The Last Mechanical Monster

So I've started a new webcomic. It's called The Last Mechanical Monster, it's about a very old man and his giant robot, and you can find it over here. There are currently 18 pages up, with another 140 or so to come at a rate of two per week (Tuesday and Friday). I expect it'll keep me occupied through mid-2015.

The Last Mechanical Monster has been percolating in my brain for years. The premise always tickled me but it took me a long time to figure out what to do with it. This is the project that I penciled 110 complete pages of in 2011-2012 when I decided the story wasn't working and I needed to start fresh with a whole new approach. I literally turned those 110 sheets over and began drawing new pages on their backs. No sense wasting good paper.

A real catalyst for reworking The Last Mechanical Monster was my experience last year doing The Adventures of Old Time-Traveling Brian, a series of dopey little comics I posted here and then self-published as a limited-edition zine. I had so much fun doing that, while at the same time I was having so little fun slogging through my 110-plus pages of pencils, that I figured I must be doing something wrong. So I started over.

The webcomic is a work in progress. One key reason for releasing The Last Mechanical Monster as a webcomic is to get readers’ feedback. When I did Mom’s Cancer, readers told me what worked and what didn’t. Crowd-sourced editing. We talked and argued, and it turned out you were always right. Please feel free to share your thoughts via the comments on each page.

It's also mostly black and white. I plan to color it eventually; my palettes and swatches are all picked out. But right now coloring would take so much of my limited time that it'd prevent me from doing the webcomic at all. I think the black-and-white art still stands on its own, and I'll add color when it provides necessary clarity or meaning.

The Last Mechanical Monster is an experiment--or actually a few different experiments. I'm trying some stuff just to see what happens. I hope you'll check it out. If you like it please come back regularly, link to it, tell your friends. If you don't like it, keep it to yourself and maybe my next project will be more to your taste.

If you're not familiar with webcomics, they're typically posted in reverse chronological order with the most recent installment on the home page, so you can bookmark it and always see the latest without additional clicks. Links below each page and along the right margin should make it easy to navigate (let me know if they don't). I recommend clicking the link in the header that reads "Starts HERE."

Here you go. Let's see what happens.

 

I Owe You a Post

Here it is.

The paradox of blogging is that extended periods of silence that appear calm and boring to you are often frantically busy for me. Or sometimes calm and boring, that happens too. I have been pretty busy (if not frantic) lately with my day job, making good headway on Mystery Project X, and working on a cartooning project that fell into my lap via an e-mail from a stranger and has the potential to be something very cool, different, and possibly high-profile.

I'm not being cagey for its own sake. I just have a rule/guideline/superstition/neurosis about not spilling a lot of details too soon and then having to explain myself if it doesn't work out. Plans fall through all the time. "Hey, what happened with that thing you were doing?" "Um, well, hmmm...." I hate that.

I've said too much already.

Be assured I continue to work on what I hope will be some good, entertaining creative projects. What comes of them remains to be seen and isn't entirely up to me. I'm eager to share when I can.

To help you with the concept of "delayed gratification," here's actor Tom Hiddleston (Loki from the Marvel movies) working through some issues with the Cookie Monster:



And to help you pass the time, here's a practical joke involving the cast of the latest "Star Trek" movie (recently voted the worst "Star Trek" movie ever made at a big Trekkie convention, which I think is unfair; I'd rank it second worst. It was also one of the most profitable, so there you go). Some of the movie was shot at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility, which truly looks like it belongs aboard a starship.


National Ignition Facility--or the USS Enterprise's warp drive. Either way.

The gag set-up: actor Simon Pegg (whose movie "The World's End" my girls and I recently enjoyed) convinced his castmates that the facility emitted dangerous radiation that only "neutron cream" could protect them against. It went a little something like this:



Finally, Chris Sparks and Team Cul de Sac are nominated for four Harvey Awards this weekend at the Baltimore Comic-Con. Team Cul de Sac: Cartoonists Draw the Line at Parkinson's, is a book inspired by cartoonist Richard Thompson to raise funds for Parkinson's Disease research, to which I was honored to contribute a page. The Harveys are named for pioneering cartoonist/editor Harvey Kurtzman, and are one of the two big recognitions available to comics creators and projects.

Did I mention here that Team Cul de Sac was up for an Eisner Award--the other big recognition--last July at Comic-Con International, but lost? Nice consolation prize: the project instead won the Con's Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award, which is an even more exclusive club.

Best of luck at the Harveys, Team. You'll always deserve the "Best Anthology," "Best Biographical, Historical or Journalistic Presentation," "Special Award for Humor in Comics," and "Special Award for Excellence in Presentation" in my book!

I Drew This

From time to time, mostly as a way of encouraging myself, I think I'll post a bit of something I've drawn recently. Maybe a panel, or even a little piece of a panel--something I'm happy with. Unless otherwise described, they're from Mystery Project X, and I'll be careful to avoid giving anything away. These're pre-Photoshop, pre-lettering, pre-coloring: raw stuff.

I drew this.

Making Comics is Hard

I've been trying to do some work on Mystery Project X every day. And nearly every day I hit some problem on which I bang and bang and bang and bang and eventually pound through. I've heard it said that if it's not hard, you're not stretching yourself enough. I'm stretched.

The problem usually isn't drawing, it's storytelling--controlling the pace of the story through the panels and deciding what information needs to be in each panel to not only depict that moment of action but pay off the previous one and set up the next.

I could write a really long post on this topic someday. Not today. But here's a fundamental truth about making comics I didn't understand when I was young: a lot of people can draw one pretty picture that'll take your breath away. Literally millions of artists can draw prettier, more impressive pictures than I can.

The trick--what makes what I'm trying to do comics rather than illustration--is drawing the pictures before and after that one to convey information, create a mood, evoke an emotion. The choices you make define your voice. They can't all be technical showstoppers, any more than every violin recital can be "Flight of the Bumblebee." Sometimes the very best comics panel is one that shows very little. Sometimes the most perfect thing you can draw is nothing at all.

It's really hard.

Process

It's been a while since I've posted a bloated, self-important manifesto about process, so I thought I'd write one.

This one stems from recent conversations I've had with a group of medical students as well as another cartoonist that boiled down to (as most conversations with other cartoonists boil down to): "How do you do it?" In fact, I've done it different ways.

Mom's Cancer was done parallel with real time but several weeks behind. That is, I'd notice something that might be worth writing about, capture it in a note or sketch, then set it aside for a while to see if and how it fit into the rest of the story. I wanted Mom's Cancer to be more than a diary comic--I wanted it to have some real dramatic arcs and a beginning, middle and end, even if I didn't know at the time what the end was going to be. The result was a sort of guided spontaneity.

In contrast, Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow was pretty solidly scripted from the start (although my initial proposal for WHTTWOT was very different--for example, there were no Pop and Buddy at all). Then I sat down and drew what I'd written. I still had a lot of freedom to revise as I worked, and Editor Charlie and I wrestled with the final chapter until quite late in the process. If there's a typical method of doing a graphic novel, I think that's close: script it then draw it.

My first aborted stab at Mystery Project X went the same way. I wrote the whole thing, thought I had it nailed down, then started drawing. In contrast to WHTTWOT, which I pencilled and inked in four- or five-page batches, I decided to pencil all of Mystery Project X first, then go back and ink it all. I was trying to avoid a couple of problems.

