National Graphic Novel Writing Month - part 5

WHY GRAPHIC NOVELS AREN'T JUST "MOVIES ON A PAGE"

It was 1989 and I was reading Hellblazer Annual #1 round at Paul Mason’s place. (Script by Delano, art by Talbot – we didn’t know how lucky we were.) “Guy’s seen a lot of Roeg movies,” I said.

Paul looked at the page. “Huh.” A week later he added, “I thought you were talking nonsense, but I just read an interview with Bryan Talbot where he says he’s heavily influenced by the films of Nic Roeg.”

Movies are my other big passion, so inevitably I spend a lot of time talking about my comics work – and storytelling in general – in terms of cinema. When I was posting about dialogue recently, most of the examples came from movies because I figure they’ll be more widely familiar than if I were to quote, say:

“I’d fall in love, or fall in lust, and at the height of my passion I would think, ‘So this is how it feels,’ and I would tie it up with pretty words.”

Not so easy to place as a classic movie line, perhaps? Though there are some you can’t mistake:

“Soft on scum. Too young to know any better. Molly-coddled them. Let them live.”

But comics are not movies and, as Alan Moore has pointed out, they can only suffer in the comparison:

“The use of cinematic techniques can advance the standards of comic art and writing, but if those techniques are seen as the highest point to which comics can aspire then the medium is condemned forever to be a poor relative of the motion picture industry. That isn’t good enough.”

Comics both allow and demand that the writer supplies visual interest to a scene as well as the plain events and dialogue. It’s the same with movies, true - but comparisons are invidious, as we know. A movie has its own predetermined momentum (unless you choose to hit Rewind) whereas you’ll adjust your reading pace with a comic or graphic novel to fit how much each page gives you to take in. You can flip back easily to check on something earlier – in that sense, the experience is more like a prose novel than a movie. Yet it’s not prose either.

Take a scene where two characters are talking. In a movie you have to cut that right to the bone: the audience is impatient with waffle. In prose, you can let it go on for page after page, and not even bother with what the characters are doing. Eg:

"You have overlooked the curious incident of the dog in the night-time," he said.
Watson stopped walking and stared at him. "The dog did nothing in the night-time."
Holmes speared a dock leaf with his cane. "That was the curious incident."

See, that’s too much detail for prose. Any decent editor would strike a red pen through all the dock leaf and stage direction stuff. But in a comic, that isn’t enough. You can have the talk, but you’ve got to keep interest in the scene in other ways too. It’s neither movies nor prose, nor a halfway house between the two. It’s a medium in its own right.

In Mirabilis #3, I planned a long sequence where Gus is telling Jack about the green comet. As exposition, even with the little frisson of uncertainty around Gus, it would lie there on the page like last Friday’s fish. Starting with the sense of unreliability Jack should be getting from Gus, I found a solution that injected surprise, action and danger into the scene. Serendipitously that gave me an opportunity to undercut all Gus’s wordy explanations with another bit of business which has Jack eavesdropping on part of a conversation between McNab and Estelle and hearing (he thinks) nothing good about himself. That accidental inspiration in fact gave me a title ("Outside Looking In") for the sequence when it appeared in Random House’s weekly David Fickling Comic. And as an extra bonus, the way the scene was set up provided an easier and more dramatic way to reveal Gargantua, the cause of that episode’s cliffhanger.

In prose, that same scene would have been so cluttered with different strands that it would have been impossible to follow. In a movie, it would have needed to be rewritten to reduce the expository dialogue while massively amping up the action beats.

Being a frustrated novelist or a wannabe scriptwriter are the wrong reasons for choosing to work in comics. A good storyteller can move between those media, but he or she will appreciate they call for different techniques. That’s why they call it an art.

The real measure of success

The girl came over because somebody at the bar told her I’d sold a million books that year. “Is that true?” she asked.

I nodded.

“So you’re a success?”

“I guess I am.” (I could have added, “This year.”)

She slid into the next seat with a sudden smile. “I admire success,” she said significantly.

This for me was a moment of real interest. (The only one in that conversation, actually; she worked in marketing.) It was the moment that I realized I don’t admire success. I admire talent, I admire craft, and I admire achievement. They don’t always come with success as a package deal. Just ask Van Gogh – or Dan Brown.

So when a publisher pressed me recently to say what I thought about Mirabilis, it was hard to give an answer. The publisher meant: did I think it would be a success. But all that matters to me, really, is have we been successful at what we set out to do.

And that we have. I am always praising Leo’s and Nikos’s and Martin's work, but in this instance I’m not too shy about praising my own either. I wanted Mirabilis to be “a modern Tintin” in the sense of an adventure with a family of characters who you feel warmly towards. I’m very happy with how it turned out. If it were a movie, it would be what Tarantino calls a hang-out movie. You keep coming back to it because it’s fun hanging out with these characters. “Only connect!” - that’s what I’m proud of. The achievement is what matters.

