Following up on my feature review of Renee French’s latest, The Ticking, here are some interviews French has done around the web to support the book:

From the Newsarama interview:

If I think back, the seed for The Ticking came when I was in a hotel room in…Tasmania, maybe? I like to take pictures of the locks on the inside of stall doors – the inside of bathroom stall doors, especially little rinky-dinky bathrooms wherever we travel, and we travel a lot.

So I was sitting in a dilapidated bathroom that was in the basement of some restaurant in a hotel, and there was wallpaper that was ripped a little bit. I always have had this fear of what’s underneath something else, and I like to scare myself, so I’ll do things like imagine what if I peeled back that wallpaper and there was, for example, skin underneath it on the wall. That led to me going back to the hotel room and making sketches of peeled back wallpaper with some sort of skin or some sort of things that would couldn’t identify underneath – maybe a fold in skin, and lots of little doors in the wall that you could open up and there would be something that would be both subtle and terrifying.

That then developed into me wondering about what if you were sitting in your hotel room and the picture fell off the wall and something came out of the hole. From that, I started doing a story about my characters that I’ve used a lot in my short stories, Edison Steelhead … read more

Tom Spurgeon interviews her over at comicsreporter.com… and it’s a long interview, comprehensively career-spanning, and (I’m guessing, based on some of the asides made both by French and Spurgeon) it was originally intended for the Comics Journal. There wasn’t a quotation as cool as the one above, for me to pull out and tease you with, because Spurgeon focuses more on career kinds of questions (why she moved from this publisher to that one; what kind of work she did in art school, etc) than on The Ticking itself — but still very much worth reading, especially if you’re interested in a little artcomics “inside baseball.” … read it now

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