Cemetery Dance Interview on Bloodshot World

Cemetery Dance just published an interview with me about Bloodshot World. One thing that puzzles me is that I really enjoy talking about comics scriptwriting in a way that I don't usually with prose writing unless I'm teaching it or talking with another writer. Maybe it has something to do with the collaborative process of comics scriptwriting? 

Here's an excerpt:

Who are the seven international artists you found to work on the project, and how did you find them?

Three are US-based: Frankie B. Washington, Kevin Phillips, and AJ Smith. Elena Cerisciola and Marco Bovi are based in Italy. Grego Pulp is in Spain. Davi Santos Silva is in Brazil. All of them have been amazing to work with — professional and dedicated to high quality work. I found them all online through different sites: freelanced.com, Facebook, and Discord. Early on in the project Paul D. London helped me get my footing as a script writer. I worked on a single story at a time, and finding a match in terms of artistic style and sensibility was an individual process for each story. I took my time and didn’t rush the artists, and that’s one reason this first volume has taken six years to put together. I was figuring everything out as I went.

You’ve previously published a novel and a prose short story collection. How is working with comics a different experience for you?

Comics writing couldn’t be more different from prose writing. I had written a couple of screenplays — and comics writing is most similar to that form. However it’s even different from screenwriting in that the format for screenwriting is very strict. In comics writing there is no standard, really. It’s a single writer creating a script that will only be seen by a single artist and perhaps a letterer. The writing is purely functional — everything goes to serve the image. You don’t need to — and can’t, really — build an internal world like you do in prose fiction. It’ s all about present action, something I learned from Mat Johnson. He writes literary fiction and graphic novels. Everything has to serve the present action of the story in comics, otherwise there’s nothing to show on the page. Also you have to think in terms of page and panels — how many panels to tell the story of this particular scene? Or can it be a single splash image? It’s a lot of fun adding the visual but requires a different sense of rhythm.

One thing I hadn’t expected is that it also brings out aspects of your characters that can stay hidden in fiction. For example, race, age, appearance — all those come through immediately in an image but don’t have to be specified in prose. The artist imagines these things into being, and the room for the viewer to imagine shifts into the space between frames. So, allowing for that imaginative collaboration is another challenge of the form.

Kickstarter Campaign for Bloodshot World

 

This week the Kickstarter campaign for the graphic story collection will launch, and it's given me a chance to reflect on the process.

In 2018 when I started this project of adapting some of my short stories into graphic form, I couldn't have known it would take six years to get to this point. Recently I keep coming back to this image by Kevin Phillips for the story "Cri de Coeur" because that's what this whole adventure feels like to me, my heart in my hands, a feeling everyone knows, when something on which you've spent so much time and energy is about to go into the world.

Working on it has been a challenge in the best of ways--learning a new art form, getting to collaborate with incredible artists, and giving myself a distraction. This book has been with me through a new job, through Covid, and through dealing with the ongoing loss of two siblings, a niece, and others. 

I've had to steal time from other responsibilities and projects for it, but it has been a source of joy, and I've been surprised to find that, more than I've experienced with any other writing project, I've held close its initial point of inspiration, that moment of pure excitement I felt on that hike up Paradise Ridge when I first had the idea for the book. 

Looking forward to seeing what response there will be. So many hours spent thinking about and working on these stories, it's hard to encapsulate it now with the finishing line in sight. 

More soon.

 

Marco Bovi put together this two-page interior cover spread, a composite from "The Source of My Troubles." 

The incredible Marco Bovi rounds out the collection with this, the sixth and final story, to be completed for the upcoming BLOODSHOT WORLD. 

Night Deliveries - Cover

 

BLOODSHOT STORIES - update

 Five stories have been created:

Another Cop Story (32 pages)

Night Deliveries (12 pages)

As You Are Now (18 pages)

Cri De Coeur (2 pages)

Tribute (13 pages)

77 pages total. Moving into this stage finally at long last...

Another Cop Story - First Page

 

Another Cop Story - Cover art

 

 Elena Cerisciola has finished the art for Tribute. Here's the cover page. 

Artist to Finish Tribute

Update: Pages 4-9 have been inked, artist reveal forthcoming...

Looking forward to seeing what comes next with this story. 

 

Purity of Form

There's a purity to comics scriptwriting, and I love it. Everything goes to serve the visuals. It's so different from prose writing, and yet prose writing, especially the writing of scenes, contains plenty of crossover techniques. Here are three aspects of comics scriptwriting that I'm finding pleasurable:

• Transference. Everything is aimed, ultimately, at serving the viewer. The final image relies on the artist, of course, but the more that I can project myself into both the artist's mind and the viewer's mind, the more connected the final art will be. It's this amalgam of three minds, this network of empathy between writer-illustrator-viewer--a web of connection, a triangulation of sensibilities--that are held in the mind, ever shifting with each choice.

• Functionality. The script is a step along the way, not the finished product, and as such its highest function is to correctly describe how the final product should appear. In this it doesn't require lyricism or poetry but a precise technical language. The script itself won't be published, and in one sense this takes off some pressure to "perform" with the language. It strips the use of the words down to their functional specificity.

• Minimalism. There are lots of little things, like starting a scene with "P1 - Int. Police Cruiser," that, in its shorthand minimalism, does a ton of heavy lifting. There's no room for all the things that I ordinarily rely so much on in prose writing--psychological reflection, description, language play. In this way, I find that comics scriptwriting is a great challenge. It requires only descriptions that immediately forward the story. The form itself is so focused on present action that the script will only tolerate language that actually does something--describes an image or a character that will translate to the visual, or presents dialogue or captioned words that will appear in the scene itself. Every word in a script has skin in the game. 

Here's a page from the script that I'm currently adapting, "Another Cop Story."

Script vs. Finished Page

Here's a page of the script and AJ's finished page. On p. 3 of "Tribute" the Stuntman is just waking up from having accidentally knocked himself out while practicing his fall from the post.