(Parenthetical explanation (which is why I put it in parentheses) of pencilling and inking: I'm a dinosaur cartoonist who still works in paper and ink. Traditionally, you sketch with pencil, then go back and draw over it in black ink. Some very confident cartoonists can work directly in ink without pencilling first. I'm not one of them. Many 21st Century cartoonists work entirely on the computer. I don't find that fun.)

First, character designs can evolve and wander off-model, so that the character you draw on Page 100 looks nothing like the same character you drew on Page 1. You see this in most comics strips that run for decades: Snoopy in 1955 looked different from Snoopy in 1995. I faced this issue on Mom's Cancer, especially in how I drew my Mom, such that when we did the print version I had to redraw her for about the first third of the story (as described in this old blog post). So my reasoning was: draw the whole story in pencil first and work out the kinks so that when I inked the characters they'd stay consistent throughout.

Second, I thought that pencilling the whole thing first might expose any weaknesses in my story or storytelling sooner rather than later. And I guess I kind of accomplished that, though not exactly as I'd intended, when I decided after 110 pages that I just wasn't liking either the process or the story and needed to start over.

Now that I've restarted Mystery Project X, I'm trying to combine two processes that worked for me before. I know the outline of the plot but haven't scripted the entire thing. I'm working in chunks a few pages at a time: scripting, thumbnailing (sketching), pencilling and inking as I go. So far I'm finding it much more satisfying than my first stab at scripting the whole thing, then penciling the whole thing, then inking the whole thing. I think I know why.

In my first go-round, I never had the satisfaction of getting something done. I pencilled 110 pages but they were only half done, and wouldn't be fully done until they got inked months later. Nothing was ever finished. My internal clock was out of synch. However, this time around I've gotten several pages pencilled and inked and done, and can tick them off my mental progress bar. Much more satisfying.

I'm also enjoying the diversity of problem-solving required. One moment it's a story puzzle, next a scripting puzzle, then a layout, pencilling or inking puzzle. I find this much more stimulating than solving all the story puzzles, then all the scripting puzzles, etc. Variety is good.

Finally, sort-of-making-it-up-as-I-go gives me some latitude to change the story as I create it. I have had the quintessential writer's experience of my characters deciding for themselves what they want to do despite my wishes, and enjoy leaving open the possibility it could happen again. Room to discover. In fact, I'm not really sure how the story is going to end. I know a couple different ways it could end, but I trust the characters will inform me how it must end by the time I get there. We'll see how it goes.

It's worth adding that my processes cover a narrow range of the processes available. I'd say I edge toward the "stodgy" end of the scale. Other cartoonists create with an instinct and spontaneity that astonishes me. They just start drawing and see what comes out. I don't know how they do it but the results can be terrific. I believe Carol Tyler, whom I adore, works like that. Phoebe Gloeckner told me a story about a publisher who offered her a book contract but wondered, not unreasonably, what the book might be about. Phoebe couldn't say; she wouldn't know until she finished. Offer withdrawn.

Finally, to learn way more than 99% of you would ever care to know about process, check out this post by cartoonist and comics instructor Jessica Abel, in which she describes a method of "visual scripting" she adapted from something Alison Bechdel does. I'm not sold on this but it's interesting. What I like about it is that it combines text and visuals, as opposed to methods that treat words and pictures as entirely separate entities. In the best comics, words and pictures need and support each other, and visual scripting encourages that. I'm less fond of the sittin'-at-the-computer-using-InDesign aspect, when it seems to me I achieve pretty much the same benefit doodling on a Post-It note. Still: worth a look.

 Food for thought. My bottom line: If you want to make comics, make them however works for you. There's no right or wrong way (though there may be ways that make your comics easier or harder to publish, which might be worth knowing ahead of time). If you're frustrated or stuck, maybe it's not your story or talent that's the problem. Give your process a jiggle and see what shakes loose.

Do You Hear That? I Don't Hear Anything. Exactly!

It's quiet here at The Fies Files.

Partly, I haven't been much inspired to blog lately. Nothing's sparked. Oh, I could make something up, but neither of us would enjoy that. My blogging output has slumped before and, if history is an indicator, I'll probably come up with five exciting topics tomorrow.

I almost did one about my kids, but decided they might someday apply for a job or meet someone who'd google them, and that intended post (and photo!) would be the last thing they'd need. People ought to be able to control their own online destinies.

On Facebook, my friend MK demanded more photos of our pup. Here's one. Not much to say about Riley right now except she continues to be adorably dog-like and doesn't like going out in the rain. She seems to regard each drop that hits her back as a freshly astonishing insult.

 

Another drag on my blogging output is that I'm writing and drawing comics again, for the first time in a while. Today I'm drawing page 1, panel 1 of Mystery Project X, which I've been hinting at for months (years?). Daunting. As I've said before, I think sitting down to put the first mark on a piece of paper knowing you've got hundreds more to go is one of the braver creative leaps of faith. Also, Mystery Project X is the story that I pencilled 110 full pages of before deciding I didn't like how it was going and abandoned it for a new approach. Same basic characters and theme, different plot and style. I'm literally turning over the pages of the old story and drawing the new one on their backs. Quality paper's expensive.

I'm not sure Mystery Project X is any good, nor do I have a contract or commitment in hand. All I know is I need to get it out of my system before I can move on to other things--that seems to be the way I work. Editor Charlie and I keep in close, friendly contact and I know he'll look at anything I send him, but the graphic novel publishing industry is leaner and meaner than it was even a few years ago. The idea of doing it as a webcomic appeals to me--a return to my roots--but I wouldn't start posting it until I had most or all of it finished. That'll take a while. I have a naive faith that if something is good it'll find an audience and things'll work out.

Doing the Adventures of Old Time-Traveling Brian (still two copies of the zine left!) was very helpful, both in inspiring me to take Mystery Project X in another direction and reminding me that making comics should be fun. Otherwise why bother? And after working pretty hard at my day job the last quarter of 2012, I'm approaching 2013 with the resolve that if I'm serious about this comics thing (I think I may show some potential) it's time to get crackin'. Just do the job and then do the next one and the next one and the next one, and maybe that's what a career looks like. No idea if I have that many "next ones" in me.

What an unusually self-reflective blog post. Won't make that mistake again. To atone for it, here's another adorable puppy pic.



Stealth Mode X

This is what 75 blue-pencilled pages of my next comic, which I've been calling "Mystery Project X," look like:

I'm aiming for about 196, so I still have a long way to go. It's slow. Never enough time. Some days I'm enthusiastic and others discouraged. The usual. One reason for posting this picture is to to lay down a marker that'll spur me to see it through. It's good to see it all together like this; picking at it one or two pages at a time does add up. Bird by bird.

Another reason is to reassure anyone who cares that I'm still in the game. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean I'm not playing.

It's also an opportunity to write about Process, which is something I've always done and some readers like. First, it's evident I remain an old-school dinosaur cartoonist who works with paper, pencil and ink instead of photons and electrons. Our numbers are dwindling. For me, analog is a lot more fun and fulfilling than digital. How quaint.

I've already scripted and drawn thumbnail roughs for the entire story, and have them open in front of me when I draw. As is standard, I draw the pages larger than they'll appear in print or online. Shrinking artwork tightens it up and hides its flaws. These originals are 27 x 42 cm. (or will be when I slice off the right-side border of the paper). First I draw with blue pencil, then go over the pencil lines with India ink using brushes and pens. I use light blue pencil because it's nearly invisible to photocopiers and scanners, so I don't need to erase it after I ink. Then I'll scan each page into Photoshop to add lettering, word balloons and coloring, and do whatever editing and clean-up are needed.

