Aní is now a nurse and between that hot summer evening riding on Xavier’s bicycle and now bad things have happened that she keeps tucked inside a drawer in the back of her mind.
She cut all ties with the old crowd and tried to forget without really managing it. The memory of her young adulthood is a stale box of dried rose petals that she from time to time can’t resist opening.
Now the past catches up with her.
These are the pencils of the first page of an 8-page comic, a warmup for the long-form graphic novel I’ve been writing and is one of its many possible epilogues.
before starting to draw pencils for my new 8-pager. The model for the foreground is a co-worker. And I love drawing Felix Kay from About Maria Turner. Pencil and sakura graphic 3 on sakura bristol.
So this is the last page of this short.
Aní and Xavier vanish into the hot suburban Lisbon afternoon but they won’t leave the stage just yet.
They will soon be entering a time where adulthood will claim its toll, finding love, ecstasy, sorrow and rock’n roll. A revelation from the past will change their lives forever, like a tidal wave moving across generations.
This is the page with an interpretation of Frank Miller’s style and the Tokyo Story frame.
Putting the frame, a traditional interior of 1960′s japan, within the About Maria Turner storyline was not going to be easy. So I decided to go literal and have the Reader viewing the movie in a movie theater.
For the Miller part I thought of noir: shadows, blind shades and dramatic scenes. This of course meant complicated birds-eye 3-point perspectives. Here is the first story board:
Here are the pencils of the 3rd page of Hey Rusty inspired by the Commotions song with the same name.
This page is the busiest one of the story and whilst pretty silent (it will have 4 word balloons) the looks between Aní and Xavier do all the talking.
Here are the pencils of the 2nd page of Hey Rusty inspired by the Commotions song with the same name. In this spin-off of the long comic I’m writing, Xavier dares his twin sister Aní into stealing a pack of cigarettes from the local petrol station.
In this story set in 1987, the twins are 16 years old. It is summer and Hey Rusty is playing on the radio (in this universe Mainstream was out 3 months before). This is about 4 years prior to the start of the long comic. I plan to do another short 15 years after (when they are about 35 y.o.).
Seed idea for the whole project came from Leonard Cohen’s Famous Blue Raincoat, hence the #FBRC tag.
The brief was to draw a set of B&W film frames using the styles of acclaimed comic artists. I chose two of these to develop further: Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995) and Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953). For "Dead Man: fim alternativo" (Dead Man: alternate ending) I used the style of Giraud/Moebius where I speculate about the entering of William Blake in the Spirit World, the goal of the movie's quest. I tried here to use Giraud's style from the Blueberry years for the corporeal world and Moebius cleaner line for the spirit world. Tokyo Story is drawn in the style of Frank Miller. In this zine I show one of the 8 pages of my short-comic "About Maria Turner" where Miller's cinematographic style seeps from the screen into a dream the main character is having.
This is the first page of a 4-page short comic about stealing cigarettes in the late 80′s in Lisbon. It’s inspired on a Commotions song from 1987.
Hey Rusty is part of a series of 3 spinoffs from a larger work. Together with 2 other shorts, I’m going to use it to test final art solutions and flex my drawing muscles before getting into the long-form comic book I’m writing.
After 6 months without drawing comics, these pages were a struggle to draw but I feel like I’m starting to get into the groove.
Another cinematography study. This time the great Robby Müller photographs the amazing Tom Waits in Jim Jarmusch's DaunBaiLo. Initial linework and ink and then the original scan with washes and the grayscale version.
Felix mediates between the 1st person narrator and the apparent object of their quest.
Once the owner of the blackbook is established to be one Maria Turner, we are faced with two options: either the story produces Maria Turner within short notice using her as a plot advancement or she remains illusive, converted into the story's McGuffin. I opted for the latter. Felix assumes the role of leading the reader closer to knowing MT and at the same time assuming momentarily the role of the narrator of past events.
In terms of page composition I was stuck with a traditional regular array of panels. Initially the assignment requested a 3x3 all equal sized frames but I argued that my text needed more room to breathe. The tale Felix was about to tell was personal. I wanted for it to be told in a documentary tone. Open mic and camera rolling. In the end I settled with 12, 3x4 equal square panels.
Early 3x3 version of the page with no room for pauses or mood changes.
The character Felix was my way to indulge in my intuitive attraction towards the 2nd character in the 2nd page, but at the same time escape an obvious extramarital affair between David Little and MT.
