The title of this interview is a reference to the man's first appearance on the show last year—an episode we lost! The audio crashed, the back-up was never found, it was ugly... But hey, today we've been given a second chance at greatness and greatness we deliver!
Ragnar is not only one of our favorite creators, he's also one of our favorite people. A wonderfully knowledgeable guy, a student of his craft, a committed family man and often seen wearing...what? The colors in his palette! Do tell! Plus, he's just a super nice guy. His response to the aforementioned lost episode was, "No worries, I understand completely" (and just so you know, we were worried as hell).
To us, as long as Steranko and Prince aren't in the room, he's the coolest guy around with one name. We met him in person for the first time at this year's ACE and for the convention, he brought with him a mucho
smaller version of his Comic-Con set-up. It was all really quite neat. Books, prints, mugs, chimps, skate decks—again, just neat stuff. He sat in on about three panels that weekend and we thoroughly enjoyed his presence as a guest.
Now, the work. Ragnar's done tons of work in animation, but will tell you himself that a good bit of it, you may never see. His clients over the years have included companies like Warner Bros, Disney, Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. However, with the nature of animation and the film business in general, projects often start off one way and end up somewhere else by the time they finally come out. And that's especially true for Development, which is the area he's contributed to the most.
What you can see though and plenty of it, are his own creations! Books like Chromaphile, Vernaculis, Kings of the Road and the newly released Symptomatica! All of them fantastic and all get the high SiDEBAR Seal-of-Approval (which means dick, but go buy 'em anyway, they're hot)!
Our conversation with him stays pretty loose since we all sorta know each other, but we do get to some key items. Big City being one, Symptomatica being another, and the latters being his upcoming all-ages book and where he got his name. Beyond that, the rest is just filler—but it's some damn good filler (ha)!
**For this episode, we played a snippet of Dead Kennedys "California Uber Alles" in honor of Dwight's timely reference.
Click here to download the show.
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