I'm trying something different on this project than I did on Mom's Cancer or WHTTWOT: pencilling the entire story first, then going back and inking it (on my previous books, I pencilled and inked a few pages at a time, completing small batches as I went). This solves a few problems. First, a character's appearance naturally evolves as you draw it over and over, streamlining and polishing, so that the same character can look very different between start and finish. I've already noticed that happening with these characters. That'll be much easier to adjust between pencilling and inking than if I had to go back and fix a bunch of already-inked pages. Second, I have some continuity concerns--things that must match at the beginning and end of the story, or build slowly throughout--that are again easier to get right and revise in pencils than inks. Third, it gives me freedom to think of new ideas as I go and weave them back in retroactively.

I think my pencils-first idea is working well. The downside: assuming I persevere in pencilling all 196 pages, I'll be only half done. I'll still have to ink them all.

Sigh.

I'm not on any particular deadline except a constant crushing awareness of my own mortality. That has pros and cons. A deadline, as Sam Johnson said of an impending hanging, concentrates the mind wonderfully. Absent one, I have a completely arbitrary, imaginary target in my head that I think I can hit if I apply myself. It helps.

I'll continue playing my "Mystery Project X" cards close to the vest. Just wanted to let you know that I am working on something and making progress, even if I'm not breathlessly blabbing about it. I'm determined to see it through, although that could change tomorrow. Not sure I have a choice; what else am I gonna do with myself?
.

Pitching to the Stars

Three obstacles are coming between me and my blog:

1. My Day Job: multiple year-end deadlines are piling up, and all of my clients believe they are my sole top priority, just as I groomed them to believe. Heh heh heh. Unfortunately, now I have to act like it.

2. Mystery Project X: In any spare time I can find, I am pencilling pages. I thought I'd try something different this time. My plan is to pencil the entire book, then go back and ink it (usually I ink as I go, finishing pages in batches of three or four). I'm hoping it'll produce some stylistic continuity from start to finish, allow me to fold in any great new ideas that come up, and be a bit more efficient. We'll see; I may change my mind. It's all still being done on spec, with no contract or commitment from a publisher (although interest from more than one). I have faith.

3. Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow: With luck, we'll have one or two good things happen in 2012 that I'm working on now and can tell you about later.

Despite my busyness, I still feel a nagging obligation to give you a reason to visit once in a while. So with your indulgence (or without it, just watch me!), from time to time I'll dip into the archives and post a re-run. Since I've been blogging since July 2005, I've got a big backlog of perfectly swell essays little seen or long forgotten. I'll try to pick good ones.

Here, lightly edited, is a post I wrote in September 2006 about something I learned from failing. At the time, Mom's Cancer had been out a few months and I'd just started working on WHTTWOT.

I've written about my great affection and appreciation for the original "Star Trek" before, but in fact my relationship with the series goes a bit beyond that. This is a story I don't tell very often--mostly because it ends in abject failure--but I did talk about it during my 2006 Comic-Con Spotlight Panel and I think it gives some insight into how I approached the writing of Mom's Cancer.

The 1960s' "Star Trek" was followed by another series that began in 1987 called "Star Trek: The Next Generation." It ran for seven seasons. I enjoyed the show as a fan, though never as passionately as I did its predecessor, and around the beginning of Season Six I learned that the show would consider scripts from unagented writers. This policy was unique in all of television and the news hit me like a thunderbolt. In a few weeks I came up with a story, figured out proper TV screenplay format, and sent off a full script with the required release forms. Shortly afterward I followed with a second script, the maximum number they allowed.

I don't know how much later--surely months--I arrived home to a message on my answering machine. "Star Trek" wanted to talk to me. Neither of my scripts were good enough to actually shoot, but they showed enough promise that they were willing to hear any other ideas I might have. Would I care to pitch to them?

Yeah. I think so.

Paramount sent me a three-inch thick packet of sample scripts, writer's guides, director's guides, character profiles, episode synopses: all the background a writer would need to get up to speed (not that I needed them--I'd been up to speed since 1966). I spent several weeks coming up with dozens of ideas, distilled them to the five or six best, and made the long drive to Paramount Studios. Just getting onto the lot was a small comedy of errors: the guard at the gate didn't have my name on the list and I'd neglected to ask which building and office I was supposed to report to. Unlike anyone who's worked in Hollywood in the past 30 years, I wore a tie and sportcoat--a bad idea on a hot day when I was already inclined to sweat prodigiously. But I eventually made my way to the office of producer Rene Echevarria and threw him my first pitch. He stopped me after two sentences.

"We started filming a story just like that last week."

Crap. That was the best one.

Pitches two, three, four and five fared no better. After desperately rifling through my mental filing cabinet for any rejects with a hint of promise, I was done. In and out in less than 30 minutes, weeks of work for naught.

Still, I went home satisfied that I gave it my best shot. I wrote Rene a letter thanking him for the opportunity and expressing a completely baseless hope that he might give me another chance someday.

I got the next call a few weeks later. Rene had gotten my letter, looked over his notes, and decided that, although none of my pitches were good enough to shoot, I merited another shot.

Months later came my second try. By then I was smart enough to spare myself the drive and pitch by phone. If I remember correctly, Rene liked a couple of my stories enough to take them to his bosses, but by this time the series was into its final season and the available episode slots were filling fast. In anticipation of the end of "The Next Generation," Paramount was already producing a successor series, "Deep Space Nine." In my last conversation with Rene, when it was clear "The Next Generation" was done with me, I asked if he could arrange for me to talk to "Deep Space Nine." He was bewildered.

"Why would you want to pitch to those guys?" he asked.

Nevertheless, I soon had an appointment to pitch to those guys, got another thick packet of space station blueprints and character bios, and started writing. I parlayed that opening into several pitches over the show's seven-year run, most to the very professional, generous and kind writer/producer Robert Hewitt Wolfe. And when Paramount started production on the next "Star Trek" series, "Voyager," I tried my old trick on Robert.

"Why would you want to pitch to those guys?" he asked.

So I got more packets of cool stuff, more experience, and more rejection. Although they liked some of my ideas enough to mull them over, I never got close. It was exhausting. At last, after eight or nine years and forty or fifty stories, "Star Trek" and I mutually agreed we'd had enough of each other and parted ways.

Lessons in Writing
Here's my point (and I do usually have one, eventually): even as a complete failure, my experience pitching to "Star Trek" made me a better writer. What I realized was that the stories they quickly rejected focused on some science-fiction high-tech premise or plot twist, while the stories they liked focused on the characters. If I said something like, "Captain Picard starts the story at A, experiences B, and as a result grows to become C," I had their attention. I had to be hit over the head several times to realize that a good story isn't about spaceships or aliens or ripples in the fabric of space-time, but about people.

That sounds blindingly obvious, but I realized how unobvious it was as I talked to friends and family about the experience. As soon as someone hears you have a distant shot at actually writing a "Star Trek" episode, they can't wait to share their ideas with you (never mind how fast they'd sue if you actually used one). And literally without exception, every idea I heard from someone else was about a spaceship, alien, or ripple in the fabric of space-time. Not one that I recall even mentioned a character, how they'd react to the situation, or how they might be changed by it. Once I learned to look for it, it was striking.

These were lessons I internalized as best I could and took into the writing of Mom's Cancer. I realized early that my story couldn't be about the medical nuts and bolts of cancer treatment. First, because there are too many treatment options for anyone to cover; second, because I knew such information would be obsolete very quickly; and third and most importantly, good stories are about people. My book isn't about radiation and chemotherapy and cancer, but about what those things do to a family. If something I scripted or sketched didn't drive my mother's story--if the plot didn't serve the characters--I cut it.

