Kim Thompson

Fantagraphics V.P. / Co-Publisher.

The Cultural Questionnaire.

What’s your favorite line from a movie?

A tie between ‘You’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an asshole’ and ‘We’ve gone on holiday by mistake’.

Which movie do you love but would be embarrassed to talk about in a serious, intellectual conversation?

There is no movie I love but would be embarrassed to talk about in a serious, intellectual conversation, because if I love it, it is worth talking about by definition. (I concede this could be taken as arrogant.) That said, I am mildly embarrassed at how much I actually love Love, Actually.

The tune of the moment?

Fuck You, obviously. Sans asterisks, or Gwyneth Paltrow. I also find Florence + The Machine’s Dog Days Are Over weirdly, addictively hypnotic.

Name a museum where you’d be happy to be locked in for the night?

The Musée d’Orsay (boring high-art answer). Or the Centre National de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image comics museum in Angoulême (boring professional/nerd answer).

The three books you’d take with you for a very, very, very long 100% environmentally friendly trip overseas?

The biggest omnibus of P.G. Wodehouse on the market (is there a “complete works” Kindle edition yet?), and Finnegans Wake, because that would force me to finally read it. And a big collection of André Franquin’s Gaston Lagaffe because it is the most beautiful comic ever made and one could study every panel for days.

You can give two “cultural items” (be it a book, a painting, a movie, a record or anything else), one to the person you like the most, one to the person that bores you the most. What would these two items be?

I’ll go with the Wodehouse book again for both, because I want everyone in the world to read Wodehouse; the person I like would enjoy it and it might make the boring person less boring.

What painting would you steal if you could magically become invisible for a few hours?

Does the original art to the cover of Tintin in Tibet count as a “painting”?

Which artist, alive or not, in any given field, would you love to party with for a wild, wild night?

I’m too old to party. (I’m not sure I was ever young enough to party all wild, wild night, at that.) I cannot imagine anyone would have been more entertaining to party with than Serge Gainsbourg, though, especially if we hit a few piano lounges on the way and he got talked into sitting down at one of those pianos…. If he brought along Brigitte Bardot that would be OK too, come to think of it.

Filed In: Comics

April 8, 2011 at 8:00 am