Since I wrote last night’s post about the webcomic format, I decided to try and come up with an idea for it. Maybe I wouldn’t do three 100-page books, but three 50-page ones (or one 150-page one), but I wanted to keep to the idea of a single story.

The original story I’d thought about for it was fairly episodic, because I’d had this idea that I could have guest artists come in once in a while. The problem with that ended up being that I had a lot of engine, but not a lot of heart behind why the story was happening that specific way.

So this time, I wanted to go for a single continuous story that I could tell with a single artist (though one that could be adapted to multiple artists if it came to that) but for which I knew the whys. I ransacked my notebook of old ideas, but nothing really fit. Then I went to bed, and I lay in the dark going through lots of ideas and combinations of genres and characters to see if anything sparked. I think I went through almost every genre I’ve read, let alone written.

And finally one coalesced into a nugget that I can start work from. It’s still quite rough, but I think it’s reasonably strong – I narrated the setup to a couple of people today just as a “Would you read this?” check, and it passed.

What led me to it was realising that in thinking of genre, I was sort of limiting myself to a framework that’s not helpful in generating ideas. So I started thinking about the visuals. After all, there had to be a strong reason I wanted to make a comic and not a novel here.

So I asked myself – if this has to be a comic, then what do I want it to look like? And I knew I wanted to do something that looked a bit like Moebius, something with that line and that colour, and from there, I started thinking about what I would want to do with visuals like that. I could work on something fantastical, or surreal, but also maybe do straightforward sci-fi.

Funny thing is, every time I read Moebius, the stories never give me the same thing I’m getting from the visual style. I want something solid, something grounded but strange, and the stories are mostly philosophical babble, abstracted from any kind of reality. Which is fine – those are the stories he wanted to tell.

But that’s one of the most fun exercises for a writer – you see something that has some interesting aspects, but you feel it doesn’t entirely work. And then you think – How would I fix it? You ask yourself enough questions, and you have a story completely distanced from your inspiration.

So that’s what I have for now – I’m obviously not going to tell you the story here. But I might use this log for more engine posts as I get going.

#comics #writing

Borrowing from Ganzeer’s (and Warren Ellis’s before him) concept of the Comics Engine – thinking about delivery formats for a comic.

This is one I’ve had in mind for a while – years in fact – and the fact that it still appeals to me implies that it’s a reasonably robust one. I kinda have a story for it too, but it’s been three years and I haven’t written that story, so it might be time to find a new story for the format.

Anyway, here it is:

You make the comic either at standard comics size or, if you’re feeling a bit expansive, at European size. I was going to make it at A4 size, which is only slightly off European size.

Anyway, take the size of the page, and cut it in half vertically. You have a half-page of the sort that used to be published in European comics magazines. In fact, that’s where I got it from, after observing that most of the early Asterix comics were quite neatly split halfway down each page.

Anyway, you do a comic that runs four half-pages a week. That’s two full pages a week. And because you’re composing to half-pages, each of those full pages will end up fairly dense. And you have beats to write to – there’s the half-page, then the full page, and then each set of the weekly two pages.

At the end of a year, building in two hiatus weeks, you have 100 full pages – that’s a graphic novel.

My idea was to do a webcomic for three years that’d end up a trilogy of graphic novels.

As I said, I still really like the format. Just needs a story.

#writing #comics

I read The Love Bunglers a few days ago, by Jaime Hernandez, previously serialised in Love and Rockets like most Los Bros Hernandez stories. It’s a beautiful hardback, with a great debossed cover and quality paper.

It’s also one of the very best of the Hernandez stories. It centres on Maggie and her ex Ray (the titular love bunglers) and it portrays their story with the richness and depth it deserves, with vignettes and scenes accumulated over the decades, told non-linearly, reflecting the way love is usually experienced in life.

I think my favourite thing about it is how the choice of scenes almost seems arbitrary at first – entirely slice-of-life – but going towards the end, it gathers the momentum of a singular story, while never losing its acknowledgement of all of its characters’ humanness, and not just that of its principals.

#comics #reading

As a comics reader, and as someone who’s now made them for more than a decade, I’ve been thinking about my limitations.

The first and foremost is obvious – I can’t draw. All my various attempts over the years have taught me ways to appreciate other people’s art, and lettering thousands of pages certainly gives you a glimpse into how pages work on a basic level. But that’s a big lacuna – not being able to actually do the thing that makes a comic a comic.

Second, I’ve had a blindness towards other kinds of comics than American. I’ve definitely dabbled in European comics (grew up on Asterix and Tintin), I have my favourite webcomics and manga. But push comes to shove, these are not media I have an attachment to – not nearly as intense as the American variety.

I haven’t been able to pinpoint to myself why that is. There are some webcomics that are investigating the format of comics in a way paper comics never could,* there’s manga that’ll give you an emotional ride of a depth and breadth that most American comics can only dream of. And European comics have some of the best, most laboured-over art. And yet, I love individual examples of all of these, but the media themselves evoke no passion.

* The Webtoon vertical scrolling feels like something that should fire up my imagination, but I’ve read a bunch and … nope.

I’ve tried to tackle this a few times over the years, and it’s introduced me to one of my favourite comics ever – Pluto – but I suspect this is something I’ll eventually just have to make my peace with.

#journal #comics