It all starts with the idea...

I was in the process of finishing my last book when the opportunity arose to pitch an idea for an anthology story to a print publisher. This was in October or November of last year, and I had a few ideas in my mental file that were brewing.

My initial pitch consisted of a character sketch and a synopsis for the 6-8 page story that became Strangle/Switch. The original idea was to run this short introduction story as a stand-alone piece, to set the mood and establish some of the characters, and begin the story proper in a different setting outside of the anthology.

When the option of pitching Zuda came up, I hadn't heard back from the anthology's editors, and decided to draw the piece to Zuda's specs and pitch it.

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The idea is deceptively simple - the Faustian metaphor for the creative process. Robert Johnson goes down to the crossroad and comes back able to play far better than he left. His explanation is that he sold his soul to the devil. The story's about creativity, and we all sell ourselves to somebody at one time or another. It was also a slight meta in-joke at how my colleagues might perceive me bringing a project to a well-funded webcomics site after being so successful and happy at ACT-I-VATE. Wink-wink.

So it began with those ideas. Geoff had something wrong with him, and I know what it is, but since I'm assuming this will be a serial, it would be showing my hand too early to let the audience know explicitly what - though there's enough evidence in the first 8 pages that it could be sussed out. I also know I need to introduce the guitar, and somehow touch on Lola and Jenny, our other key characters.

So by the end, we've set up Geoff, the guitar, the "hairy eyeball", the creepy overall tone, Geoff's obsession with Lola, and the impending entrance of Jenny by page 8. Check.

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Today I'm going to begin a step-by-step on creating page 3 from script to completion. Here goes:

As you can see, this is a little different from how it ended up. It's also in screenplay format, which is how I always prefer to work - even when working with a writer, I tend to pace things out in the layout stage, and trust my own instincts as a storyteller. Actually this page is one of the closest from script-to-final as far as changes go.

I didn't save my thumbnail layouts for this story, but generally I do those in a sketchbook, roughly to proportion. They tend to look incoherent anyway, so it's not much of a loss. But to make you feel better, here's a picture of a French Bulldog:

Anyway, I pencil on 7"x9" marker paper with a soft #2 ticonderoga pencil and a kneaded eraser. Why so small? Because it helps me with proportions, and I can carry my gear with me in my metrosexual man-purse wherever I roam. I blow them up and ink them later, so a proportion wheel or a template is a must. The marker paper is a pretty slick surface which makes erasing easy and is translucent, so tracing is a snap - and it's more rugged than tracing paper. But you have to wash your hands fairly frequently to avoid looking like you've been karate chopping coal chunks. Luckily, I'm a germaphobe, so I wash my unclean, unclean hands a lot anyway.

The resulting pencils look something like this:

This is before I shoot any reference. I'll usually take the pencils with me and shoot backgrounds in the field to match the angles. I think I did the reverse this time, because of timing around the holidays - the location in question this time is the basement of Jack Demsey's, just down the street from Jim Hanley's Universe, and across from the Empire State Building. The arrows to the left and bottom are so I know which sides to line up on the photocopier when I blow it up for inking.

Next time, we go to inks, and I bitch about how much Kinko's sucks.

Daily Crosshatch

Part 2 of my interview with the Daily Crosshatch, dealing largely with S/S, is up:

Daily Crosshatch Part 2

Part 1 is here.

Comment here.

What are you so afraid of?

Horror is sort of a nebulous word. It usually conjures up thoughts of demons in the closet, or monsters jumping out of dark alleys, or zombies lumbering slowly in your direction while you, defying the laws of physics, fail to outrun them. The images that the word "horror" alone tends to conjure up are external.

Technically, horror refers to the immediate reaction, a synonym of revulsion - the shock of seeing someone's head getting sliced off, noticing maggots in the meat, or a finding a severed finger in your sandwich (for which they actually charge extra at some McDonald's franchises). That would be horror. Terror would be the feeling that sets in afterward, that creeping sense that something is decidedly wrong with the world and your inability to do anything about it. Sometimes that extends into panic, and sometimes it's preceded by fear.

As a kid, there were demons in my bedroom. And mysterious men always trying to break in the basement door from the darkness outside. And bloated vampires scratching at my window every night. When I was nineteen, I witnessed some strangeness with a ouija board that I'm still not entirely convinced was imagined. In what I assume to be a night terror, this past Christmas morning at my parents house, I lay prone in bed, stuck to the spot while giant shadowy figures moved about the corners of the room and I tried desperately to wake myself.

This is what comes to mind when we think of horror stories. Monsters or creepy-crawlies trying to attack us, whether to destroy us or take us over. It is fear made real and it comes from without.

What scared you most as an eight-year-old?

I remember what scared me. And mostly it looked the vampire kid from Swamp Thing #39. Or Linda Blair in the Exorcist. But these days I'm more afraid of contracting MERSA or losing my house. I suppose that's what happens as we grow older - our priorities change, and we find it easier to ignore the monster hiding under the bed in favor of moving though the dragon-infested valley in front of us.

