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. 

 

Tribute

 

Character art from AJ Smith for Tribute.

Cover Page!....ahh, color

 

See Reference Image

As a child of the 80s, it still amazes me how quickly our world gets cataloged for the eyes, and that there are all these folks out there continually uploading images of rusted-out trailers, green hallways of corn, military uniforms from every era and branch of service, archived photos of Ventura Boulevard in the 1940s. 

In the pre-internet Before Times, to find such visual specificity for even a single useful reference image would take hours (walk to the library, find a computer terminal, scratch out the call number, begin the hunt through the book stacks--not that I don't LOVE this process, of course). Even given a whole day in the library doing analog research, you could never turn up the plethora delivered in less than a second by a simple google search. 

The application for comics scripting? Reference images. The scriptwriter speaking to the artist visually.

Reference images have the added benefit of making the script itself more efficient. You can spend a precious paragraph describing the exterior of a house as you imagine it, or you can simply write, "See reference image," find a house on google images that's close to the one you picture, and attach it.

So far I'm keeping a separate "Images" file for each script. Below are some of the reference images for Tribute. The full reference file for that story, a comic of thirteen pages, is fifteen pages, with one to two images per page. 

I'm still refining how the search for reference images gets incorporated into the process of scriptwriting. Even though the search itself is nearly instantaneous, poring through the numerous results, refining the search, delving down through the various pages to find that perfect single image, can be tedious.

It can also be a terrible distraction. Often I'll just make a note to find the actual image later and keep typing. 

And noticing this just now--looking at the images separately from the script but in sequence, they still tell the story in their own way. 

It's like reading only the final word on each line of a poem--you still get a flavor of what the poem's about.

And a final note--artists are grateful for reference images. It simply saves them time. Who wouldn't be grateful for that?

Emotion, Vulnerability, Destructive Voices

I found Taylor Swift's movie Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions profoundly moving. It's filmed intimately and largely without artifice. It also speaks powerfully to the moment inside the pandemic in which we find ourselves. 

"It's an album that allows you to feel your feelings," Swift says at one point.

I came across the movie unexpectedly and knew little about Taylor Swift--passing headlines, the occasional pop song, an ad she did for Coke, an article I read about her queer fans poring over her lyrics. The result was that I was unprepared (or perhaps perfectly prepared) to be walloped by her creation.

The feeling was so powerful that I became interested in my own response to the movie. How much of it had to do with being in a vulnerable state, as we all are at some level inside the pandemic? And how much of it had to do with Swift sort of going for it?

So, yeah, just interested in that dynamic of working on a project and hearing all these editorial voices, many of them destructive and desirous of killing the creative fervor. There are so many reasons not to write anything, and a lot of what I find myself doing these days is bantering in my head with these voices, reasoning, cajoling, dismissing, conceding, then reengaging. 

I think such voices can be important at times to listen to in shaping the story, but if the story has its own emotional energy, it still needs to exist. Readers don't have to read it. 

Here's a page from Frankie B of Night Deliveries. His artwork is impeccable and stunning, IMHO. 

A lot of voices pinging me on this story; it feels vital. I'm going with the vital.