IS SMALLVILLE MADE OUT OF JELLY?

I think memory is a bit like Jelly...

wobbly and semi-transparent. Starting off the comic with a framing narrative that unhooks you from your usual expectations means you really have no idea where you're going to be taken in the story..

. And I wanted to write something that I haven't seen in a DC Comic before, something jolting about the DC Universe.
There's a whole tradition of surreal 'dream art' outside of comics: Listen to "The Bewlay Brothers" by David Bowie.

Look at how the Monty Pythons structured their TV shows. So-called nonsense actually expresses a different kind of sense, that's all. Check out the stories of Chester Brown or Renee French or Jim Woodring.

I like to imagine David Lynch doing a comic book.
I was listening to Syd Barrett's solo records and was inspired: there are finished songs, but in other places it's kind of sketchy and fragmentary. That's the feeling I wanted for the SOLO comic: Lots of little stories inside a bigger story.

It seems quite odd to me that a person will accept the experience of say, listening to sprawling flow of The Beatles 'White Album', yet reject a similar kind of feeling from a comic book. Musically structured storytelling is interesting, I think.
I still like to see stuff that is different and original.

.. I wanted THE FLASH story to be just a fragment from another kind of FLASH story, one that uses the FLASH's iconic imagery to give us a glimpse of another whole new take.

DC should try out this new one...

He has a new story to tell, new places to take us, new villains to fight. And this FLASH is about Light, not Speed. Running fast doesn't seem like such a thrillingly big idea these days.

.. The Silver age gives way to the Luminous age!

If you're looking for the usual stuff, then there's reams of that to read out there, but how about about a bit of the unusual now and then? I can do 'straight' narrative stuff if I want to, butI really am bored to distraction by the stories in comics aping film narrative techniques. I don't want comics to turn into just a kind of "pitch" document for the movie industry.

It's the job of comics creators to go where films, or any other media, can't go - in style, storytelling and concepts. Let film follow where comics lead!