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. 

Next Up for Adaptation - "Tribute"

TRIBUTE
Tilly Syreeta Bancroft
(1920-2005)

The first time I met Tilly, it was all about the eyes. She had the biggest prettiest eyes in the world. They were like two flecks of sky, blue-marbled and cool. I was the third man back in the line of stunt doubles for Ray Bolger and she was a Munchkin Villager in Yellow Sun Dress. It was the morning they were shooting Dorothy’s arrival at the village.

Chuck Waller, who played the Munchkinland Mayor, was strutting around the set telling people where to go and how to get there, as usual, so I opted for a quieter spot around back. On Mr. Bolger’s recommendation, I’d spent the day before at the zoo’s gibbon exhibit, getting a feel for the awkward grace of those lopey buggers. No better teacher than nature, Mr. Bolger liked to say. So there I was in a deserted corner of the MGM lot, hooking the back of my overalls onto a jury-rigged cruciform, when the nail snapped and sent me tumbling to the ground. Very ungibbon-like.

Fade to black and all that. Next thing I knew, there in front of me was a vision of two patches of Nebraska sky trying to resolve themselves into the most tender pair of blue eyes I’d ever seen.  

“Are you okay, Mr. Scarecrow?”  

The voice was as delicate as a piece of thread. I was sure I’d died and was being escorted into the blue yonder by the holiest angel in God’s heaven. Her hair brushed my forehead like a tassel of golden corn silk and whisked me back to a time when all us kids would hide from each other in green hallways of corn. Tilly would agree that I bore an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Bolger, but I never could get her to admit that she’d mistaken me for the real Scarecrow.  

After a day of shooting, Tilly and a group of Munchkin actors often unwound at a juke joint on Ventura. I started dropping by and that’s how we grew close. Oz intoxicated all of us. The whole cast—but especially those of us who hadn’t found much work until then—sensed that we were part of something bigger. She was from Ferndale, California, and I was from Red Cloud, Nebraska, a couple of small-town kids who just connected on the idea that anything seemed possible. Oz was the biggest score either of us had made since moving to la-la-land. 

Sure there were blue moments. Aleister Blackwell, who played an uncredited Munchkin, would have a second vodkatini and start stroking his furry sideburns and bemoaning storm clouds over Europe, claiming that the world had passed some point-of-no-return and lost its way. We humored him for a while, then Tilly and I would slip off to spend time together.  

We fell in love. But her family refused to bless our marriage plans. “It’s not right for two people of such different sizes to come together,” her mother wrote in a letter Tilly showed me. “You’ll just end up getting hurt when he tires of the novelty.”  

I told Tilly that I would gladly chop off both my legs if it would help me win her parents’ blessing. It didn’t seem right that our God-given bodies should stand in the way of true love, but Tilly put a hold on the wedding plans.  

Things kept at a standstill for a time until the war came and I got shipped to Europe. At the dock Tilly asked to be picked up, something I’d never before done in public. There we were, me in my sharp-pressed uniform and Tilly in a powder-blue dress that matched her eyes. People gawked but we didn’t care. We pressed our foreheads together. Her skin was as cool as fine china. We stepped out of time on the dock that day. I’ll never forget that embrace nor our whispered promises to be true.    

We wrote every day but in the winter of 44, her letters stopped. In June came the “Dear John.” Two days later, with the 29^th Infantry, I landed at Normandy. A German land mine mangled both my legs to the knees, where they were amputated. Fate had a good chuckle at that. As I rehabbed at Walter Reed, a single thought tormented and teased me—that my injury was actually a gift, that I’d been rendered Tilly’s height so that her parents would finally accept me. Sometimes I wrote four letters a day from that hospital bed.  

No replies, though.

It was a long journey back to Red Cloud, but I finally made it and got through to Tilly on the telephone. She’d married Barry Bancroft, who played a Munchkin Tin Polisher and was four inches taller than her. She was pregnant with their first child. She cried and I could tell how hard it was for her, so after that I broke off contact.  

She and Barry had a happy life. I saw her one last time, at the 60^th Oz reunion. We spotted each other across the crowded banquet hall and immediately made our way past all those people we didn’t recognize anymore. She stood on my footrests and we embraced. It was like I’d had a house on my chest for fifty years. I finally took a full breath.  

“It’s so good to see you,” she said. I simply couldn’t speak. People called out to each other, champagne corks popped, ice fell into glasses, and all I could do was look into those big blue eyes and feel like I was twenty years old again, lying on my back on the MGM lot, believing that dreams really do come true. To have woken up next to Tilly each morning would’ve made it all worthwhile. She’ll be missed.  

(Bancroft died of kidney failure in Santa Barbara, Calif.)

Character Images - Night Deliveries

I'm excited to be working with Frankie B. Washington on the third story to be adapted, Night Deliveries. This story's not from Bloodshot Stories but appears in New Ohio Review. 

Here are the main characters: Carla Johnson, a USPS mail carrier-- 

And her son, a senior in high school who's about to join the Marines--

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.