Whatever success my books have had and will have, I think that's the key. With due gratitude to all the Treks.
.

Lunacy

I saw surprisingly little mention in the press commemorating the anniversary of that terrible day, 12 years ago yesterday, when a nuclear waste dump exploded on the Moon and propelled it deep into interstellar space. How quickly we forget. I still miss the tides.



No word from my publisher on my Mystery Project X book proposal but that's all right; I'm knee-deep (that's more than ankle-deep and less than hip-deep) in Mystery Project Y, which I'm also very excited about. They're very different in both form and content, which lets me flex different writing and drawing muscles. I also think I could get Y done much faster than X, so it may zoom ahead in my queue. That's assuming either of them actually flies, which is quite in doubt. If Editor Charlie can't do X, others have expressed interest in publishing it. If not them, maybe I need to revisit webcomics. It worked out all right before. On the other hand, it's a lot of work.

Backing me up on that last thought is this blog post by comic book artist Stephen Bissette explaining why he will not draw your graphic novel for you (hat tip to my pal Mike Lynch for the link). A lot of people contact Bissette absolutely positive that they've got a great idea for a best-selling book if only he would do them the favor of providing the art--often for free, although he'll obviously be richly rewarded when the money truck backs up to the author's door. Bissette's answer is kind but blunt:

* Drawing a graphic novel takes a long time--much longer than scripting one. How will he buy food and pay rent during those months or years?

* You are probably not interested in giving him the share of ownership, rights and control over the project that he'd want to make it worth his while. Even in the best professional arrangements, collaborating is creatively, ethically and legally difficult.

* If he had the time to draw your graphic novel, he'd much rather spend it working on one of his own ideas that he hasn't had time to pursue.

I receive a few e-mails like this. However, I think mine have a different cast to them because they're often from people who've read Mom's Cancer, gone through something similar in their own families, and with the very best intentions want to tell their story in the same way. They mean well, they don't know cartooning or publishing, but they're just aching to get it out somehow. I understand that.

My answer has the virtue of being both sincere and true: I can't tell your story. I don't know you. I wasn't there. Anything I'd draw would be second-hand reporting at best, lies at worst. The only person who can tell your story is you, and if you can't draw then you should find some other way. Writing, photography, video, HTML, collage, macaroni sculpture. If the message is important and true, the medium is nearly irrelevant.

Beyond that, my unspoken answer is the same as Bissette's: I don't have the time. If I did have the time, I'd rather spend it on my own projects (X, Y and beyond) that aren't repeats of things I've already done. There's probably no money in it for me; if there is, it isn't enough to pay me even near minimum wage for the hours I'd spend. I'm sympathetic and charitable, but not a solid one or two years' of hard work worth.

I think the disconnect here is that a lot of people don't realize how difficult it is and how long it takes. "They're simple cartoon drawings! You can bang them out in a few hours!" I take it as a compliment that I maybe make it look easy, but it's not. Mom's Cancer was the toughest thing I've ever done creatively, for obvious reasons. But even on Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow, which didn't impose the same emotional toll, I did thousands of hours of work and gathered thousands of pages of research (literally--I have three 500-page binders stuffed with material). Both projects demanded long months of total immersion. You're asking a lot.

I'm not whining--no one's ever held a gun to my head, and it beats coal mining. Just explaining why I Will Not Draw Your Graphic Novel Either.

* * *

Please allow me to draw your attention to two new Web thingies. First, a new blog by Friend O' The Blog Jim O'Kane, whose topics have already included fiddling, trains and 19th Century rocketry, so you know he's my kind of guy.

Second, the new home of the Toon Talk forum, recently relocated to a Facebook Group. Toon Talk was begun 10 years ago by cartoonist Darrin Bell ("Rudy Park," "Candorville") and for a long time was a nice place for pros and fans to meet and talk all types of comics. As sometimes happens, people gradually fell away and the forum became a ghost town. Honestly, I stopped visiting myself. When Darrin's web host wanted $250 he didn't have, Darrin moved the whole kit 'n kaboodle to free Facebook, where it's gotten more traffic in three days than it did in the past 30 months. I know not everyone does Facebook but I think it's a big improvement. Nice people, check it out.

* * *

I'll be visiting the USS Hornet again this weekend. Anybody want me to pick them up anything?
.

Friday Outgoing

Comics & Medicine 2011

My wife Karen and I made it home from the second international "Comics & Medicine" conference in Chicago--or, as one of our participants called it, "the Coolest Conference on Earth." I can't disagree. Assembling a detailed, coherent trip report would take days. Instead, I'll report some random impressions and annotate some photos to try to capture a feel for it. If you want to know more, you'll just have to attend the next one (whenever and wherever that'll be . . .).

First, we lucked out on weather. Every forecast we saw predicted thunderstorms all weekend. The day before we arrived was a muggy 100 degrees. But once we landed in Chicago, temperatures were moderate and I only had to pull out my umbrella once. Complaining that we would've liked it a few degrees warmer would be ungrateful. Karen and I took an extra day Sunday to play tourist, and just look at the sky in that photo above! Lucky. The city treated us very well.

I was a little worried going into the conference that last year's in London went so well we couldn't recapture its magic. That fear was unfounded. For Chicago we expanded from one day to two, added workshops, receptions, and book signings that everyone seemed to enjoy, and I think successfully caught lightning in a bottle again with a similar catalytic mix of doctors, nurses, academics, writers, cartoonists and others from as far afield as Australia and Europe. The most common complaint was that we had too many good things going on at the same time for anyone to get to them all. The last I heard, 80 people had registered: a few more than in London but still quite a small group, which allowed a lot of interaction and intimacy. Participants especially seemed to appreciate a chance to mingle with our special-guest speakers Paul Gravett, Phoebe Gloeckner, David Small and Scott McCloud, all of whom stuck around for other panels as they could and were totally accessible and friendly.

Here are some pictures and notes, in roughly chronological order. I notice that I don't have many photos of panels; I was kept very busy moderating two panels and giving my own 90-minute workshop, and just didn't have a chance. Most of these pictures were taken by Karen.

Thursday night's opening reception in the lobby of Thorne Hall, a large auditorium in which Scott McCloud spoke on Saturday. We had an art exhibit set up with 19 or 20 pages of relevant comics art and accompanying commentary, including one from Mom's Cancer. These weren't originals, but reproductions on foamcore board; although an exhibition of original art would have been fun and we briefly considered it, the responsibility, liability and hassle would have been enormous. In contrast, we could stack up and toss around these posters without worrying about them. It was a smart solution.

Karen and I dashed straight from airport to hotel to reception as fast as we could, arriving in good time. On the right is Paul Gravett, the dean of UK comics journalism and criticism, whom I met in London last year. He's an incredibly knowledgeable, charming, and kind man who gave an opening talk in London that everyone liked so much that we bought him a plane ticket to come do the same in Chicago. Paul also moderated a panel on David B.'s Epileptic. I love Paul. In the middle is acclaimed illustrator and Stitches author David Small. I'll have more to say about David and his wife Sarah later. David opened his keynote address the next day saying that he didn't really know what "graphic medicine" was or why he'd been invited to speak until he saw the artwork here at the reception. Then he got it.

My new BFF Sarah Leavitt. She's a Vancouver cartoonist whose book Tangles, about her mother's Alzheimer's disease, is getting great reviews and award nominations in Canada, and has just found publishers in the U.S. and U.K. Sarah and I began corresponding a while ago when I passed on the best advice I could about getting published and such, and I already considered her a good friend before we finally met in person about 30 seconds before this photo was taken. Sarah seemed awesomely shell-shocked all weekend.

