Summary: Josh Bayer is coming a teaching class up town, and I’ve just finished work, so find a middle ground, a coffee shop called Ralph’s, bathed in the shadow of nearby Trump Tower. The place came highly recommended online, but there was no mention of the fact that it’s stashed away on the second floor of a Ralph Lauren store. Descent coffee, though. Bayer’s already there when I arrive, poring over comics on a tablet. He’s excited to talk about his work as a comics educator, having just come fresh off a class. His students run a broad spectrum, from upper east side kids to adults in need of a sort of art therapy. A deconstructer by nature, the work has caused the artist to pull the curtain back even further on what goes into making a great comic. The artist’s best known works are exercises in their own right. His Suspect Device anthology made a mission of turning well known comics source material on its head, with postmodern popcultural mashups and collaborations with a broad range of different alternative artists. His latest work, the ongoing All-Time Comics finds the artist paying homage to golden and silver age comics superheroes published by Fantagraphics, an odd destination for the tights and cape crowd. The each issue focuses on a different character, an experiment of sorts of step-by-step word building with a broad range of creative collaborators including the late-Herb Trimpe and covers by the likes of Jaime Hernandez and Anders Nilsen.
