Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, where I am up against it on a couple of deadlines, so this week is UNEDITED BRAIN DOWNLOAD sorry.

As most of you know, I no longer do comics conventions.  But Lisa Wood, director of the Thought Bubble comics festival in Leeds UK, is an old friend.  You know her better as Tula Lotay, artist on my SUPREME BLUE ROSE.  And she asked for a little help this year.

So I'll be appearing at Thought Bubble Festival in Leeds on September 22-23.  On the 22nd, I'll be interviewed onstage by Kieron Gillen, god help me.  On the Sunday I'll be giving a prepared talk of some kind.  This will be my only appearance at a comics event for the foreseeable future.

I won't be doing a signing.  I need to save my hands for work, and, frankly, since my Medical Event, the right arm is not what it used to be.  That's why I limit signatures to the book being published when I'm on book tour.  Sorry.

Here's the web page.

Please don't hurt me.  I am old and weak.

I've spent wwwwway too much time this week thinking about comics pages.

TOP: Will Eisner, A CONTRACT WITH GOD.  BELOW: Frank Miller, SIN CITY (the first one, I believe retroactively titled THE HARD GOODBYE.)

I've long been fascinated by the work of Gil Kane, particularly the later period, after he ascended past those DC inker smoothies who poured treacle on his lines and you could see the jagged marks at work, a summoning of texture and weight.  This brief period in Miller's style, when he was moving out of his beautiful mid-period baroque into his blunt late period, was really very interesting to me because you could see all the moving parts of his influences and thoughts running together.  Kane and Eisner and Kojima and Munoz and Pratt and Moebius and everything else caught in his net, working to gorge the eye with simple black and white.

All the other SIN CITY books were disappointments to me.  This one, where the line is delicate and true and everything is framed like cinema and theatre like Eisner, and what if Eisner liked bad crime novels and bad bourbon and bad country music and just had a mentally ill criminal beat the shit out of everyone on Dropsie Avenue for 200 pages...

That's a page from BLACKMARK, a paperback-sized graphic novel Kane did.  There are a few of these quixotic, heroic things in his bibliography, attempts to change the path of the American industry and innovate new directions.  He re-invented the wheel a couple of times, just to put new ideas and approaches out there.  And from the 70s onwards, the pages are incredibly strong graphics. The text is often set into negative space beside the panel, not on it as in this example, which you also find in SIN CITY after the first dozen pages or so.  (I lifted it for my book JOHN CONSTANTINE HELLBLAZER: HAUNTED)

This is a page from issue 8 of THE BLACK MONDAY MURDERS by Jonathan Hickman and Tomm Coker and Michael Garland.

THE BLACK MONDAY MURDERS is now on its second collected edition, and recommended.

Comics is nearly unique among the arts in its startling lack of theoretical canon.  There's Eisner's two books, Scott McCloud's two books, and not a hell of a lot else. We don't have a lot of tested language available to use as handles to lift Things In Comics out for our consideration.  If we went to design theory, we might call panels like these "graphic affect."

The other panels above are also what might be called "single statement panels."  Which are becoming rare in the commercial field, possibly as a result of jokers like me using three-balloon combinations to suggest the flow of conversation between two or more people, or to suggest the breath-pause or thought-train of monologue.  Or - and this gets forgotten -- because it is more visually pleasing or graphically useful to break thoughts into multiple balloons.  Dialogue and lettering have graphic functions on the panel and the page, too.  

(Going back to Miller -- his SIN CITY dialogue is unsayable, as was proved by many fine actors never quite making it live in sound.  This is partly because his lines have a graphic quality on the page.  They were never designed to be spoken. They were designed to be seen.)

(I'm always there on a CASTLEVANIA recording session because I know, I know in my bones, that I've always written at least one line that looked fine on the script page but is just unspeakable by an actor.  I'm there for the show, to give character and performance notes and line reads and all. but in my head I know I'm there to rewrite lines on the fly to save my actors from my stupidity.  And, every time, I have to rewrite one line on the spot and read it down into the actor's headset. I love my CASTLEVANIA cast.  They tolerate so much shit, and they make everything better.)

I've also been (re-)reading THIS WILL ALL HURT and PROXIMA CENTAURI by Farel Dalrymple, who I think is probably a genius:

All of this - and a lot of other stuff -- Matt Fraction & Christian Ward's ODY-C at the top of the list -- because I started thinking about Beckett and slow cinema and composition and atmosphere and framing and how to build that into a new (for) me way of looking at comics, developing some of the things I tried in SHIPWRECK.  And now I have a pile of notes on comics style decisions that do not actually fit the half-a-story-idea I had in mind.  Which is fucking infuriating.

But.  It was all still useful thinking.  Remember that I've said variants on "always be checking your practise" before?  This is that.  This is checking in with yourself as a writer, looking at what you're doing, what you're still doing, what's gotten stale, what's gotten predictable, what's gotten comfortable.  It's easy, especially when you're working a LOT, to just blast through with the tools you have to hand.  And that's how you get stuck in your ways and Old and mocked when you go outdoors and shunned by The People and denied food because there are other better persons who deserve it more and finally they come for you at night with a plastic bag for your head because you're using up air and other natural resources that belong to someone who can make more use of them.

Moreover, it is useful to be reminded that other people made challenging, innovative work and you are just a mudbound hack who never changed anything.

Part of this is grid psychosis after a year and change on THE WILD STORM (which I saw someone recently refer to as being "only" a 24-issue-long serial, fuck you).  Part of it is spending a few weeks studying the current comics field a little bit, and seeing spaces between what's happening now that I can work within.  Part of it is summoning up knowledge and memory.

If you ever wondered why I still get given money to make new work in a field I've been working in for 25 years while never having had a huge hit book?  This is a big reason why. I'm not a genius.  Nothing comes easily to me.  I have to work three times as hard as everyone else just to be ordinary.  Which means I have to work ten times as hard.

AS GODS FALL by VORTEX is a huge doomy ritualistic dark ambient record that I spent all yesterday listening to.

I been blurbing again.  Nice to be on this ARC with old mate Charlie Stross, too.

Okay, I'm out.  I have twenty pages to write today and I have discovered that they're not writing themselves while I've been doing this, which is very disappointing.

You know the drill, folks.  Put your own oxygen mask on first.  Turn down the volume on the world when you need to.  Go outside if you can.  Make a fort if you can't.  Do what makes you happy.  You're allowed to, and you deserve to, and never let any bastard tell you otherwise.  Hold on tight.  See you next week.

- W