Brian Azzarello and Jill Thompson

An interview with Chicago resident Brian Azarello is the front-page feature of the Arts + Entertainment section of today's Chicago Tribune, heralded by a presidential-portrait-sized headshot that fills fully half of the newspaper page. It's only appropriate that a Chicago newspaper would feature a local craftsman so prominently.

Azarello is accumulating some acclaim for his New 52 relaunch of Wonder Woman, and the article covers that and his other accomplishments well. Here is a link to the online version of the interview which, unfortunately, is just one-third the length of the full version in the paper. Though unstated, the publishing of the article is synchronized with the first day of this year's WizardWorld/Chicago Comicon, which might be viewed as ironic since one of Jill Thompson's tweets a month or so ago announced that they would not be attending that convention. Wait! I should have mentioned first that Brian Azzarello and Jill Thompson are married.

By the way, have I written before that my first year of teaching was at Jill Thompson's high school? Jill was in the other geometry teacher's class so she was not my student, but her friend Marguerite was in my class. This was back when I was drawing for Alan Light's Buyer's Guide for Comic Fandom and one day I brought a page or two of my artwork in to school to show my students. After school that day Marguerite brought comics fan and budding artist Jill to my room so she could see my pages also. Jill was around then getting involved with fanzines and created Banana Man and, not too many years later, she was drawing Wonder Woman. Yes, the same WW that her husband now is the writer of. Did you ever notice that everything is connected?

Down below is a picture I took of  Brian Azzarello being photographed at this past spring's C2E2 convention.