The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: comics

  • Dear Comics

    It’s not you, it’s me.

    I want to fall in love with you, I really do. All of my friends say that you’re really great. And you are great, really. I’m just not feeling it.

    I just can’t get into the way that you tell stories.

    As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been attracted to text. I like well built paragraphs, with broad metaphors and strong descriptions that can carry a story safely across the great divide between author and reader. A clever simile, a well-crafted pun, will always make me smile. I have kind of a Thing for a confident narrative that introduces me to fascinating characters and takes me to exotic places. The right novel comes along, and I’m lost.

    I have experimented with comics in the past. Some of my favorite authors, particularly Neil Gaiman, are bi-genre, and in their company I’ve dipped my toe in the graphic waters. But I can’t pretend any more.

    When I open a graphic novel, I’m faced with page after page of lavish illustration, but all I can really see is the text. Unfortunately the text isn’t quite enough to carry the story. It’s mostly just dialog, with perhaps a dash of exposition. The lion’s share of description, mood, and theme are carried by the artwork, and I just don’t see it. Instead of carefully examining each page, each panel, I’ll find myself madly flipping pages, looking only at the speech bubbles, and by the end of the book I’ll be groaning in unfulfilled expectations, crying out, “That’s it? That’s all you can give me?” Excited by the prospect of a great story, only to have it come to a premature and unsatisfying end.

    Sometimes, on a second go around, I can force myself to go slow, carefully examine the artwork. I know you’ve worked hard on your appearance, comics, and I’d like to give you mad props for it, but I’m just not that kind of a girl.

    A novel, on the other hand, is long, and thick, and carries the promise of great satisfaction. A novelist knows how to create the mood, set the pace, and tickle my fancy just right.

  • Writing It Down For Later

    The Mad Thinker is a Marvel Comics character created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee back in the day.
    The Mad Thinker is a Marvel Comics character created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee back in the day.

    Inspiration is a tricky thing to describe. Kind of like trying to capture scents with a mason jar underwater.

    I mean to say that one never knows when something will strike the flint and and an idea will erupt into flaming life. It’s part and parcel of being a writer that one must keep records of lots of things.

    Of course one runs across so many things in the Age of the Internets. It used to be that I’d just write stuff down as I came across it when I read something else. It all starts, as these things do, in the beginning. The formative years, when we begin to realize that being an astronaut or a fireman isn’t going to be what we really want to do, is when we find something that really connects the dots. One of the first things I wrote down came from Chris Claremont, the writer of Uncanny X-Men:

    “What you do not comprehend is that we are dying from the moment of birth, indeed, from the instant of conception. Creation bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

    Our lives are finite things. We live our allotted span and are no more. Regardless of what we may do, how hard we try, the best we can hope for is a brief delay of the inevitable. It is sad. Even cruel. But it is our most fundamental reality to be faced and accepted.”

                                         –Colossus, Uncanny X-Men 165 (vol. 1)

    That really affected the teenaged me. It was a point of view I hadn’t considered before. It’s something that I have referred to often despite being one of the most overwrought pieces of comic book writing ever. It’s a moment between two people and the feelings are genuine and there are true things said. It’s a philosophy.

    It affected me enough to want to be a writer and to, as often as I can, tell the truth as I see it.

    As I’ve become more and more a storyteller, I have collected quotes about writing that mean a lot, that keep me moving forward. The Cult of Done has been one of the biggest, most influential pieces, too. I blog about it a lot.

    DONE IS THE ENGINE OF MORE.

    — Bre Pettis

    But then there’s the curmudgeon Harlan Ellison who might sue anyone who quotes him. Still, this bit, from an interview conducted during the release of Dreams With Sharp Teeth (which you should watch often) over at Comic Book Resources, gave me a quote that gets me through every single day:

    “You can either seek the approbation of the monkeys or you can continue to produce your art at the level at which you do it best.”

    — Harlan Ellison

    Since I’ve got a bum ring finger as I type this, I’m going to wrap up with my favorite quote about writing and the process of writing:

    “Finish your shit.”

    That’s good ol’ Chuck Wendig.

    Yeah. So moving from the philosophy of Claremont’s most human character to the foul-mouthed-but-sensitive Wendig, the things that inspire me to write are pretty varied. I have a quote for just about any occasion, should I need something to pull me through a tough spot of writing.

    Of course every spot of writing is tough. All those scraps of paper tacked to the bulletin board over my desk are there to distract me from the hard work and at the same time remind me that it’s hard work.

    Ah, the life of a writer…

  • To Serve… Others

    Asimov's robots are the ultimate in customer service. Humans should learn a thing or two from them.
    Asimov’s robots are the ultimate in customer service. Humans should learn a thing or two from them.

    I’m primarily a fiction writer. Actually 99% fiction writer. The exceptions are these posts for the Cafe, some real-life stuff on my own blog and a rather largish pamphlet I wrote back in the early 2000s (the Naughties – heh) on the subject of making mini comics.

    Once upon a time there was a website called SixShooterComix.com (it’s now defunct but you can see a shot of the forum here thanks to the WayBack Machine). I met Rob Schamberger  and Thom Thurman at a comics convention in Kansas City around 2001 and we hit it off. Rob has gone on to become recognized for his paintings of wrestlers and we’re still friends.

