Tapas!
- matt fraction -
SEX CRIMINALS #24 is out today. There's fire, hats, and it turns out Dewey wears an Akira jacket, so.
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We were in Barcelona last month. It's so great it made me understand why so many people fuck off to Barcelona after that one particular semester in college.
I had a panel that was something to the effect of a 'masterclass' -- I think that was the word on the schedule; it was something similarly butthole-tightening in its magnitude and not at ALL a thing the Dick Jokes Guy should do -- and I didn't really know what I was gonna say.
I've come to realize that the way I do things TODAY will not be the way I do things TOMORROW. Hell, I don't even do the same things, write the same way, think the same way, from book to actual book. So how do you pin down "How do you write comics" when the goalposts don't just keep moving, but actually keep changing entire playing fields? Or... other metaphors? I told them on the panel, if you see me in ten years and I'm saying the same shit, do not trust me, because it all should change, the more you do, the more you learn. It's hard to pin down.
I mean, hell, Kelly Sue and I did a writing seminar on the JoCo Cruise and we couldn't even agree on the definition of comics, let alone what rules were or weren't important. I think for about fifteen minutes there Kel wasn't sure the marriage would survive.
Anyway, after that I started to wonder -- if the solutions are variable, if even the language and semantics of the form are mutable -- maybe the problems stay fixed?
(It was Spain, I was tired, it felt like it made sense, go with me.)
I started to think "How do you write comics" can reduce down only one problem: what are the moments of time you need to own to tell the story?
What if Comics echo the way our minds, electrified bags of fat and jelly attached to cameras made out of goo and tubes, capture and record aspects of a dimension and a direction we cannot actually see -- time?
Comics mimic the way we remember, the way we dream, not as fluid constants but in pulsing recreations of sound and space and time, interrupted by gaps where the memory stops. Like how light lingers against the back wall of our goo-and-tube camera eyes, there's a persistence to memory that gives it all the illusion of anima. Asa Nisi Masa. It's the secret spell that makes the pictures move.
The reader closes the gaps we present -- the time and space between the sequential images -- and rebuild, in their own electrified bags of fat and jelly attached to their cameras of goo and tubes, wholly fictional moments of time we build from whole cloth.
Closure, though -- McCloud -- closure is where it's at. You know the old canard about Michelangelo carving away all of the stone that wasn't David? That's this. Comics sculpt with time. WIthout the space around David's hip, David's contrapposto doesn't mean anything. The stuff we cut out is just as important as the stuff we don't. What does negative space look like in a captured narrative?
So we stab at figuring out those moments amid their attendant antimoments. We put 'em on the page and leave it to you to parse the shit. Comics are the art of elision. Comics cut out all the things that aren't the thing, all the words, all the pictures, all the motion and sounds in life that get in the way of the essential thing that's inside. It's all choices you make, or you and your partners make. Stuff might end up on the page without consideration, but nothing lands there by accident.
All of this spun around in my little jetlagged brain and I started to think about comics from that 35,000-ft sort of aerial view. Like, if my methods change per project, if my work habits change over the years, how can I say, well, THIS is "how I write." It's all "this is how I write THIS THING right NOW."
It was a new way for me to think old thoughts. Look at these two stacks, the top all the stuff I lugged home from Spain, the bottom stuff I picked up in March and April. And also, uh, a white box, and maybe a little bit of a backpack? Anyway. Look at those authors, that diversity of voice and vision and experience. All of 'em had to figure out what their specific solutions are to that one problem, a million different solutions boiling down to one thing:
(That top one is the stunning, startling, face-meltingly wonderful QOBERIOUS vol 1 by D.R.T. and is available HERE and you should buy it right now because holy SHIT)
What is everything that is not David?
Comics crush verbs into nouns, smash an invented spacetime into flattened fixed planes. We trust an unseen partner to breathe life into it again. We hope to figure out the right moments that turn all the inside thoughts into outside thoughts, and we trust an unseen partner to bring their own interpretations based on the evidence we present. The ink on the page traps and transforms thoughts. Readers make the mechanism work, forming a communion and a covenant between us. Stone is strong. All that stands between the thing and the chaos is the stone.
Anyway, so that's what happens to me when I'm jetlagged and already tired and have to try and teach an audience of Spaniards what my big fucking ideas are. How are YOU?
- kelly sue deconnick -
is very busy this week but sends her regards.
tl;dr
May 2 - SEX CRIMINALS #24 ON SALE
June 16 - Kelly Sue signing in Houston, TX, at Bedrock City Comic Company
June 20 - SEX CRIMINALS #25 ON SALE