How to drive a classroom crazy.
Great news! For Halloween we're going as Sexy . Hope that's okay?
- matt fraction -
I spent the weekend working on the WIC+DIV show. Adapting someone’s work, let alone someone I hold with the esteem in which I hold both Gillen and McKelvie, let alone someone’s work whom I hold in esteem as well as admiring the work itself as I admire (and enjoy) WIC+DIV, made me feel... what, dread? Anxiety? Panic? The resolve to abandon writing sentences with any recognizable grammar or flow ever again, as evidenced by the apparently English sentence I opened with up there? All of the above? Sure.
[You can tell my sincerity by the lack of shit I talked in the above about either Kieron or Jamie, or the book itself, which, if you don’t know, is kind of a thing that never stops amusing me and only me.]
[Until now. Because now I’m meddling with their thing and it feels weird.]
[Brackets!]
[One more real fast: there’s no news re: the show other than we’re working on it. That doesn’t mean anything beyond precisely that. Sorry.]
I came to a realization I have time and time again about letting myself suck at first. It feels better to me to rewrite than to write; it feels better to FIX something than put myself out there and actually MAKE something. Making something makes me make both a thing that sucks and makes me feel sucky. FIXING something makes me feel like a fraud but at least I’m a fraud getting away with it for another day.
Uh... is WICKED AND DIVINE the name of the law firm our sexy lawyers work at THERE THERE IT’S OUT THE JOKE IS OUT I WON’T MAKE ANY MORE I SWEAR
•
I bring this up not to self-immolate in public [but, y’know, burn, motherfucker, burn] but rather because the above frame of mind ricocheted around my head all day Friday as I prepared to talk to Brian Michael Bendis and David Walker’s comics writing class at Portland State here downtown: I am going to talk to a room of young writers looking to learn about my craft, I thought. I know nothing about my craft and they will see right through me.
The first draft is the shitty, scary draft that reveals all of your failings as a human yet, without it, you cannot make it better. The times with which I feel comfortable saying "you" rather than "I" in circumstances like this happen rarely but, believe me, I believe the Shitty, Scary Draft to be an immutable truth of the universe.
So we did an exercise I love doing [I love doing exercises it’s like real writing only it’s not real at all doesn’t count and is kinda supposed to suck but it sounds like typing and that sounds like writing, yay!] and have subjected their poor kids to before: the three sentence story.
The framework of the exercise: write a three sentence story. The first sentence is the beginning, the second your middle, and guess what the third is? Right, an end. Also, then, after those sentences have been presented, you have to tell the class both what happens in your story (another sentence) and what the story is about (another sentence, bringing us to, what, 3+1+1=5 FIVE lines basically).
Then Brian and David and I kvetched while these kids tried to figure out what the fuck any of the above meant.
•
I built the exercise to divorce myself from the notion that pages are precious, that ideas are precious, that everything I write is for publication or is even worth being read by someone else. In art school I’d fill page after page of sketchbooks attacking human gesture, still life, self-portrait, whatever. And no matter how terrible or how wonderful the sketch was, it never transcended its nature. The sketch was always a sketch because it’s a goddamn sketch.
When I came to writing, however, I started to confuse the vast whiteness of an empty page with, I dunno, unmarred porcelain or pristine white marble. I started to think my pencil resembled a chisel and every mark I made somehow destroyed the potential of the white space. That I wasn’t writing, not really, but sculpting away all the white space that WASN’T the words I wanted.
And that meant a kind of paralysis. I can’t write this dumb monkey comic because it is not an unparalleled masterpiece in the tradition of the unparalleled masterpieces that brought me and kept me enthralled by comics.
In film schools, it’s the shadow Orson Welles casts: what movie did you make when you were 26 and making a film for the first time?
•
So we didn’t say how long they had, we just kind of winged it. I think it ended up around fifteen minutes. Then everybody tore their stories out of the notebook [yes!] and put it in a literal sack [why David Walker had a sack I do not know but he’s a guy with a spare sack if U ever need one] and I randomly distributed them.
To increase the terror, random students were selected to read the three lines out loud. So hastily were these written that some were near-illegible. We’d road test the three sentences. Is that a beginning? What is a beginning, anyway? What’s the premise of the middle, then? What's a second act, how does it work, and how the shitting sweet fancy fuck can you reduce it to a line? Why are the aliens only coming up in the third sentence here at the end because now there are aliens and I don't know if I know what this thing is about. And then debate among ourselves about the other requirements. How do we reduce those three lines into one? And at the end of it all, why the hell did we take this journey in the first place?