Felix Kay, formerly Mrs Felicity Little, had to be in love with the woman Peter Aaron calls MT. I planned the text to give an idea that MT played easy with other people's emotions, that Felix knew this from the start but nevertheless let herself fall for her. The text in this page sets out to place MT in the realm of Peter Aaron’s fiction, to introduce Peter Aaron and to justify the absence of MT in the story.
When read on its own the text has very little emotional weight. It is a testimonial in line with a documentary piece. The images were used to signal mood changes. The scene starts with lighter tones when Felix is informing the reader about MT like a profiler about a subject. When her account becomes personal the camera moves in and she creates a barrier by lighting up a cigarette. In the last five panels, Felix breaks away from the viewer, killing the story by putting out the cigarette. By the end of the page she retreats to the cover of darkness, thus deflecting any lingering questions the viewer has about the end of her affair with MT.
After finishing the planning of this page I realized that Felix was my first real character in the story. It was too soon to part with her. She would still be instrumental in telling us the relation between MT, Peter Aaron and Benjamin Sachs.
By now it had set in my mind that the Caller in the circular flow page was a participant narrator. I thought it would be nice to subdue the voice of this character and let the first-person view invite the reader into the story.
To accomplish the illusion of some degree of participation by the reader it seemed to me that the written and drawn story should be vague enough to allow the construction of individual narratives and views when actively reading it. As a consequence I had to design an open-ended narrative where relations between characters and plot would be implied, making alternate resolutions and multiple fictional threads possible.
Unlike prose, first-person narration in comics can have little or no off-screen text. So, limiting author-imposed choices and opinions to the minimum could contribute to the illusion. For part of the eight pages I was able to maintain this. But that would be impossible for the two pages that required some form of art critique.
The brief set by the comics class included a splash page fragmented in a 3x3 square grid. This splash page had to include a progression made by one or more characters over a static background. The characters should interact with the environment. I chose this spec for my first page. A splash establishing scene, silent and vague where an undefined character would find my first MacGuffin: Maria Turner’s little black book.
The first thumbnails and sketches show an urban park (Central Park?). Allowing a the landscape to evolve from far in the upper left corner to on-your-face at the bottom right corner. A downward camera angle, raised horizon, allows the inclusion of all of this in the page.
Planned initially to include two characters: the book-owner and the book-finder. With the target form-factor of 165x230 mm it was going to be challenging to depict the loss of the book at the top-left frame. In this initial sketch I chose to color code the ownership of the book.
However, this layout had two problems: the large 7th panel insert of the book broke the premise of using just 9 panels with a straight landscape, and the color went against my editorial choice of B&W.
For the final pencils I chose to use just one character, and a nice camperdown elm tree centerpiece. The book-finder was kept undefined since this would be the character that would be embodied by the reader once the 4th-wall was broken in the next pages.
The first pencils went alright, but my initial attempts to ink the board gave out a clumsy choice of line weights in the railings and in the vegetation. It was so bad that I couldn’t white-gouache my way out of it!
I left the page alone for another 2 months or so while I was doing other work, trying to improve my skills with brush and pen nibs, such as the Zebra G and the Hunt’s 102 Crow-quill. During the course of the that work I started to digitise the pencils, printing them in non-photo blue and inking over them after.
I made some studies of trees, like the camperdown elm above, and tried to include as much as possible the indication of the ink stroke in the pencils to reduce the choices while inking.
The new pencils were a better starting point for the inking:
Nevertheless, there was still a lot of uncertainty in the stroke. That resulted in the painstaking process of inking this page that went through 5 (!) ink versions. Mostly the problems had to do with unbalanced line-weights, heterogeneous graphic language, etc. These several versions also included one that had line weights so thin that most of it simply vanish when reduced from the A3 to the final 165x230 form factor.
In the end I think I managed to land an acceptable balance between tone and line.
The four characters pictured in the page revealed themselves without much thought. The names in the little black book came before the characters, with the exception of Dottie. Starting from the unknown person answering the “call this number” on the inside cover, I thought of following the list in the book: Adam Little (probably MT’s close friend), James “Fixer” (a shady dealer of some sort), Dottie (MT’s hairdresser) and Sam Bird (no clue about who this person was).
The fist character was not really defined. No name, vague facial features, illusive in their response to the Caller’s question.
For the 3rd character, James “Fixer”, I came across a reference photo of this weird 80′s nerd on the phone. I never watched Napoleon Dynamite, a feature film from 2003, which I don’t know anything about the plot. The main character’s look seemed perfect for a self-centered sociopath criminal of some sort.
