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:
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.
I started the last school year with the intent of gaining as much ground as possible on my first year learning comics. To what was an already ambitious syllabus, I managed to add an extra B&W comics workshop, totaling 270 h of classes on top of my day job.
Then the pandemic created havoc and that ambitious goal got harder and harder to reach. By the end of the year, like most of my schoolmates, I had a lot of incomplete assignments to finish. These were mostly short 1 - 2 pages exercises, some of them completed, some only in pencil, others in thumbnails, and one or two yet to start.
I decided to turn this miserable state of affairs into something better. With the opportunity to publish in a small press comics compilation, I set out to make an 8-page comic made of 6 unfinished exercises. This comic had to comply with the requirements of each exercise and at the same time present a coherent narrative.
At the time I was rereading Paul Auster’s Leviathan, a book that I thoroughly enjoyed reading some 20 years ago. One of the characters of the novel is a concept artist named Maria Turner that is pivotal to the catastrophic chain of events and coincidences, typical of Paul Auster’s novels. I decided to tell a story tangential to Leviathan using 3 of its characters: Maria Turner, Benjamin Sachs, and Peter Aaron (the narrator).
According to the school brief, I had to have the following pages:
3x3 square grid with a circular reading flow around a key panel;
3x3 square grid as splash page that would show a character(s) moving across it;
3x3 square grid with free composition (I cheated on this and made it a 4x3);
One page interpreting Frank Miller’s style and including a frame from Yasujiro Ozu’s Toky Story;
2 pages with a biography;
2 pages of art critique.
Getting an uniform graphic style for all of these constraints was going to be difficult so I decided to own it and make each brief a distinct style.
Well, what seemed a good idea in the beginning of June, soon downed on me that there was lot of work ahead to be able to complete the 8 pages on top of the other school work and my day job.
I had to cook up a script fast, and so I opted for a very lean text using film screenplay conventions.
I already had a page drawn where this person is trying to find the owner of a little black address book by trying the phone numbers in the book. The scene was set in the early 90′s, probably 1992. So no ubiquitous mobile phones or internet.
This is one of the plot hooks Paul Auster uses in Leviathan.
Auster writes the book in the form of an onion. The reader is reading the real-world book as it is being written by Paul Auster’s alter ego Peter Aaron.
So I grabbed Paul Auster’s onion and added another layer. What about if a reader in Peter Aaron’s world would have already read the alter-Leviathan? And what if that reader is confronted with the same event where they find a lost little black book in the park? This time it would be Maria Turner’s black book. Where would the search for the owner lead? And if Maria Turner is a character in Peter Aaron’s book, was she a real person under her real name? Was Maria Turner an alias for a real person in Peter Aaron’s world?
This would be a good excuse to include a biography of Benjamin Sachs, one of the main characters of the book, which Auster (through Aaron) describes extensively, ticking 2 pages of my brief.
I added also another quirk. I wanted the reader of my comic to be reading it in first person and in that way become one of the characters. So I would try to draw always in first person view and if not possible, the character Reader would not have any characterisation.
So the scenes would be:
Found in the park: Where the book is found by the Reader;
On the phone searching for MT: cycling the phone book with no apparent luck;
A meeting with Felix: Where we find a bit about Chloe Jones, the person behind Peter Aaron’s character Maria Turner and her link with Peter Aaron.
Dreaming of Chloe and Felix: The Reader dreams about the aftermath of the publication of alter-Leviathan in Peter Aaron’s world, and how the revelations in there affect Peter Aaron, Chloe and Felix.
Bomb Child, a biography: Two pages of Benjamin Sachs biography.
Reading session: The Reader rereads alter-Leviathan searching for clues about Chloe Jones. This scene had to include some kind of review of alter-Leviathan and give the story a clear but open ending.