The movie question was what the publisher was really fishing for an answer to. Did I think Mirabilis would join the long stream of graphic novels getting turned into films? I might have said there are an awful lot of graphic novels that don’t. I might have said that most graphic novels that get turned into movies should never have been. But what can you answer, when your own criterion for success is personal, a measure of craft, and theirs is financial? The languages are too different.

You’ve got to have at least a sprinkling of the second kind of success, otherwise the first is unobtainable. Can’t paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling if the Pope never heard your name. But how much success do you want? Well now, there’s a question.

“Just enough,” I’d say. If twenty people grok your comic – well, you’re going to have to fit it in around your day job. If twenty thousand people love it, then it can be your day job. If two million people like it, though – well, bask in that, but it’s probably not your comic anymore.

Take Watchmen, ticking over pretty nicely with a hundred thousand fans for a couple of decades. The movie comes out and suddenly a million copies of the graphic novel are sold. Twenty million people pay to see the movie. Is that a good thing? Only if you sell action figures; I don’t think it meant a jot to Alan Moore. If he enjoys meeting interesting Watchmen fans, I’ll bet he found far more of them among that original core group. All success did was to dilute the people who appreciated Watchmen the way Moore intended in a vast ocean of casual browsers who didn’t really get it. That’s fashion, not passion.

Elitist, you say? Gimme a break, I’m a comics fan. I’m not talking about the poems of Rilke here. I’m speaking as an artist, not a critic. You create a work of art to communicate something. And what you want is for the people to whom that something has meaning to come across your work and be moved by it. And the people who find some other reason to like it – well, good luck to them. They should have a nice life. But you have no investment in them. They admired your garden as they walked by, that's all.

Being true to your own vision doesn't have to mean starving in a garret. The choice isn't necessarily personal success or financial success. Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books come in for some flak because most reviewers find them tame. And that may be true; her brew of teen alienation is administered in a very weak dilution compared to, say, Kate Thompson's Creature of the Night, or Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin. I've only read the first book in the series and, while I don't share the opinion of those who think it's badly written, still it doesn't have anything like the subtle emotional insights of an author like Jill Chaney in her book Angel Face. But my point is that the Twilight books are genuine. Ms Meyer is writing what she wants to write. This is her version of vampires, and you may not care for it but at least you can't say it's manufactured to find an audience. That it did find quite a big audience is the icing on the cake for Ms Meyer, and I hope she enjoys talking to all the fans. I suspect she probably does. But her real achievement is that she had a vision and she put it on paper.

Francis Ford Coppola said recently, “The bigger the budget, the stupider [the movie] has to be, because it has to appeal to everyone. The smaller the budget, the freer you can be.” Another wise gentleman spoke to me the other day of having “a keen eye for volumes brimming with tone, atmosphere, character, and individuality - the comic book version of the great film producers of early Hollywood.”

And between those two statements I realized that’s where we want to be with Mirabilis. This is a labor of love. We do want it to make money. I think it will. We need it to make enough to pay our grocery bills, at least, so that we can go on with it and tell the whole story. But we don’t have to chase success – we must not – at the expense of the story and the characters and the soul of the thing. God forbid it turns into Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and 3. (Comparisons with PotC 1, you will notice, I find perfectly acceptable.)

All our experiences with Mirabilis over the last year or so have led us to this point. Like any revelation, it makes life so much simpler. We now know what we have to do: just be true to the work, make it available to those who want it, forget about anything that doesn’t serve the creative honesty of the project. Yes, it should be obvious. What can I say? Sometimes you have to go on a journey to arrive where you started and know the place for the first time.

That’s why Mirabilis will stay in our control, and no offer of movie millions (or even television thousands) will take it away from us. Because then it wouldn’t be Mirabilis, it would just be the latest corporate pod-product pretending to have a heart. It would risk becoming the awful zombie parody of itself which all wildly successful franchises eventually fall prey to.

You may now be saying, “Dream on, buddy. Your little comic strip would never get as big as something like Star Wars anyway.” And I agree. I hope it’s too personal for that. As big as Stardust would suit us just fine.

Quoted in The Guardian, Ricky Gervais says that the secret is to care about the project, not the money or the accolades: "I went into every meeting [about The Invention of Lying] with one great strength - I was always ready to walk away. I don't care if they say no and that makes me bulletproof. They don't know what to say when I say I don't care about the money. The room literally goes quiet." He adds: "If you want to make a good film, try to make your film for £40." (Note that laser-focussing on the quality of the work itself has not meant that the other kind of success eluded Mr Gervais - far from it.)

The satisfaction of a craftsman, the pride of a creator, the rapture of an artist. Those are the true measures of success. Accept no substitutes.

