The Great Horned Owl

Couldn't get to sleep last night, and right before I set the phone down around 12:30 a.m., an email from Grego came through, wanting to know what kind of owl flies into the shed where the zombie is--Great Horned or Snowy Owl? 

Aha! I thought, this is why I couldn't fall asleep. I needed to be up for his email, to offer the one thing he needed to finish the next page. Hubris/magical thinking/striving to make sense of things...

I immediately typed out "Great Horned" then before sending decided to google "owls on the Palouse" then saw that Grego sent a followup email with a pdf pamphlet on "The Prairie Owl" from the Palouse Audubon Society. And I was glad to have affirmed that the Great Horned Owl is: "Probably the most well known and most seen species" on the Palouse. 

Besides captive owls, it's the only owl I've encountered--of a dark night, startled by one overhead in the front yard crabapple tree; on another night, by one in a nearby evergreen. Once, in the old arboretum on campus I had a conversation with a Great Horned in the dark. 

So I sent the email into the ether and turned out the light.

Here's the Audubon image:

And later in the morning after a couple hours of sleep, I was happy to see Grego's version:

Defamiliarizing the Zombie Story

Good art either makes the strange common or the common, strange. It all goes back to ostranenie, the Russian neologism meaning "enstrangement" or "defamiliarization"--making the new seem old, the old seem new, as first detailed by Viktor Shklovksy. Some stories strive to do both, and I think the zombie story's in this category.

First, it takes something strange--a monster--and makes him common. By the end, hopefully, the reader feels for the zombie. He's become an everyman, could be a homeless person or a wanderer who's given up on appetite and decided to disconnect from the world and its suffering and pass on into whatever comes next.

Second, as a result of the monster becoming common, the type of story suddenly becomes strange. The typical monster story assumes fear of the monster; but when we begin to yearn for the monster to survive and even thrive, the story moves into less typical territory. In this way, the story takes a common cultural trope and enstranges it. This move, this sympathy for the devil, is a simple inversion. We're taught to fear monsters, but what happens when we get to know the monster as one of us? Frankenstein, Quasimodo, the Phantom of the Opera. 

A somewhat contemporary literary example is John Gardner flipping the Beowulf story on its head and telling it from the monster Grendel's point of view. Same story, same concept is also done magnificently in Sturla Gunnarson's Icelandic film Beowulf & Grendel from 2005, which develops a powerful sympathy for the monster. And the film The Others from 2001 works along similar lines, though more subversively.

And as the cruel world closes in on the monster, as it inevitably does, and he becomes the hunted one, sympathy-for-the-devil moves the reader away from fear of the monster to fear for him. Speaking ideally, if the story functions on its highest level, the common or expected emotion of fear transforms into the rarer, more poignant emotion of loss. The zombie and reader are made to sense all that has been lost in his transformation--fly fishing, love for his dog, etc. And here, also ideally, the reader becomes linked to the zombie in a common sense of injustice. 

*Key & Peele's White Zombie skit also enstranges the zombie trope by inverting the common direction of fear between zombies and people. (Notably, though, they don't make the zombies common; the zombies are still zombies in this sketch, strange and monstrous). When the White zombies show fear of Key and Peele's characters because they're Black, common tropological expectations are upset and, brilliantly, the very strangeness of racism is exposed, the ugly faces of the White zombies charged with it. In this case the enstrangement is made to carry the comment on racism. 

 Consider the Heart is now Cri De Cœur. Here's Kevin's cover image.

The First Page

Hard to describe how anxious I was to get a first peek at Grego's artwork for the project, the first story to be adapted. I have to say, from the first second seeing it, I loved it. It felt right.

Doubt, That Uncertain Engine

One time over beers with my fiction-writing friend--let's call him Dan b/c that's his name--I mentioned that the highest point of excitement for me in working on a story comes at the beginning when I initially conceive of a new idea. It's a moment of euphoria, a glimpse of a wild possibility (and it strikes me now, often the highest point of emotion felt in relation to any story). 

It doesn't happen with every project, but when it does, the idea feels new and necessary. It's the proverbial lightning strike, and it once sent me on a seven-year journey writing a novel.

No, no, no, Dan said, laughing at my naïveté. You've got it backwards. The beginning and the revising is the hard part. Only when you've done the thing, when you've realized it and it works--that's when you can get hopeful.