Our conference's host, although the actual events were held at the law school next door. Co-organizer MK Czerwiec did a fantastic job working with Northwestern University to help us out with facilities, publicity and logistics. Northwestern was very, very generous to us--more than they needed to be.

One of the law school buildings where our panels were held. The campus was an interesting mix of old ivy-covered brick buildings like these side by side with modern concrete and glass, and all a block from the shores of Lake Michigan.

After the reception, the conference organizers and a few others went out for Thai. Sitting across from me were co-organizer MK Czerwiec (Chicago nurse/instructor/cartoonist), cartoonist and keynoter Phoebe Gloeckner, and co-organizer Ian Williams (U.K. physician/cartoonist). I think Phoebe has her iPhone out to show us photos of her cats.

My Friday workshop on "Making Comics: See One, Do One, Teach One." About two dozen people attended, which was a fair proportion of the conferees. Karen got video of almost an hour of the middle of the workshop. When I have a few minutes, I'll try to break it into 15-minute chunks for YouTube and fill in the missing material for a subsequent post. In brief, I was surprised and very gratified by the audience's willingness to do my little exercises and share them with the group (my mini-laptop has a built-in webcam that I used to project their drawings onto the screen). I've never done anything like it before and ran out of time before the end. Everyone nonetheless seemed to enjoy it, and I think one or two might have actually gotten inspired to make some comics. Mission accomplished. After I finished my workshop, I was able to relax.

Scott McCloud arrived Friday afternoon and hung out for that day's reception (yes, another reception!). Scott and I quickly renewed our acquaintance, which to that point consisted entirely of Scott handing me my Eisner Award and saying "Congratulations" in 2005, about which I made a little joke when I introduced his speech on Saturday. I had the treat of introducing Scott to Sarah, who gave a workshop on turning diary into narrative, with some very thoughtful exercises that I liked a lot. I believe Scott is contractually obligated to wear plaid to every appearance.

Phoebe Gloeckner at the same reception, bending low to take a photo of cartoonist John Porcellino walking down a staircase. I bet it is an awesome photo.

Now I have to talk about David Small and his wife, Sarah Stewart. David was a highly regarded children's book illustrator even before he created Stitches, the #1 bestseller and National Book Award finalist, while Sarah is a creative force in her own right whose book The Gardener (illustrated by David) was a Caldecott Honor Book. I reconnected with a lot of people this weekend, met many more for the first time, and feel like I made some friends among the many smart, friendly, talented people who attended and participated in the conference. But David and Sarah are special. First, because they both knew Mom's Cancer and said very nice things about it, and I am not immune to flattery. In fact I thrive on it. But seriously, they couldn't have been more friendly, gracious, open, or delightful. Also very appealing is how much they obviously love each other and what a strong, dynamic team that makes them. They are each others' biggest fans. After meeting them, I am an enormous fan of both.

Following Saturday's full day of panels and a great concluding public lecture by Scott, many of us took a big yellow school bus (Paul Gravett, giddy: "I'm on an American school bus!" Karen: "Don't you have school buses in England?" Paul: "Yes, but this is an American school bus!") to Quimby's Comics, a Chicago institution with an interesting mission. I don't think I saw a single superhero comic book in the place; instead, the long narrow space was packed with adult literary comics and graphic novels (in all meanings of the word "adult") with a special emphasis on supporting low-budget independent mini-comics. I was told that if you could write, draw and photocopy your comic, Quimby's would find a spot on a shelf for it. Paul Gravett was a kid in a candy store, flitting from the work of one undiscovered talent to another. Scott McCloud, John Porcellino and I sat down to sign books but mostly to talk shop and life. I also described my Mystery Project X to Scott and got his thumbs-up, which means something to me.

By the way, I mentioned on my Facebook page that Scott missed his 51st birthday party on Friday to attend our conference. So before Scott's lecture on Saturday, I huddled with Katie Watson--a Northwestern University professor, lawyer and comedian (!) slated to do the post-lecture Q&A with Scott--to inform her of that and decide whether we should lead the audience in singing "Happy Birthday" to him. We concluded she'd best handle it. Her first question to him: "What date is your birthday?" Heh. Got him.

John Porcellino (in baseball cap), Scott and I gathered around the Quimby's signing tables. The bowl holds little pretzels. In addition to hosting this signing, Quimby's staff manned tables at the conference, selling books that were either written by participants or the subject of panels. I must have bought a couple hundred dollars worth. Books make luggage heavy.

David Small and I bought copies of each other's books. Here's the kind of pro David is: he came to the signing even though Quimby's had sold out of Stitches the day before (the one I'm holding is a stray that Quimby's didn't know it had until a friend of David's found it on a shelf for me) and there was nothing for him to sign. He promised he'd show up so he did, I guess on the chance that someone might bring in their own copy hoping to meet him. Also note the photo booth behind me; its significance will be revealed later.

David and I pretended to angrily autograph each other's heads. I don't know why. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

An overview of Quimby's: me with my back turned and silver hair glowing phosphorescently, John sitting at the table, and Scott farther down. The guy on the right is a graphic artist who bought Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow just because he liked its design. Cool!

This one's going onto the "In the Wild" page of my Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow Facebook photo album. Quimby's sold out of Mom's Cancer the first day of the conference and was afraid I might be upset because they hadn't ordered enough. On the contrary, hearing the words "sold out" applied to my work is so rare that I enjoyed the novelty.

We managed to get 80% of the conference's organizing committee into the photo booth. From left are Dr. Ian Williams, Penn State English professor Susan Squier, Penn State College of Medicine Professor Dr. Michael Green, and yours truly. We worked MK in later.

There's MK! Below her is Katie Watson, and then Ian and I and Susan. Somebody took custody of these photos and promised to scan them. If they do, I'll share.

Your Second International Graphic Medicine Conference Organizing Committee: clockwise from me are Ian Williams, Susan Squier, Michael Green, Satan's Bride, and MK Czerwiec.

I've found a few mentions of the conference online. If you're interested in other perspectives, check out what Scott McCloud, John Porcellino (good photos!), and participant John Swogger said about it. More as they come up. LATER LINKS: Sarah Leavitt's blog.

I think we pulled it off.
.

Panel Borders & Chicago-Bound

I met radio reporter Alex Fitch when I spoke at the very first Graphic Medicine conference in London last June. Alex hosts "Panel Borders," the podcast version of the UK's only weekly radio show about comics. What perfect timing, then, for Alex to tell me he's posted a recording of my keynote speech less than a week before I head to Chicago to take part in the second Graphic Medicine conference. Not that I expect anyone to listen, but if you dip in a toe please keep in mind that I'm narrating a slide show you can't see. I really enjoyed meeting and talking to Alex, and very much appreciate him keeping in touch.

Chicago is coming, ready or not. I think I'll be ready. In addition to preparing a 90-minute workshop on "How to Make Comics," I need to do enough homework to moderate two panels plus write a smart, witty and brief (I'm aiming for two out of those three) introduction for Scott McCloud's public lecture. We'll also have receptions, a mass booksigning at Chicago comic book store Quimby's, all sorts of revelry. I expect to be happily exhausted, after which Karen and I will stay an extra vacation day for ourselves. If Chicago could oblige by not mounting non-stop 95-degree thunderstorms, we'd appreciate it.