Like math, it is dumb and hard.
[There’s all kinds of variations you can do with this five-line game. Do a story we all know, a movie, a book, whatever, and we all have to guess it. Do a true story that happened to you. Do a song. Do it Exquisite Corpse-style and see what happens. Do a myth, do a show you watched last night, randomly pick three nouns and three verbs and work ‘em in. The idea remains: move your hand for fifteen minutes. Destroy the page with your terribleness and look! The notebook remains. YOU remain. Your peers remain.]
•
No great art got made in the room that day [sorry kids]. No great art ever gets made under circumstances and strictures as ridiculous as the above. But a room full of kids [that weren’t really all kids but go with me here] wanting to figure out how to express themselves in some way in this wonderful, ridiculous, sublime medium of ours, put themselves out there, allowed themselves to be silly or strange or terrible or whatever they were afraid of before the rest of us, and then looked down to see, beneath the sheet they’d torn out, another one of those blank bastards awaiting the same fate. Be terrible. Throw it away. Be less terrible next time. Something brave lies in that, something vulnerable and true. Maybe that was the lesson?
Or maybe what I’m saying is the WIC+DIV show is gonna suck but my NEXT one’ll be great I don’t know.
•
ODY-C 12 drops Wednesday, wrapping up Cycle One, our first, uh, year of stories. The shape of the thing is 5 issues following Odyssia, 5 issues following Ene and He, then 2 following the fall of the house of Atreus, the Oresteia, the death of Gamem/Agamemnon, and everything thereafter. It serves as a kind of... well, you'll see. Once we're all done, those chapters will be collected in a single FALL OF THE HOUSE OF ATREUS volume.
Because Ward and I are exceedingly terrible people we decided 1) I was gonna write it all in limerick and 2) he was gonna draw it all in kind-of splash pages? I think it’s the best work he’s ever done, but I’m biased.
•
Here, let’s do The Exercise with all of The Oresteia:
A family line is cursed with violence and madness across generations.
The latest victim returns home from war to a violent betrayal by his wife, leading to her murder at the hands of her son, who then stands trial before the gods for the crimes of his family.
Through a combination of honor and chutzpah the Gods forgive him and lift the curse, but nothing really changes for them, or for us.
What happens is the final generation of a family haunted by a violent curse stands trial for the crimes of his family across the centuries.
What it’s about is, maybe, the folly and madness of revenge, and the sins of one generation haunting the next, ensuring it makes the same mistakes.
I dunno. Maybe? Did I just reduce one of the foundation stones of western literature to five sentences at the end of a newsletter? Yes. Yes I did. Fuck it.
I’ll do better next time.
m
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FROM KELLY SUE: THAT'S AN ADDITIONAL 40% OFF THE SALE PRICE, Y'ALL.
The sale closes at 5 PM (PST) on Monday, October 31st!
#ICYMI
HAMILTON DOCUMENTARY, HAMILTON DOCUMENTARY, NOT A DRILL, HAMILTON DOCUMENTARY.
(It is up until 11/18.)
Kelly Sue will be at Ta-Nehisi Coates' Festival Albertine this year! On November 3rd she'll be on a panel talking high art vs. low art with producer David Simon (The Wire), fellow comics-er Catherine Meurisse (La Légèreté), and spoken word artist D’de Kabal (Chants Barbares). (If you can't make the festival but want to watch the panel, it's at 7:30 PM EST and the livestream will be here!)
Days for Girls International is running a project where you can sew kits to help girls who would otherwise have to miss school on their periods stay in school.
tl;dr
Oct 24 - Milkfed Espionage 40% off sale begins.
Oct 26 - ODY-C #12 on sale
Oct 31 - Milkfed Espionage 40% off sale ends.
Nov 2 - Bitch Planet 9 on sale
Nov 3 - Kelly Sue at Festival Albertine
Nov 8 - US Election Day
Nov 10-13 - Avengers Weekend; We didn't train for this at all. It's going to be a disaster. To make ourselves feel better, we might to a pop up signing or meet and greet. Check Twitter.
Nov 11 - Snake's birthday.
Nov 23 - (JUST IN TIME FOR THE HOLIDAZE): ODY-C: CYCLE ONE HC on sale (big, beautiful HC filled with never-before-seen art, concepts, issues #1-12, and the entire monster-sized gatefold from issue #1.)
Dec 1 - Fraction's birthday.
Milkfed Logo by Rian Hughes.