Camerawork

It was only on reading Peter Richardson’s fascinating posts about Jim Steranko that I remembered Jaunty Jim’s artwork for Nick Fury Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. was what first made me aware of the potential of comics to tell a story cinematically. I don’t know why it took me so long, because I had been reading comic books avidly by then for several years and I was a total movie nut almost from infancy. (At the age of six I was telling my bewildered teacher how there was this scene of Lawrence striding along the top of a train and it was really brilliant because David Lean had only shot Peter O’Toole’s feet. I really was quite a scary little boy.)

Comparisons are not only invidious, they don’t really work. To say that comics are like cinema is to miss all the ways that they can do things differently. Alan Moore has something to say about that:

“The use of cinematic techniques can advance the standards of comic art and writing, but if those techniques are seen as the highest point to which comic art can aspire, then the medium is condemned forever to be a poor relative of the motion picture industry.”

And this from the man who wrote the opening page of Watchmen, remember. I get the point Mr Moore is making. However, many of the techniques we think of as cinematic actually predate the moving image by many years. There’s a sequence in Great Expectations where Magwitch is about to reappear on the scene. Dickens describes a storm rolling in over the rooftops of London and then he swoops down into Pip’s lodgings in Middle Temple. I can just see a director like Fincher or Burton having fun with that. But even much earlier, in Pickwick Papers, Dickens had scenes that were set up (as we would see it now) cinematically. I’m not just talking about his very evocative visual descriptions, but his use of spatial relationships in a scene, the sense that he always knows exactly where “the camera” is.

What I like is the way a camera can pick out a detail for emphasis – like running feet in a Lean or Kurosawa movie, the cage of shadows in film noir, the hiss of steam from a pipe in Roeg’s Bad Timing, or bamboo swaying in the moonlight in King Hu’s Touch of Zen. The “camera” in this context could equally well be our viewpoint in a comic, a videogame or even a novel.

But what I really love is when the camera/viewpoint explores the 3D-ness of a scene. Maybe it has something to do with our hunter-gatherer past that makes spatial relationships so fascinating and pleasurable? The three panels above are from fairly late on in the Mirabilis story and come right after a sequence of several pages that has taken us from the streets of Constantinople to the rooftops and right across the bay, and there from the mast of a ship to its deck. Breathtaking comics work from Leo there, and I hope we get the chance to show it all to you soon. (Update: it's here in Book Two.)

Games, of course, excel at this particular “cinematic” trick, and one of the best examples is in the classic game Outcast. Watch from 4 minutes in:



- though for the full effect you really need to play the whole game. Ten years old and still the best - trust me.

The world of ideas

A quick plug for the final part of Pádraig Ó Méalóid's in-depth interview with Alan Moore over on the Forbidden Planet blog.

Everything Alan Moore says is worth hearing, and he is without a doubt the ne plus ultra genius of comics. This particular bit caught my eye because it expresses everything I'd like to have said about our reason for doing Mirabilis in the first place - although Alan Moore, of course, says it far better than Leo or I ever could:

PÓM: Do you believe in fairies?

AM: Do I believe in fairies? Well, I believe in absolutely every creature that the human imagination has ever thrown up, in an ontological sense, in that the idea of fairies exists, and I believe that fairies are the idea of fairies, just as I believe that gods are the idea of gods, that these things exist in a world of ideas in which they are completely real, and you only have to look at the Victorian fairy painters, and how many of them ended up mad, you only have to look at Richard Dadd’s Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke to see that little figure of the old man with Richard Dadd’s face sitting there, looking really anxious, staring out of the picture at you, sitting there on his log, and I look at that, and I don’t think, “Oh, that’s Richard Dadd painting himself into his own, you know, miniature masterpiece,” I think, “That is Richard Dadd trapped in a painting. The fairies got him.” He was away with the fairies.

The same went for Richard Doyle, Arthur Conan Doyle’s dad, and some of his paintings look like, the later ones, that are not jubilant at all, they look like they’re taking place in the dayroom of a madhouse, and you’ve got a figure staring at the table, trying not to look, as these little imps and fairies caper through the air. I mean, I’ve experienced fairies during some of my magical experiences, or things that seemed to be fairies. They were quite traditional cute Victorian ones, rather than spiky post-modern Neil Gaiman ones. That’s just my mind, I guess, but yes, in the terms that I’ve just described, yes, I believe in everything.

PÓM: Of course, Conan Doyle himself was a big believer, wasn’t he?

AM: I mean, whether I believe in the same literal way that Conan Doyle wanted to believe, I believe these things are real; I do not believe they are real outside the world of ideas and the mind, but then they have no need to be real beyond that realm, because in that realm they’re completely real, and they can affect us profoundly, as with any of the other denizens of the imaginary terrain, the angels and demons and monsters.