Time has really gotten away from me. I can’t believe that my
last entry was way back in June. Between now and then I’ve been to Chicago
twice, taken a trip up the California coast to look at colleges with my high
school senior son, and waded through armies of costumed fans at Comic-Con.
Oh, and I finished my book.
To recap, the book is called That Hidden Road, and it’s
about my solo cross-country bicycle ride, which I made in the summer of 2010.
It’s also about those parts of my life that made me think I needed to go on a
long, long ride by myself.
I knew from the start that I wanted comics in the book, and
I knew that I wanted to draw them myself. Problem was, my drawing skills were a
little rusty and I’ve never made comics before.
As I drafted and revised the manuscript, I played around
with some ideas for comics and eventually came up with three main types. Backin early December, I posted a few pages from one of these, which I called the “StuffI Saw” pages. Pretty simple idea—one page of six panels each in a more or less “realistic,”
sketchbook-y style. The second group of comics I called the “Voices from the
Road” pages. These would also be single-page comics, but have only four panels.
The style would be a little more cartoonlike and focus on some people I met
along the way who made brief but memorable impressions on me. I finished these over
the summer. Finally, the third group of comics would be more sustained
narrative; there’s a brief two-page story in the prologue called “Pre-Ride
Jitters,” and there’s a longer (eight pages) story in the middle of the book
called “Welcome to Springview Farm.”
This story covers the few days that I spent on a farm in
Missouri—a farm that belongs to Jan and Bill Montgomery, who happen to be the mom and stepdad of my best friend. I didn’t want to
fold that story into one of the other chapters; instead, I wanted it to stand
on its own even though I couldn’t—at least early on in the writing—say why.
Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I decided to write a
blog post that went into some detail about how part of this story came
together, and I thought that the easiest way to do that would be to document
the evolution of a single page from “Welcome to Springview Farm.” The page in
question is the third of the story, and it covers part of the tour that Jan
gave me of the farm and house.
In writing this and assembling the materials I used, I found
it very helpful to me as a writer to step back and examine my creative process a
little more closely. As I said before, despite my lifelong love of comics and
the fact that I teach and write about them, I’ve never—until this book—tried to
make comics myself, at least not in any organized way. So I thought I’d give a
shout-out to several helpful sources along the way, including Scott McCloud’s Making
Comics, Barrington Barber’s How to Draw Everything, Bruce Blitz’s The
Big Book of Cartooning, the many Facebook postings by Ed Piskor of his work
on Hip Hop Family Tree, several Youtube videos by Alison Bechdel about the
construction of Fun Home, my friend and comics goddess Mary Fleener, and conversations with students much more
talented than I am in this regard.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how the story came into being.
I think I got the idea within the first hour or two I spent with Jan and Bill. They're incredible people who are also pretty wacky, and as Jan showed me around and told me stories, I realized
that the written word alone couldn’t do justice to this bizarre and comic
experience. I was going to have to tell the story through comics.
Coming to this realization was the easy part. In writing
this book, I’ve found that the most challenging part of memoir comes in trying
to shape and narrativize your experience. Fact is, there’s a lot of dead time
in our lives, but story demands at least some kind of structure. To
get there, we need to arrange, amplify, and discard the pieces of our
experience and hope to hell that in doing so we arrive at a
meaningful truth. With comics, one’s experience becomes even more fragmented—literally,
by individual panels. Plus, the canvas is much smaller, and the words that make
it in must be pared down yet still work effectively in conjunction with the
corresponding image.
Because I’m a textual kind of guy, I started with a script, though
that’s a little generous of a description. It was really more of a sketch with
words—lines of dialogue loosely coupled with some ideas for images. The draft
was long and rambling, and like most drafts, I ended up axing close to half of
it. The section of the script that covers this particular page reads as
follows:
Springview Farm is filled
with strange and wonderful creatures…
Underfoot, the invisible
barn cat
Goosey and Goofy (two
llamas)
??? (pygmy goat)
A Watusi bull (image of me
taking its picture while it’s trying to mount cow)
Jan: “Oh for the love
of Mike, don’t show them that.”
Me: “Why not? It’s nature!”
Jan: “It’s Eskimo!”
Me: “Huh?”
Jan. “I don’t like the word ‘nasty,’ so I say
‘Eskimo’ instead.”
Inside the house is just
as interesting…
Fisherman lightswitch
Stuffed owl that watched
me.
Jan’s closets
The Fairy Closet
The Shower Closet
The Memories Closet
Closeup of Chuck and Dewey poster
Jan’s dolls
The events depicted on this particular page took place in
late June of 2010, and I didn’t really start drafting this script until almost
a year later (fortunately, I had my photographs and journal from the trip).
Like most of the drafting I do, I didn’t pause too much to double-check
details. For example, I couldn’t remember the name of Jan’s pygmy goat, so I
let that go. I also didn’t know what kind of bull they had (just that it looked
really strange), so I let that go and filled in “Watusi” later, after calling
Jan. At that point, I knew that the goat wasn’t going to make it on the page,
so I didn’t bother to find out its name (sorry, pal). As I wrote, I also knew
that part of my brain was thinking in terms of comics. I had an idea about what
to do with that bull, and I see in the writing that I had an idea for both the
image and the word balloons.