Dottie, the 4th character had to be a hairdresser. I thought of the character Sister Carol played in Married to the Mob (1988). Sister Carol also appears in Something Wild (1986) with the name Dottie. She was perfect for the part, again.
The 2nd character started their life in my head and in the paper as Adam Little. However, while inking it, feminine traits started to appear. A blotch of ink led to a somewhat paigeboy haircut, or was it a wig?
When I wrote the dialogue I was more concerned with the circular flow of the page and the balance of the text than with the meaning of it. This would prove an advantage when opening the story of the rest of the pages.
So, reading the page there are a number of incongruous and apparently conflicting conclusions, starting by:
Despite the numbers being on MT’s address book, nobody seems to know her apart from her hairdresser.
Who is the person on the 3rd and 4th panels? Adam Little’s wife? Adam Little themself?
What is the relation between Sam and Fixer? It clearly has a criminal tone to it. What was MT relation to them?
At this point I resorted to a technique used by the Master of Ceremonies (MC) of the tabletop roleplaying game Apocalypse World by Vincent Baker. In the rules Vincent lays out for the facilitator of the game (the MC), there is one rule that instructs the MC to Leave yourself things to wonder about. Applied to script writing, the incongruity of the text handles the writer a set of answers to fish from. For instance, the person in the 3rd panel could be Adam’s wife and that could lead to the obvious conclusion that MT was having and affair with him. James Fixer was a loan shark, and MT had a debt problem, so she got out of town. These were fish at the surface. But like Vincent Baker notes, sometimes more interesting fish are deeper and barely visible from the surface.
By now I was starting to get the feeling that MT was not a real person but an alias. That fitted with the fact that the people in the little black book didn’t know who she was. Well, except for Dottie, but it’s established in Peter Aaron’s (Auster’s) book that MT is an eccentric person, not removed from giving her hairdresser an alias when booking a haircut.
So if MT was an alias, perhaps the person in the 3rd panel was Adam Little after all.
From the surface fish I had the distinct feeling that MT had disappeared.
At the time i kept returning to drawing the character Dice from an online Apocalypse World session hosted by Adam Koebel and played by Distracted Elf.
I was not interested in the character itself but on the results i was getting from the drawings: an androgynous female, somewhat cool but at the same time carrying a deep sorrow.
This person had to be Adam Little’s wife or girlfriend at some stage. I chose to call her Felicity (Felix) Little.
Somehow MT’s social experiences and performance art took advantage of one or both of the Littles. Then something happened that made her vanish, breaking one or two hearts in the process.
Since none of the characters knew who MT was, I needed Felix to be the next number on the Caller’s list, and serve as an interpreter for the story that was now taking shape in my head. A visit to Felix’s apartment was due.
But first I had to do a splash page showing the Caller finding the little black book in the park.
The brief of the first page I draw for the story was to create a 3 by 3 square grid with a circular reading flow, with a key panel in the middle.
This was before making the decision of keeping most of it in First Person View (FPV).
The purpose of the page was to give the impression of the caller going through several pages of the book trying to find a way to contact its owner. Somehow I ended up thinking that most of the people in there wouldn’t know who Maria Turner was.
So the first sketches represent the caller (not yet upgraded to the Reader character) facing away from the camera in the center of the page, talking to several of the contacts in the little black book. These first thumbnails had a problem, the caller shouldn’t be the protagonist in this scene. The little black book was. Plus, repeating the the book each time the caller dialed in, would limit the real-estate for the narrative and become boring.
After some teacher and peer critique I ended up doing just that: The little black book takes centre stage and the caller is only seen in FPV.
Most of the time, my fiction starts with vague imagery that turns into text and then into actual image. In this case I started with the book and the names it held.
The book had to have an “if you find this..:” number, where I would suppose the caller would start, and then 3 or 4 numbers on the 1st page. Disclaimer: I pixelized the numbers for the purpose of this post.
So I now had 5 panels out of 8 to fill with new characters, a centre panel with the book and 3 to be filled with separators. I arranged them in a clockwise direction around the book.
In a first version of the page I used only the telephone chord from the 2nd call to give an indication of the circular flow:
This clearly wasn’t enough visually. With just that aid, I had only the list of phone numbers and names spoken in the dialog as a key to giver an order in which the panels should read.
In the interim I read a Comics Journal review on Jesse Lonergan’s Hedra with it’s incredible use of the shape of the panels to drive the narrative:
I did some tests to find how I could apply it to my page. So here is the final result without the text:
Next: the text, the characters and deeper fish, or how to use open-ended text to inform the course of the fiction. Stay tuned.
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