new character

Character design - but not like a character back-story or anything like that - I literally have to figure out what I want a character to look like. I've finally got to the point in the story where I've got to draw him, so ... I've got to figure this out.

I've got a cool idea - and it'll be interesting to see if you can identify whom I based the design off of. Here's a hint - all of the characters are modeled off of some celebrity that has plenty of pictures of them on the Internet for me to use as guidance while drawing.

That being said - this actor is quite old and accomplished - so there are lots of pictures of him, but fewer as a young man. That's fine, too. I'm looking forward to it.

Next - the woman of the story. I know who I want to base her off of, but maybe I want to change my mind. Women are ... for some reason, hard to draw the facial features of - or else they wind up looking like witches. It's weird. Or, it's just weird to me, I guess.

William S. Boroughs graphic novel
I'm not exactly sure how'd your present Naked Lunch as a graphic novel (it's an opium induced heroine trip scrawled out as crib notes over a period of years. Honestly, how much more sensible can it be after that?

No, this is not a surreal, drug-induced alternate reality.

No, seriously, back in the late 60′s, before the term “graphic novel” had even been coined, William S. Burroughs worked with artist Malcolm McNeill to make the experimental Ah, Pook Is Here. It was a multi-year collaboration that flashed briefly on the literary scene of the time, then disappeared. However, Fantagraphics has plans to resurrect this lost treasure as a two volume set.

I’m not familiar with the artist, though there are some samples at that link above, and the book itself seems to be yet another of Burroughs’ experiments. In fact, the article describes it as an extension of the “cut-up method” that Burroughs is famous for and liked so well. Personally, I think it’s just interesting as a piece of history. Alan Moore may have all the pretensions he cares to about his graphic novel work, but he can’t possibly hold a candle to this genius.

Anyway, it’s Friday, so take a mental health break and go read about this crazy experiment that was well before its time.

And here is something that I must have intuited very thinly back in October when I started drawing Tomb of the Undead, but it appears that October is National Graphic Novel Writing Month. I had no idea:

On National Graphic Novel Writing Month

I’ll bet you didn’t know that October is National Graphic Novel Writing Month.

Glenn Hauman of ComicMix describes NaGraNoWriMo thusly:

The goal is simple: By October 31st, you write a script for at least a 48 page long graphic novel.

Despite my employment by the comics industry, I’ve never really wanted to write for the medium. Okay, okay, twenty years ago I’d have thought writing for comics would have been awesome, but I was also sixteen years-old and my juvenile impulses shouldn’t be held up as any sort of present-day standard.

Would I want to participate in NaGraNoWriMo? Do I want to write a script for a forty-eight page comic book in the month of October?

I thought about this on Friday, and recognizing that this would most likely produce an interesting (but ultimately unusable) spec script, I thought that perhaps this was the opportunity to write the Doctor Who/Uncle Scrooge crossover I’ve long dreamt of. For several reasons, none of which I’m willing to share at the moment, I decided this was an untenable choice.

On the subway ride home Friday, I brainstormed other ideas.

After dismissing Batman/Thor as an unrealistic waste of time (seriously, even though it’s a spec script, there’s no point in writing something utterly pointless) and a zombie baseball story (because it’s a joke of an idea, one that would be better suited for an 8-page Tales from the Crypt tale, not a 48-page graphic novel), I settled on two ideas that had promise.

One would be a modern day, lit-esque graphic novel. The other would be an historical piece.

After more musing, I decided the second would be best. It’s something different and unique and, to be honest, putting the work in on developing the graphic novel script would give me the foundation for a short story or a novel.

In truth, I had some of the background work on this done. In the spring I’d started a file of notes for an historical story, but I didn’t actually have a story. A setting, a concept, some characters, and how they related.

Now I’m hanging this sketchy work on something. I spent the afternoon hammering out a two-page outline.

I have some issues of TwoMorrows’ Write Now (the magazine about writing comics) to look at for ideas on formatting a comic book script. Screenplay I can do. Not well, but I can do it. Comics? That’s terra incognita.