Did I mention that conference participants will be given a cool cloth tote bag with artwork from Mom's Cancer screen-printed on it? Well, they will. I think that's pretty neat. But now I'm starting to sound like a PBS pledge drive.

Did I also mention that I've been working hard trying to send Editor Charlie a full proposal for Mystery Project X before I leave for Chicago? Well, I'm not gonna make it. But soon.

I was looking through Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow this afternoon to find some material for my workshop when I realized I hadn't actually cracked its cover in a long time. I also realized: Hey, it's pretty good! I'm not sure I was ever able to look at it with fresh eyes before. It's better than I remembered! What a relief.

I just found out tonight that a guy I know in real life reads my blog. Hi, Joe! Good seein' you. Vaya con dios.
.

Friday Tapas

Bite-sized morsels heading into the weekend.

Blogging's still sparse while I work hard on my day job (looks like I might get an important new client!) and thumbnailing Mystery Project X. I'm into the fun pages of the latter: the exciting conclusion when all secrets are revealed amid wall-to-wall pulse-pounding action. Yeah, let's go with that. I still have a ton of work to do before my sketches become a proposal, then who knows how many months of drawing afterward to turn it into a near-200-page graphic novel.

It's at this point that I always regain huge respect for anyone attempting a big creative project like this, even if it's an enormous steaming heap. After all, nobody sets out to make an enormous steaming heap, and it takes just as much time and energy. For all I know, that's what I'm doing. I worry about that.

My friend Jim O'Kane is down in Florida right now, waiting to watch the penultimate Space Shuttle launch. At this writing, the weather looks good. Jim actually invited me along and I wish I could've taken him up on it, but North America's a big continent that I'm on the other side of and shuttles aren't famous for launching on schedule. Endeavour looks good to go today, though. Godspeed, Jim.

BTW, Jim took a great photo yesterday that I'll post to my Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow Facebook Fan Page when I get a minute. If you haven't seen my album of "In the Wild" photos showing my book in various settings--including tombstones, rocket nozzles and Disneyland (isn't that a Lesley Gore song?)--you might enjoy that. Make my WHTTWOT page one of your "Favorites" while you're there, but only if you really feel that way deep in your heart.

I don't care much about the Royal Wedding but Will and Kate seem like swell kids and I wish them well. I do appreciate the sense of tradition and century-spanning continuity that the wedding evokes. We don't have much of that in the New World and especially in California, where the oldest structures are missions from the 1770s. In Britain, they'd call that "the new stuff we're still breaking in." One aspect of the wedding coverage I've enjoyed is that, after making my first visit to London last year, I have an internal map of the geography: "Oh, I've been there!" All these places--Buckingham Palace, St. James Park, Westminster Abbey, Parliament--are like a 20-minute walk apart. That makes the grand pageantry a bit homier.

Karen and I showed up for the wedding 10 months early.

I didn't mean to make this "Britain Day," but cartoonist Dan Collins posted the video below that I decided to repost for no other reason than it made me happy. After years of mostly seeing the Beatles in scratchy black and white, it sometimes startles me that film like this (from the movie "Help") exists--essentially a music video a couple of decades before MTV was invented. But it wasn't really that long ago, was it? They (we) were so young and they, at least, were charming. I was eating paste.



Have a terrific weekend, everyone. It looks like spring around here. If you happen to look up at the stars tonight, take a second to marvel over the fact that we've got people up there.

Friday Mid-Morning UPDATE: Oh no! It looks like the Shuttle launch has been scrubbed for at least two days. I hope Jim can stick it out!
.

No One Told You When to Run, You Missed the Starting Gun

Begrudging blogging. I'm still chipping away at "Mystery Project X"; have thumbnailed (laid out, sketched, and placed dialog for) about 80% of it and built a related model that'll prove useful later (remember how I built a spaceship once? Like that). When completed, I'll print out the thumbnails, put together a little package, and ship it off to Editor Charlie to see if he's interested in publishing it. I alternate between confidence that I'm creating the greatest work I've ever done and terror that it totally sucks and my career is over. In other words, the usual.

* * *

I had a birthday last week. It was nice. My favorite gift was from my girls. I mentioned before that my daughter Laura is a part-time docent on the USS Hornet Museum, an aircraft carrier which was the recovery vessel for the Apollo 11 and 12 missions before being decommissioned in 1970. Her sister Robin has since started working there as well, helping chaperone the groups (Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts) that sleep over on the ship most weekends.

Also docenting aboard the Hornet is a gentleman who actually served on it during the Apollo missions, and who during those recoveries slipped away to shoot his own Polaroids of the events. Which is how I ended up with a CD of 36 never-before-seen pictures of the Apollo 11 and 12 missions. To me, that's as good as finding a new photo of Lincoln at Gettysburg. The best part is knowing I raised kids thoughtful enough to come up with a gift like that.

* * *

I laughed at this news story this morning about Emma Watson, who plays Hermione Grainger in the "Harry Potter" movies, dropping out of Brown University partly because her fellow students just weren't cool enough to handle having her there. Apparently she got tired of them shouting "Three points for Gryffindor!" whenever she got an answer right.

I'd like to think I wouldn't be one of those students, but at age 18 I probably would have.

* * *

A couple of nights ago, Karen and I went to see a friend of ours give a poetry reading. You heard me right: I know a professional poet. Ooooh, impressive! Karen and she became best friends when they met at age 13 and I wormed my way into the Circle of Trust when we all went to the same university. It was a good night that reminded me my life could use more fine poetry in it. Although, as Karen pointed out later, it's not as if I haven't dabbled a bit myself.

I was delighted to find that the bookstore hosting the reading had a copy of Mom's Cancer on its shelves. I've slowly gotten over my shyness about offering to sign books I find in the wild, but it's still a weird thing to do. And I was struck again by two things I've noticed before: 1) More often than not, the clerks seem totally indifferent--I mean, I wouldn't presume anyone would be impressed that one of their authors happened by, but maybe a smile to indicate I'd penetrated the montony of their day? I usually end up apologizing for bothering them. And 2), nobody ever asks for ID. I could be a crazy man vandalizing random books for all they know. Or care, evidently.

Anyway, read some poetry. It's good for your soul.

Now back to work.

Mark Twain Insult of the Day #8, and more

You're getting tired of these. I can tell. But I love them and it's my blog. Today's Twain target is Elisha P. Bliss Jr., who published a few of Twain's books under what Mr. Clemens later decided were unfair terms.

I never heard him tell the truth, so far as I can remember. He was a most repulsive creature. When he was after dollars he showed the intense earnestness and eagerness of a circular-saw. In a small, mean, peanut-stand fashion, he was sharp and shrewd. But above that level he was destitute of intelligence; his brain was a loblolly, and he had the gibbering laugh of an idiot . . . I have had contact with several conspicuously mean men, but they were noble compared to that bastard monkey.

* * *

NON-SEQUITUR SEGUE ALERT:
Speaking of the Graphic Medicine conference I'm helping to plan for next June in Chicago, we've just started to look at the proposals for papers, talks, panels, workshops, etc. that people submitted. We have many excellent ideas to choose from--maybe more than we can accommodate in the time and space available, I don't know yet. Personally, I'm relieved. I mean, you just never know! What if we'd gotten none? My co-organizers had more faith and it looks like they were right. The hard part now may be having to turn down terrific proposals just because we have too many. Seeing what we have to choose from, I am confident we're going to have a wonderful event. Registration is open!

