Electrified Words and Images, A Golden Notion

What's the power of comics form? It seems to be looked down upon by the literary world as a popular form--the old high/low aesthetic split--and one stereotype seems to be that it doesn't, that it can't, carry the gravitas that more "literary" work does.

I don't know, maybe Maus dispelled this notion to some degree. I recall sitting in the audience at AWP listening to Art Spiegelman give the keynote in NYC a decade ago. Now he was electrifying. He got the nod, then it was back to the regularly scheduled prose programming.

Just for fun, let's apply the low-art label to comics art for a second. What, then, are graphic adaptations of literary works--dumbed-down versions of the real thing? This has been a point of internal resistance in my mind as I consider the current project. 

Not that I care about the tenuous membrane between low and high art or the perceived need to puncture it, just that I wonder, fundamentally, why reach for a different form? 

I guess I'm suspicious of my own intentions. Is it a commercial impulse, a desire for more readers and respect, a result of my stuckness with producing new work, something else? All these fears suggest I come at the project out of some shameful necessity. 

And yet.

Last night, while reading Nnedi Okorafor's introduction to the graphic adaptation of Octavia Butler's Kindred, I came across this sentence: "The very medium of the graphic novel already electrifies words and images."

My brain ignited. What if the comics form is actually a higher, more immediate, more powerful, more electric form of art than prose? Ai yi yi. Maybe we don't need to posit "higher." Higher is problematical. More emotional, more visceral are terms that are perhaps more useful.

In the heady days of grad school I liked to declaim film as "the highest art" because, I would argue on my fourth or fifth glass of cheap merlot at a symposium, it combines not one but multiple various arts--written, visual, acting, editing, and musical--to play on the viewer's emotions. And beyond that, the "visual" is a dynamic one of cinematography...zzzzzzzzzzz....you get the picture.

So now I consider a return to the golden notion that recombinant art electrifies, intensifies, amplifies. Perhaps here, there's a little bit more.

Impatience

 I'm so impatient--a major character flaw. What I feel, always with something new, is the need to move on the thing that's being done.

This is to say that I couldn't wait to hear back from that single artist I contacted about adapting a literary story. I went ahead and posted an ad on freelanced:

I also decided that the zombie story should be first. It comes first in the collection, it's short, and it's got action that would seem to give itself over to comics form. 

Working with Mat Johnson, he talked all the time about "present action," what's actually happening in the moment of the story, the physical immediate movement. 

The zombie story has this.

I remind myself that, to move forward, it's necessary to keep choosing. I'll make mistakes and bad decisions, but as long as I'm continuing to make choices, progress will be made. Maybe the impatience can be turned into forward momentum. 

I just have to convince my inner editor that nothing in this is irrevocable. 

Making a Start

Since March when Covid hit, I haven't written an original word. I just can't find the energy to start new work (I know I'm not the only one). In the past few days, though, a couple of the stories from Bloodshot have loomed in my thoughts. And a particular idea I've had for several years wouldn't leave me alone. 

The idea came to me years ago while hiking Paradise Ridge after my sister Paula's death in 2010--to adapt some of my short stories into graphic form. I can recall this pulse of energy that charged the whole hike. I could do three at a time, bring out these little chapbooks. 

At the time, though, the stories themselves were unpublished or had only appeared in journals--so it didn't really make sense. How do you "adapt" something that doesn't yet have a published original?

But now, a book of stories out in the world for a couple of years and the mulling over what that means the past few days, of whether I'll never again work with those stories. I find myself still very close to the stories, sort of longing to be in them again.  

And so while walking the creek today I decided to make a new start with old work. It's welcome for now when nothing new will come, when the old beckons. 

The day finally came to give it a go.