A rambling melange of pop-culture.
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Slave to the Form
This post is modified from a draft I made for elsewhere, but once IntricateGirl dropped the phrase, "slave to the form" in a comment about Alan Moore, I had to refer to it for this.
As I've mentioned, I literally grew up on comics. It isn't unusual amongst fans. But I first wanted to learn to draw because of comics and the first thing I started drawing were my own comics characters. I was also a fan of the written word from an early age, and I carried both forms with me into adolescence (and now, adulthood).
I grew up wanting to become a comics penciler/writer/creator, but I was always a percussionist and when the band started taking off (slightly, it never went anywhere), I decided to pursue that for a while. I pretty much abandoned drawing altogether, not just the sequential art form. But over the years, especially as I began to focus more and more on my writing, I found myself constantly going back to sequential art.
I'll always be an illustrator at heart. It has really affected me, especially when I work in the written word. There are just some scenes that I can visualize perfectly and when I'm writing them, I'm literally describing the picture I would place with it -- and you can tell. The descriptions come across as mechanical and flat, like the frustrated guitar sounds coming from the guy who bought a bass just so he could stay in the band.
Now, there's no question that I can write -- not very well, mind you, but I mean that I can get my point across and sometimes even do so with a bit of flare -- but the written word alone just feels restrictive to me. I think that's why I mess with so many plays and screenplays. It's not that I can't write exposition or description, it's just that what my mind's eye conjures is an actual, rendered image. I don't envision a snow-covered street in a small, American town; I picture a single panel of a snow-covered street as rendered in black and white by Charles Vess or Bernie Wrightson. And instead of thinking how cold the snow is and what kind of leaf is skittering across the blanket, my mind turns to how the artist got that certain stroke (is that a brush or pen? What nib would you use for that? Did he go light to thick or did he start from the end and release pressure as he drew?)...
It's a very hard form to shake, and not because it's somehow "easier" or anything, just because it so completely captures everything. It's such a totally malleable medium that when you move to working in other ways (such as straight art or illustration [non-sequential] or the written word), you find yourself constantly coming back to the sequential form in your mind, at least.
And further, I've met countless artists and writers over the years (particularly over the Internet) who show me projects that are not well-executed and I have often gotten the impression that if they could draw, they'd have made a better comic book. A beautiful painting of a guy with a cybernetic arm standing on a barren land is just what it is, until the artist explains how the guy is a refugee from one of the tribes that roams the barren lands and he is searching for his child who was kidnapped by the tribe what done killed his wife, but she wasn't really his wife but she was because they use a hodgepodge ritual based loosely on remembered Christian marriage ceremonies and, and... And I always say the same thing: "Well, you really need to show that stuff; not everyone who sees the picture is going to have the artist on-hand to explain to him what it means and what it represents."
The written form of this faux-pas is when anything is talked about and not shown -- the old saw about show, don't tell. Don't tell me about the character's backstory or that the other tribes exist; do a flashback or start your story further back and show me the tribes warring, the kidnapping taking place.
Which brings me up to my next salient point (one I've made before) about independent comics, as I sit down to read David Hahn's Secret Messages later today. But I'll get to that tomorrow.
And in case you think I'm reading instead of working, you're right. I mean, you're wrong.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
All I can say is that I am so much the same that I am the complete opposite. lol
I read the Oddblog post. I agree in theory. It is easier for me to have you listen to a specific song and say, "SEE! It's brilliant!" rather than trying to tell you about it.
BUT... for me, the words aren't limiting, and if they are, the writer needs to sit down and work on it some more. I like the freedom of the written word to let me imagine things for myself. Too often, even one image spoils it for me, because it begins defining something other than what I pictured. And if the images and the words aren't what I imagined, I am immediately drawn out of the story.
This absolutely isn't a slam against comics, and coming from many people, it would be. To me, the story and images had better work together, and yet tell their own story. There is great potential for comics, and yet so often, it is used haphazardly (the same is true of anything that blends different media). I don't need to see an illustration of a character crying. I know they are sad. If I don't know that, the whole thing is rubbish anyway. But give me a bittersweet look instead of "sad", and I'll ponder it for days.
There is a whole line of thinking that goes along with just what you said, as to how much text vs. art defines the actual "format" or whatever of the work (illustrated story vs. comic vs. graphic novel, etc.), as well as the truism that the best comics are written and drawn by the same creator.
And what you mean by the last bit is just good cartooning. You really should pick up some independents, as they have the best cartooning out there -- they have to, because they don't focus on action and fighting, etc. They are generally more slice-o'-life and character-driven.
At any rate, I should have chosen my words more carefully... well, restrictive is close enough, I guess. I mean to say that, having grown up with comics and learning to create my own, it's hard not to think in that way when formulating scenes and scenarios in other formats.
I often find myself flowing between images and text -- some scenes and ideas come through in florid language, where others are solid images I feel compelled to render. It's almost like the picture demands to be drawn because no matter how hard I try, I can't do justice to it by describing it. What's kind of neat about it is that sometimes just by trying to render it -- not even finishing the picture or getting it right -- allows me to focus more on what it is about the scene or idea that is really important, what I need to tell the reader for him to form the right image (not necessarily the one I had in mind, but one that contains all the important information in the right order and places).
But however it goes, some ideas and scenes simply assert themselves to my imagination in a rendered and often sequential form. And I find that when I work in comics format, I tend to like the product more than if I had tried to do it all in text or as one image or object.
Post a Comment