My process: HOPE!-doubt-doubt-(hope)-doubt-(hope)-doubt-doubt

Dan's process: doubt-doubt-doubt-doubt-doubt-hope

(He doesn't get caps or an exclamation mark b/c he's the kind of guy you only ever see excited on the inside.)

What role does doubt play in the writing process? What role should it play? Are these different? (See, doubt, that ever-nagging beautiful imp.)

It's often the initial spin inside an idea that carries enough momentum to propel me through to the end. Without that first glimpse of something golden in the distance, it's hard to remember what I'm working toward. 

Or maybe I'm just lazy. Maybe I should be more dedicated to the work of work, trust the process and all that.

There it is again--case in point--the doubt, this uncertain engine inside the mind (my mind) pulling hope's rubber-band, testing its springiness again and again.

Here's a pencil from Kevin that came through yesterday on the final story of the collection, which I decided this morning in a fit of doubt needed to be retitled "Cri De Cœur."

 

Consider the Heart - First Glimpse

So, Kevin Phillips sent along the first page of the two-page "Consider the Heart," which originally, in its prose form, was titled, "Lonely Old Woman Extracts Her Heart." 

As I was adapting the story to script, the original title struck me as cold, unnecessarily remote, and not really supportive of the story itself, which is more about longing, past paths not taken, and some sort of final reckoning with love. 

The new title, too, is reaffirmed visually (or will be) in the graphic form, and as the last story in the collection, asks the reader to return to the whole collection, to ask, what is the heart of this strange conglomeration of tales? 

Maybe it's about the quiet times when we're alone with only ourselves, reckoning in truth with who we are and what we know of our own intentions. 

Nothing's ever finished, not even titles. It's finished when you stop working on it. It's finished when you die.

Wanderer

I'm reworking one of my darkest stories* and having a blast. 

It's the toiling and toying inside a new form that's so pleasurable, and the collaborative aspect brings with it a sense of freedom. I can rely on the art to come. 

*Yesterday, in reading about Cat Powers--the "queen of sadcore" according to LA Weekly--I found that she often finds her music misunderstood. She says that her songs are "not sad, but triumphant." Isn't making something that works a sort of triumph in itself? I can't stop listening to her song "Wanderer."

First Glimpse of the Script

Paul's script came in and I was blown away. Here's his first page. 

What strikes me, in part, is the technical language, but even more, the way everything is aimed at the visual expression of the final version. This is a projection of what's to come, not the thing itself. 

And the efficiency of the lingo and all that's assumed is compelling.  

Boiling off the Fat

Wow! This adapting is intense.

Comics is really about boiling down the story to its essentials. It's got to be lean. If each page costs $100 to pencil and ink, and, at most, you get 9 panels per page, then each panel costs at least $11.11. Everything has to count--there's too much skin in the game.

As a writer I don't naturally think in terms of plot. I usually write from an image or an idea, and sequencing the cause-and-effect of things comes later. 

Comics is all about plot, cause and effect, one action leading to the next and so on, or it won't make sense. Yet the moment-to-moment action shouldn't be spelled out; you have to trust the visuals. 

I'm so accustomed to looking over the reader's shoulder, that positing a viewer instead of a reader feels very strange. I keep wanting to dive into description, but all that has to go. Death to purple prose.

Adapting turns out to be messy. I'm a messy reviser anyway, so at least this part of the process feels natural. You've got boil off the fat. Comics adapting is a rendering machine.

It's eye-opening to look at a page of my prose and see just how much can be jettisoned. This is the final hour, these are the final cuts. What's absolutely essential?

Here's the first page of the zombie story, a story I thought was pretty lean already in prose form. 

The boxed lines are those I'm thinking should survive. I'll be interested to see how Paul's version compares.

First Artist

 Out of a double boatload of applicants, I found Grego Pulp's portfolio. His retro style really blew me away, and I was especially struck by how he conceptualizes a page. Maybe it's because I'm a newbie to creating comics that I'm drawn to his style, but he doesn't work from a series of panels so much as through a flow among the panels. The organic transitions cause the images to rely more on each other, which reinforces a sense of time moving and deepens the dream, IMHO.

Here's an image from his work The Seeker:

Grego's color is lovely, but I think color might be a step too far for this project. I always come back to the power of Maus. The power's in the story, and it's also in the B&W images, the way the viewer moves between the words and the stark figures to make meaning. Plus, B&W is definitely cheaper, and there's a budget to consider--the more thrifty I am, the more stories can be adapted. 

So, yeah, Grego Pulp for the zombie story. And Paul London for the script because I don't yet know how to write a comics script.