* * *

My thumbnailing for Mystery Project X proceeds apace. I'm more than halfway through a very rough draft of what I hope will be my next book, expect it'll take me a few more weeks to finish, and am happy with how it's going. I'm getting a lot out of the process. The act of committing the layout, dialog, and sketchy figures to paper (well, pixels) is helping me solve old problems, raising new ones, and sparking new ideas, just as it should. I've also resolved some technical special-effects issues to my satisfaction for now. It's interesting: as I mentioned before, I never really thumbnailed either of my first two books (I did a bit on WHTTWOT) but it's really working well for me. I just need to do it faster.

I think "process"--insights into how different people do the job--is interesting. Some cartoonists approach their work "pictures first," letting their art inspire a story, while others work "words first," essentially illustrating a script (I'm mostly the latter, although I'm always looking for opportunities for art to convey meaning and help carry the narrative load). I recently read an old interview with a cartoonist who said she never did a rough draft of anything, and had lost jobs because of it. One publisher wanted to print her work but, not unreasonably, asked for some idea of what they might be getting first. She couldn't do it; that wasn't how her process worked. She didn't know what she was going to do until she did it. I find that alien and fascinating. I wish I could spend five minutes inside a mind that works like that.
.

Mark Twain Insult of the Day #6

Mr. Clemens and his family frequently traveled overseas and lived for two brief stretches in Florence, Italy. In 1904, in a futile attempt to restore his wife Olivia's failing health via rest in a temperate climate (I'm constantly struck by how tremendously medical science has progressed in the past century), Clemens leased the Villa di Quarto in Florence for several months. Once a modest palace, the villa had gone to seed and was then owned by an American who'd tried to marry her way into money and high society, both unsuccessfully. She was the Countess Massiglia, and Clemens genuinely despised her.

She is excitable, malicious, malignant, vengeful, unforgiving, selfish, stingy, avaricious, coarse, vulgar, profane, obscene, a furious blusterer on the outside and at heart a coward. Her lips are as familiar with lies, deceptions, swindles and treacheries as are her nostrils with breath . . .

The Countess boasted to me that nothing American is still left in her, and that she is wholly Italian now. She plainly regards this as a humiliation for America, and she as plainly believed she was gracing Italy with a compliment of a high and precious order. America still stands. Italy may survive the benefaction of the Countess's approval, we cannot tell . . .

. . . I should wish the Countess to move out of Italy; out of Europe; out of the planet. I should want her bonded to retire to her place in the next world and inform me which of the two it was, so that I could arrange for my own hereafter.

* * *

Let me pass on some advice to anyone reading the Autobiography of Mark Twain beside or behind me: don't ignore the notes in the back. I read a couple hundred pages under the assumption that the endnotes comprised academic trivia that I could skip. Then I took a closer look. They're actually a very nice companion that provides information, context and corrections to the body of the text. For example, Clemens might mention a person, place or incident; the endnotes offer additional details that enhance the tale. Importantly, they provide an interesting fact-check on Clemens, verifying his stories to the extent possible and pointing out where they conflict with other sources or historical fact. Clemens's memory wasn't always sharp and he plainly stated he wouldn't let accuracy stand in the way of a good yarn, even in his autobiography; the endnotes do a nice job of calling him out in a way that does nothing to diminish the author's reputation or charm.

The notes are organized by chapter and listed by page number, so it's easy to read a few pages then flip to the back to get the bigger picture. I recommend it.

* * *

I'm afraid my blogging will remain haphazard for a while. Still working hard on other projects that lay claim to any spare moments, particularly my next (I hope) book, Mystery Project X. I need to thumbnail faster; I'm not really sure how to do that without getting too sloppy, but at the rate I'm sketching it'll take me months to get through the story. One expected benefit of the process has already emerged: sixty pages in, I decided the design of one of my characters wasn't functioning like I wanted it to and I reworked her. She's better now. This is right in line with the character design process I described back in November. Nice to see I can take my own advice.
.

Tapas

Bite-sized morsels which, today, won't even add up to a light meal . . .

* * *

Yesterday I saw a TV commercial that struck me as the strangest thing. It was advertising Valentine's Day apps for the iPhone (I think) that allow you to send greetings, animations, tunes, and I don't even know what-all to your sweetheart. Tell me if I'm off-base here, but I started yelling at my TV screen: "You have a phone in your hand! Call them up and tell them you love them yourself!"

I dunno. Sometimes I don't understand the 21st century.

* * *

My presence here and on Facebook has been light lately, and will probably continue that way for a while. It's for a good cause. I am putting as much time and energy as I can into doing "thumbnails" for Mystery Project X, which I hope will be my next graphic novel, and whenever I have 20 minutes to spare they go toward that.

Thumbnailing is an interesting process of basically sketching the entire book showing the placement of panels, figures and dialog to give a very rough idea how it might look. I'd post an example but at this point I'm not sure I could even show you a page without giving away more than I want to. Later, for sure. Anyway, thumbnailing is harder than it looks. The layout of panels and words determines how the story flows and pulls the reader's eye through the pages. It's like the foundation and framing of a house: no one will see it later but everything is shaped by it. You'd think dashing off a sketch would go quickly, and maybe it does for some people, but it can take me an hour just to figure out whether a bit of story requires four or five or six or seven or eight panels and how they ought to be arranged. Plus I'm trying some layouts that are modestly innovative (or at least unusual) yet must still be clear enough for readers to follow effortlessly. Plus I'm researching some "special effects" that of course turn out to be more complex than I expected. Plus I discovered I don't know how to draw chickens.

It's fun but it hurts my brain.

With luck, the work I'm putting in now will make my job simpler and faster later, and not be entirely in vain. As I've paraphrased before: if it were easy, everybody would do it.

* * *

I think I mentioned a while ago that I'd drawn a couple of sample pages for a friend putting together an anthology of short comics on a common theme so brilliant I can't believe no one's done it before. It's one of those ideas where I shouted "Yes, I'm in!" one sentence into the pitch. Last I heard, that project is still alive. I hope so. It'd be nice to have something in print in the relatively near future (even if Mystery Project X goes full steam ahead, I wouldn't expect it to drop before 2013) and an honor to be part of. The second I can tell you all about it, assuming it flies at all, you won't be able to shut me up.

* * *

Happy Valentine's Day! Do something nice for somebody. Remember, nothing says "I love you" more than pushing a button on an iPhone.
.

Tapas

Bite-sized morsels, served Herb Caen style . . .

* * *

.

Karen and I saw "The King's Speech" a week ago . . . thought it was great and I recommend it. I wasn't sure how sympathetic I'd be to the plight of a spoiled royal whose worst problem during World War II was poor diction, but the story worked and the actors, particularly Geoffrey Rush, were terrific.

.

* * *

Before he died in 1910, Mark Twain spent 35 years sporadically working on his autobiography, on the condition that it not be published until 100 years after his death. And so it was, and so I bought it, and have spent two days reading the Introduction. I'm not a slow reader; the thing is a 700-page monster and the Autobiography proper doesn't begin until page 201. The best part: this is Volume 1 of 3.

What intrigues me about this exhaustive scholarly tome is that I bought it off a pallet at Costco, the palace of populism. University of California Press originally planned a print run of 7500 copies, which sounds about right for an academic book about a 19th-century author. As media and public interest grew, that number jumped to 50,000, then 275,000, then 500,000, and I have no idea how many copies are in print now. Having dipped in my toe, I guarantee that The Autobiography of Mark Twain will score the largest ratio of "Copies Purchased/Copies Actually Read" since Hawking's A Brief History of Time or Bloom's Closing of the American Mind.

Both of which I actually read.