The next step was to sketch the panel breakdowns. I saw that there was way too much material here to fit coherently, so I had to
narrow it down, to start shaping the experience into narrative. I wanted to
make this part of the story unfold as a kind of a “walking tour,” but the big
question was, What to keep? Two parts of this section jumped out at me:
the Watusi bull and the dolls. For the moment, I put the dolls aside. I knew that
I wanted the panel with the bull to be big—the width of the page. In part, that
was out of necessity; there was too much image and dialogue to cram into a
smaller panel. I figured the rest of the page would break down in a steady
rhythm of three equal-sized panels per row. I laid out the panels as textboxes in
Word, and they came out like this:
To accommodate this layout, I had to start this page with
the bull scene, so I moved the the material in the script that comes before—the
cat and the llamas—onto the previous page. That seemed to work well in terms of
rhythm, where my introduction to the various animals would climax with the
bull, and he’d be at the top his own page in a panel befitting his size and, uh, horniness.
Now, back to those dolls. Sifting through photos, journal
entries, and memories, I recognized that the real “punch” of my tour of the
farm was Jan’s collection of creepy dolls. Anyone who knows me well knows that
I’m terrified of dolls; it all dates back to an episode of Night Gallery that you can read about here.
Because I wanted the “weight” of the page to come down on
these dolls, I reserved the bottom row for them. With three panels left in the
middle, I had to pick and choose from the remaining details. I knew I needed one
of Jan’s closets in there (she has an interesting array of closets in the
house), and I went with the converted shower closet, because it’s just so Jan.
I also liked the light switch cover where the switch became the naked
fisherman’s penis (again, very Jan). It seemed like it would be an interesting
visual to pull off, so to speak. I also liked that it comes right after the bull trying to hump the cow. For the third image, I decided on the owl. I
originally picked it because my plan was to make it the third image in the row
so that two figures—a naked man and a bird—would “frame” the closet. Only later
did I come up with a better use and reason for that owl. I did a very rough
sketch of how I saw the panels:
The drawings are intentionally primitive; my purpose here was
simply to get a very rough sense of what’s going to be on the page.
Now I had to decide on text and put the words into boxes and
balloons. By visualizing the “containers” for the text, I’d get a better sense of
how much space I had to work with and how to compose the panels. By sharpening
the text into the exact language, I’d get a better sense of what exactly to
draw. At this stage, I started to think more about that owl and what I was
trying to do with the story as a whole. I said earlier that I didn’t want to
fold my time at Springview Farm into a prose chapter and I wasn’t sure why. In
actively mapping out the story, though, it came to me that it was about finding
a substitute family on the road. In fact, “Welcome to Springview Farm” is split
into two parts, and they bookend the very central chapter of That Hidden
Road, when I drive to Chicago to see my real family. Thus, “Springview Farm”
serves as a kind of counterpoint to that experience.
Anyway, back to that owl. The very end of the story is the day
I leave the farm. It was raining when I left, and I wound up spending that night in a tiny Missouri town named Houston. I called Jan and Bill to let them know I made it to my next
stop in one piece, and Jan confessed to me that they followed me for a few miles in their
truck, just to make sure I was okay. As I was writing this part of the script,
I wanted to convey that feeling of being watched over, and I remembered the
owl, stuffed and staring at me in my room at the farm. Now, the thing
about Jan is that she names everything, but I couldn’t remember if the owl had
a name. Indulging a little bit in the “creative” part of “creative nonfiction,”
I decided to name it “Mama Owl” and attribute it to Jan. I mention Mama Owl again on the last page of the story. At this point, I knew that I had to
move Mama Owl to the middle of the page, which is the most important space in a
comic. The panel breakdown with text inserted looked like this:
It’s worth noting here that once I typed the text on the
page, more revision was needed. I had to shorten some lines, move some of the
dialogue around, and play around with font sizes. The point here—and one that I
stress to my writing students—is that revision is ongoing and the
writing process is recursive; you take two steps forward and one step back
almost constantly.
Once I was happy with the page, I printed it up, taped it to
my drawing board with artist’s tape and the help of my t-square, boxed and ballooned
all the text, and got ready to sketch my pencils. To help with this, I had two
main tools at my disposal. First were the many, many photos I took at the farm.
Here are some of the ones I used:
The second tool was my sketchbook. I’ve found that it’s been
indispensible in testing out different visual ideas and to practice drawing
different things. Here are a few of the sketches I made while penciling this
particular page:
In the original sketch, I had Bill standing there, too, but the
panel was getting a little crowded. Plus, the dialogue focused more on a
back-and-forth between me and Jan, so I cut Bill out. But not to worry; Bill is
very present in the rest of the story. And he knows I love him.
The next stage was actually biting the bullet and getting
the pencils in the panels. I decided that I wanted to have some fun with the
style, so I made the top panel more cartoony and the bottom six panels more realistic.
I wanted to give those six panels more of a documentary feel to them—like a camera’s
eye roving around the farm—so it made a certain sense to me that the art should
reflect that. After the better part of a day filled with plenty of erasures, here’s what the page looked like with the text, boxes &
balloons, and pencils:
The final stage was the inking. This is where pencil lines
get sharpened and more depth is added through line weight and shading. I’m not
yet completely confident with this very difficult skill, so I turned over
inking duties to my talented buddy John. He threw my pencils on his lightbox,
inked it up (without the text), and scanned it for me. I then opened it in
Photoshop, retyped the text (and, yes, revised it some more), and performed some minor
tweaks to the images. Here, then, is the final product:
All told, there are over thirty pages of comics in the
manuscript of That Hidden Road, and I’ve developed a newfound respect
for the work that comic book artists do. I knew intellectually that it was
difficult work, but until I tried it myself, I had no idea how
difficult.
But it’s also incredibly rewarding, like any kind of
creative activity that allows you to “disappear” inside of the work. Entire
afternoons would evaporate as I’d get my drawing supplies out, set my iTunes to
“shuffle,” and get busy turning my life into story.
Well, if you've made it this far, I thank you. I'd love any feedback on what I have here or on your own process of writing, drawing, or both.
