Further On Up the Road

Seth moderates the BPRD Panel at HeroesCon (l-r: Seth, Mike Mignola, Jason Latour, Paul Azaceta, James Harren)

I should start by publicly acknowledging my wife for picking up the bulk of Exile writing for the past few months.  As many of you know, I stepped away for a bit to help wrangle the behemoth that was HeroesCon's 30th Anniversary.  Since many of the con's highlights from her wrap up post were ones I shared, I won't talk too much about my own experiences from the con.  It's always humbling to help people further their comics experience, and always an amazing thing to talk, often about normal, day-to-day things with creators whose work I respect so much.  Conversations with experienced creators are always something that help build my confidence in my own work.  It's like studying at the feet of more learned people.  After recovering from this year's con, I'm excited to be back working on my own ideas again.

So what does that exactly entail?  One thing I've learned from my past experiences in music is not to show all my cards too early.  I feel comfortable in saying that at this point, I do have some other creative projects that I'm actively working on.  'Active' is the key word here because, often, past projects rarely got beyond the thinking or planning stage.  Learning about the craft of comics writing has been a challenging and rewarding experience.  Understanding that there are fundamental differences between comics writing and songwriting or journalism is an obvious but necessary lesson.  It's still probably premature to talk specifics about exactly what stories I'm working on, but those will come to light when it's time to talk about them.  

In the meantime, I'm going to continue to figure out ways of how to use things like poetry in a visual form.  It's also important that I continue to minimize the amount of unnecessary dialogue and verbal description.  This is, after all a visual medium, and far too many writers forget that.  Things like that seem silly and obvious, but look around the comic shelves and you'll see plenty of examples of excessive writing.  I'm learning that the best thing a writer can do when contributing to a comics story is to present an open enough idea that will be enjoyable for an artist to illustrate, then offer up ideas for different options of how to approach it.  This is, I suppose, a supplementary effort.  I don't ever want an artist to feel like I'm dictating every motion and pose on a page.  At best, it's some kind of collaborative result where writer and artist both feel like they're contributing to something bigger than the individual parts.

     

     There are a few different comic stories being worked on at the moment, I can at least say that.  I'm also still happily writing for the Heroes Blog, though some of my specific roles there will be changing a little bit in months to come.  It's all for the better, and all out of an effort to maintain enthusiasm for this medium I love so much.  My writing for Exile should be picking back up again, too.  I've started several little articles on music and comics, and hope to post once every week or so over the summer.  As for music, that boat may have finally sailed...or maybe it's more apropos to suggest I've lowered the anchor.  Both a lingering injury to my left hand and a recurring bout with tendonitis in my right wrist have limited any kind of productive work on the music front.  I'm slowly coming to terms with this, though I don't think I'll ever completely get music out of my system.  Maybe I'll get back around to it at some point.  Until then, there are other stories to tell. 

Parallelogram

 

     The older I get, the longer it takes an idea to get from my head onto a page.  Once it's on a page it takes even longer to congeal enough into a thing that can stand on its own among other paragraphs and thoughts.  As I've been working my way through my first comic story that will be given to an artist, I'm trying my damnedest to make sure that the work the artist receives won't be overladen with excessive dialogue and description.  In other words, I can't write sentences like the one you just read.  In college writing courses they always said "Show, don't tell," and that took some work to start to employ on a regular basis.  In a visual medium it's even more important.

     So I've been thinking a lot about imagery, and how wordless parallels between images can be a form of poetry.  I think the key has to be restraint.  For example, if I were to write a cliched image of a young boy looking at himself in a mirror on the first panel of page one, then if I opted to have the last panel of the last page feature an old man looking at himself in a mirror, there's probably not much need for any words.  Readers glean a specific feeling or meaning by the juxtaposition of those two images.  Gratuitous metaphor, or even inner monologue is moot at that point.

      There is always that ever present notion of cliche, though, as I mentioned.  In my last blog I talked about the idea that everything we know of as art is really the byproduct of centuries of storytelling, and thus most themes and structures of creative thought have already been watered down by the time they inform us.  If you're going to use comics as a means of direct storytelling, the use of parallels as a means of visual storytelling can work, but it probably relies heavily on both the writer and artist working in a way that can be subtly understood if it's not overt or heavy handed.

     There's also some level of confidence that creators must have in such use of parallels if they're going to work.  Less is more, but if the creators don't trust the imagery, or the unison between thought and execution, then it can't work.  And as with anything, parallels aren't something that should be overused.  It's really an exercise in allowing something to stand on its own, while letting seem self aware of exactly what it's doing.  That's where the skill of the creators comes into play.

     So why are parallels on my mind so much right now?  When I decided that my story wouldn't be told in completely linear way, it started to make sense that I could use parallels between images to not only cut down on over-writing, but to also be a form of poetry, flashback, and to a lesser degree, philosophical suggestion. Then the story can maintain a literary sensibility, but the metaphors unfold as images unencumbered by words.  This is far from novel, far from groundbreaking thought, but it is nonetheless a thought worth exploring.  How will it work?  Will it even make it into my comic?  Time will tell, but the journey from thought to concrete work is indeed a fascinating one, and I'm enjoying using Exile on Plain Street to document some of my thinking about process.