But where does a good horror story really come from? What separates a story with only surface genre trappings from one that actually, truly affects us on an internal level? Certainly it isn't us relating to fighting (or more likely fleeing) the supernatural. I defy you to find one person who has fended off a real zombie attack. And I mean actual undead, not a flash mob in bad makeup.

Effective horror stories depend on us being able to relate to them on a personal level. To use a popular example, the real horror of a film like The Shining isn't the ghosts in the hotel. It's not the chick in the tub, the two creepy little girls in the hallway, or watching Hong Kong Phooey eat it. Not even the crappy acting of the kid on the big wheel. Really. It's actually the very real madman with axe battering down the door, and the havoc his internal issues have wreaked on him and his family. To my mind, the single most terrifying thing in that film are Jack's reams of paper with the one repeated sentence. What that signifies is his loss of humanity, but because - as the central character - he's the audience's stand-in, it signifies ours as well. It's the internal that frightens most, not the external.

And that's why it works. There's a certain familiarity - things we can pick out from our own lives that we can relate to. Things that seep into our brains and nag at us late into the night, when the vampires are scratching at the window. I've never talked to a ghost, and probably never will, but I've dealt with crazed, irrational people and I've also fended off an internal demon or two. The supernatural is superfluous.

An elevator full of blood is creepy, though.

--K

Comment on Strangle/Switch @ ZUDA

Bits and Pieces

The guitar in question.

A portrait of the artist (L) as a young rocker c. 1997, alongside guitarist Steve Johnson and stalwart bassist Jason McLaughlin. Yes, that's an accordion.

echolalia
noun
1.
an infant's repetition of sounds uttered by others.
2.
mechanical and meaningless repetition of the words of another person, often a symptom of XXXXX or some types of XXXXXXX.

also called echophrasia

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Please comment at the Strangle/Switch comic.

What the @#$% is a strangle switch?

When I was 16 years old (about half my life ago now), I decided to buy a new guitar. This was in the early nineties, and us suburban kids were all distorted-alt-rock, greasy-haired, jeans-wearing Nirvana-bes. One of the guitars that Kurt Cobain played early in his career was a Fender Jaguar. It looked cool, so I bought one.

At the time that Cobain was using one, the Jaguar had been out of production for a number of years, and nobody wanted to play one. The sound was tinny (it was a surf-rock guitar), it had a stupid number of incomprehensible switches on it with no guide to tell you how to use them, and it had no low-end at all. It had a floating bridge that constantly knocked the guitar out of tune and made intonation setup absolute hell. And to top it off, the sound of that guitar through a fuzz pedal was like a baby screaming through a crappy telephone. It was the nastiest, most offensive sound ever created by man or machine. I blame that sound for destroying my hearing a lot sooner than genetics would have done.

The Fender Jaguar is one of the largest and heaviest solid body electric guitars ever made. It's huge, and it gives people hunchbacks. My wife is a petite, five-foot-tall woman, and this guitar weighs more than her. At one point around the year 2000, after years of wrestling to make the guitar tone listenable, I got tired of the Jaguar and traded it to my brother for his Stratocaster, which had a much mellower and smoother sound. I was doing a lot of recording work at that point, and that damn Jaguar never sounded good on tape.

Years passed. I moved to New York. I got deeper into comics work. Then one day I got the urge to play the Jaguar again. Why? I didn't know at the time. Just an urge. So I retrieved the guitar from my brother in exchange for his old Strat, with the intention of gutting and refurbishing the Jaguar (I hadn't forgotten the crappy sound). But a funny thing happened when I got the old bastard home and plugged it into the FX pedals and amplifier.

In an instant, I was 16 again, learning how to play Pink Floyd tunes in my parents' basement. I could smell the dirt on the walls and hear the sound reflecting off the heating duct that ran down the exposed wooden beam ceiling. I could suddenly remember riffs I hadn't played in a decade, and the short scale neck fit my hand like it belonged there, having been shaped and bent by hours and hours of sweat seeping into its well-worn fretboard years before. And I realized something:

That guitar was magic.

Maybe not in a literal sense, but magic in the real world doesn't require a wand or an incantation. It requires only imagination and the power of will. With enough of both, you can do anything.

And the "strangle" switch? It's a filter on the lead circuit of the Fender Jaguar that makes the tone so high it can kill dogs. It's the one furthest to the left in the picture at the top of this blog. What it does in real life is give the guitar its distinct tone. What it does for Geoff in the story remains to be seen.

The magic I found in playing that guitar again was being able to once again feel like that kid in his parents' basement, struggling simply to communicate something inside his head that couldn't get out any other way. Something that at times felt like it was using its gnashing teeth and forked tongue to try and tear out his insides if he ignored it. And I realized something else.

These days it's not that much different.

And that's what Strangle/Switch is really about.

--Kev

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This blog will mainly focus on the technical aspects of the comic. Sharp-eyed and knowledgeable readers will have already picked up the clues as to what's actually going on storywise so far, and to the rest of you I'll say that point of view is everything. Hopefully we'll be able to go down this road hand in hand and peel away the layers of madness along the way.

Please direct any comments to the Strangle/Switch post @ ZUDA.