    Before I go any further, 6SC was very good for me. I met a wonderful artist in Svetlana Chmakova and we produced exactly one story together. There was potential for another but things never worked out. Anyway, based on the success of that story and the fact that I was still producing mini comics on my own, Rob asked me to write a column on the forum about my process. He anticipated three or four columns, but there’s a lot to making comics. Add that in with the fact that I like to talk and I produced I don’t know how many columns. Eighteen or nineteen if I remember correctly. (I have a copy around the house somewhere but it would take earthmovers to dig it out.)

    (more…)

  • Sharks Have to Swim; Writers Have to Write

    From Wikipedia

    During elementary school, I drew comic books in class. My first character was Outback Jack, a whip-toting bad-ass inspired by Crocodile Dundee and Indiana Jones. By the time I reached high school, I spent a lot of time writing and drawing comics. I came up with the brand name Power Comics when I was in sixth grade, and made business cards on printer paper. I even had a logo.

    With the exception of Outback Jack and a couple of other characters, I didn’t have interest in continuing their adventures. I loved coming up with characters and writing their origin stories. I’ve always loved a good comic book origin story, even to this day. All told, I invented around fifty title characters. Many of them shared powers with published super heroes, but that has never stopped DC or Marvel from ripping each other off.

    Looking, back, that is how I began writing. I felt a rush and kept seeking it. I used to think I started writing in college. I wrote a scene for video production my sophomore year and attended a screenwriter’s boot camp as a junior. But when I really look at my life, writing has always been there. (more…)

  • Counting Down from Dee to Aay

    Each team member gets their turn at Magneto. How they get there is a subplot. Art by John Byrne. Image Attribution.

    When I was growing up Chris Claremont and John Byrne (with Terry Austin, Glynis Wein and my favorite letterer EVER Tom Orzechowski) were taking comic books to new levels that are taken for granted now. Their run on Uncanny X-Men from 1977 – 1981 shaped how comics are made forever. What did they do? They built up anticipation with subplots that would run over the course of several issues as a ‘D’ or ‘C’ story of a couple of panels or one page or so and then graduate it to a ‘B’ story for a couple of issues before it became the ‘A’ story. The one featured on the cover.

    It was classic soap opera storytelling but it was NEW. Well, not absolutely new, but they did it in a way that was so fresh it appeared new. I suspect they learned it from what Paul Levitz was doing as he was writing his classic Legion of Superheroes runs and he did the same thing. Anyway, that’s enough about comics for the nonce. (I always wanted to use ‘nonce’ in a blog post. Check that one off my list.)

    This is what influenced me in storytelling, these amazing comics that took me places I’d never been before, told me stories in ways I hadn’t seen before. That particular run, Uncanny 108 to 143, made me want to make comics. I wanted to draw like Byrne (with Austin) and write with the style of Claremont but I didn’t know how. I didn’t know what to do. It took me years to realize there was a secret I hadn’t picked up on and even then I wasn’t sure how to go about discovering it. (more…)

  • SASE (Self-Aggrandizing Submission Envy)

    Spies use mailboxes, don’t they? Photo at Wikipedia.

    Back when I was trying to break into comics as a writer, I submitted several pitches. This was back in the day before the Big Two (that’s Marvel and DC for those who don’t know) closed down their slushpiles. I got very nice rejection letters from DC and I have them around here somewhere. One from another smaller publisher even offered some feedback that was very helpful.

    I had a relationship with one small publisher and one editor (each at different places) and got very nice emails that were terribly encouraging though both passed on the projects. I was encouraged. I should give them credit for me still wanting to be creative even though I had put my heart and soul into the projects I submitted. They told me I was good enough but the stories weren’t what they published. Sigh.

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  • Close Enough for Rock & Roll

    Eastman & Laird
    One little self-published comic book was the beginning of a startling cultural phenomenon.

    I have self-published music, comics and my writing. I am not wealthy as a result of it, but I am better for having made the attempts. These attempts were made with the best of intentions but with little heed for what was actually wrong with each of them. We had no producer for the music and I had no editor for the comics or writing. I thought I knew what was wrong at the time with all of it, and I was right.  But there was more.

    Everyone’s heard the stories of the writer who pens a wildly successful book, the band who’s basement-recorded album hits the top of the charts, the writer and artist whose parody concept spawned a revolution in comics. Amanda Hocking. Collective Soul. Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird.

    These are the exceptions to the rule. These are the inspirations for people like me. (Well not Amanda Hocking in my case, sorry.) These are the cases that cause us to keep at it. If they can do it, so can I.

    I’ve been in a professional recording studio and in ones in the homes of other musicians, always looking to make the best product I could. One band was really successful at it though we didn’t do an actual release of the record. We got two songs played on local radio (one seemed to have a regular rotation for a month or so) and had some very, very good shows. Didn’t make a dime off the record, but hey we had the shows and the beer and nice following locally. I’ve documented my comics ‘career’ elsewhere and don’t need to rehash it other than to say that I got some positive reviews and made some great friends. My writing has also been self-published on my blog and via the wonderful folks over at The Penny Dreadful website.

    Each of these situations, projects – whatever you want to call them – creative efforts, would have greatly benefitted from a producer or editor to tell us what we weren’t able to discern for ourselves: they weren’t good enough.

    Everything that’s independently produced (art, music, writing, whatever) needs to have a professionally-trained, uninvolved set of eyes to give it a lookover. The Beatles had George Martin, early science fiction writers had John W. Campbell, comics have Karen Berger and Axel Alonso. Editors are important, make no mistake. (more…)