I've been looking forward to Twain's autobio for years and will give it a fair go. I peeked ahead and know I'll find some worthwhile rewards. But I'll wager that Volumes 2 and 3 will sell signifcantly fewer copies, and will not be found stacked in pyramids atop the blades of a Costco forklift.

* * *

Speaking of 700-page monsters, the comics event I'm most looking forward to in 2011 is the release of Craig Thompson's Habibi (if indeed it is released in 2011 . . . I don't think the date has been formally announced). Thompson, whose memoir Blankets was a big success, has been working on Habibi since 2004. I'm not kidding about the 700 pages which, judging by samples posted on his blog, will showcase some of the best comics artwork I've ever seen. Amazing, breathtaking stuff.

What worries me (not that anyone asked) is its story, about which very little has been revealed. I don't know how a white American man from the devoutly Christian background so vividly described in Blankets can write authentically about the life of an ethnic Third-World Muslim woman (the titular Habibi) without being superficial, condescending, overly romantic, melodramatic, or just plain getting it wrong. I'm not being snide; I sincerely don't know how he could do it short of immersing himself in the culture for years. However, if Thompson pulls it off, Habibi could be that very rare accomplishment: a graphic novel rich and deep enough to actually be called a novel. In addition, it will win every award that exists and some that haven't been invented yet.

* * *

A book that definitely will not be released in 2011 is my Mystery Project X*. I had very little time to work on it the last few months of 2010 (you know I don't make a living doing comics, right?) but have really had a chance to buckle down the past couple of weeks. It feels great! Where I'm at: I have a 184-page script that I call my "locked-down" draft. That doesn't mean I won't change it, but I do think I finally have all the characters, dialog, plot twists, themes and motifs sufficiently settled to start drawing.

My next task is "thumbnailing," which means roughly sketching out the whole thing to see how the words and drawings lay out and work together. I didn't do a lot of thumbnailing on WHTTWOT and even less on Mom's Cancer, but I think it'll be necessary and helpful for this project. I've just begun (so far so good!) and figure that'll take several weeks. Just a few days ago I hit on the idea of thumbnailing digitally, entirely in Photoshop using a Wacom tablet, and I like it a lot. However, final art will be ink on paper, as God intended.

Once the thumbnails and a few pages of completed samples are done, they'll comprise a book proposal. My six loyal readers may recall that I discussed an earlier proposal for this same project with Editor Charlie just about a year ago. That was script only, plus a few pages of finished artwork, and I think Charlie and I both agreed it wasn't ready. It needed more work. Although Charlie has been as encouraging and supportive as I could hope and I have a commitment to show Mystery Project X to him first, I don't have a contract with Abrams or anyone else. They may not want it. Nobody may want it. These are hurdles to be jumped later, not to fret about now. If nothing else, I can always put it online and hope for the best. It worked pretty well before.


*Mystery Project X is not its real title.

I've Been One Poor Correspondent

First thing every morning I check to see how many visitors my blog's received, and on days I don't plan to post it makes me sad. So many nice people who don't know I've already decided to let them down.

But inspiration doesn't always strike and bills must be paid. My October has been consumed by three or four big day-job projects all coming due at the same time, one of which the client dithered on for a year before deciding it needed to be done now. So, to quote Dr. Gillian Taylor in the movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: "That, as they say, is that."

Sometime soon, I hope to compose a post on what my sisters "Kid Sis" and "Nurse Sis," about whom I never write, have been up to lately. Short version: It's good. In keeping with my blog's original mission of focusing on the process of writing, drawing and publishing a graphic novel, I'd like to blog about the status of "Mystery Project X," which I hope will be my next book, and the never-before-hinted-at "Mystery Project Y," which I hope might be the book after that. Short version: Don't hold your breath. I've also got half a mind to pull out some old sketches and talk about character design in terms of how I approach it and what I might have done differently if I'd been a bit smarter. Short version: Cap Crater is a pain in the neck.

We'll see if any of that happens. You'll have to come back to find out.

See what I did there?

Before I proceed to post some videos I've enjoyed lately, remember that drawing I did at the Charles Schulz Museum's "Cartoonists Sketch-a-Thon" commemorating the 60th anniversary of Peanuts? All the participants were asked to do one for the museum's collection, which I assumed meant that it would be archived in a spooky warehouse next to the Lost Ark. Well, it turns out that mine and a couple of others will actually be put on display next month.

My stuff sharing wall space with Mr. Schulz's stuff. Yeah, that'll take a while to sink in.

Video #1: A radio essay on language, grammar and pedantry by Stephen Fry, courtesy of my friend Jim O'Kane. I heartily, happily agree with 92% of Fry's delightfully expressed opinion. I part with him when he argues that careful, proper use of language doesn't "illustrate clarity of thought and intelligence of mind." I think it does. In my own writing, I find that choosing just the right words, and organizing them precisely to convey exactly the meaning I intend, often does clarify (even for me) what I'm trying to say. Sometimes I change my own mind--if a sentence's grammar won't hang together, sometimes it's because the thought it's trying to express is flawed. Conversely, I often find that people who don't speak or write clearly aren't thinking very clearly, either. On the scale of grammatical philosophy, Fry's a half-inch nearer "descriptivist" and further from "prescriptivist" than I am. Still: if what I just wrote sounds halfway interesting, this is worth your time.



Video #2: This is almost surely not worth your time, but I enjoyed it anyway: How the first Superman movie (with Chris Reeve and Gene Hackman) should have ended. Hard to argue. Found on Mark Evanier's blog.



Video #3: What happens when you mix hot postassium chlorate and a Gummi Bear? I worked in chemistry labs for more than a decade and never did anything this cool. Makes me feel kind of bad for the bear, though; it's almost as though you can hear his screams. From Bad Astronomer Phil Plait.

Later, I promise.

.

Problem Solving

Today I solved a problem that's been nagging me a while. It's a plot point in Mystery Project X--the story I haven't blogged about much lately but am still resolutely chipping away at and hope will someday be my next book or maybe webcomic if no one wants to publish it (that's its official subtitle, by the way).

Briefly and cryptically, I need a character to do X in location Y, then make his way to location Z. Everything hinges on this. But I could not for the life of me figure out how he could get him from Y to Z; if he's at Y when X happens, showing up later at Z should be impossible, or at least ridiculously complicated. Last night, lying in bed, I cracked it. All I have to do is move location Y 50 yards--do the same thing in a slightly different locale--and everything falls elegantly into place. It even makes the story better. It sounds silly, but I've been wrestling with this for weeks.

If you want to start an argument among writers, bring up writer's block. Charles Schulz famously said, "Writer's block is for amateurs." While I think that's a little uncharitable, I lean that way myself. Being a professional anything, including writer, means being able to buckle down and do the job well even when you don't feel like it. On the other hand, writers far better than I (and Schulz) have suffered from writer's block, sometimes so crippling they never wrote again.

I don't know. I'm not qualified to judge. Writing is supposed to be hard; if it wasn't hard, everyone would do it.* However, I'm pretty sure a lot of things are mistaken for writer's block: laziness, distraction, bad work habits, lack of confidence in yourself or your story. Even realizing you just don't enjoy writing as much as you used to and would rather do something else. Some might've labeled my little plot paralysis "writer's block," whereas I always thought of it as a puzzle I was pretty sure I could eventually solve. It's a subtle distinction--if I'd never solved the puzzle, then would it be writer's block? I think the difference is that solving tough puzzles seems like part of the writing process, while yielding to writer's block seems like foresaking it.

*

.