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Making Comics Weirdly
Orbital Operations for 17 November 2024
Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I would love to be winding down for the year, but it’s not quite working out that way right now. So, while I’m trying to refit a spare room while trying to finish three scripts and two outlines and basically losing my mind from stress…
In this letter:
weird ways in which people have made comics
The News
Letters about the creative life by Warren Ellis, a writer from England. Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe here.
OPERATIONS
MAKING COMICS WEIRDLY
It must have been 1990-ish when I first discovered the work of Krystine Kryttre, in the collection DEATH WARMED OVER. That jagged dark crackling energy. Fell in love with it immediately. And it took me a while to realise how she achieved those weird panels. She worked in scraperboard. I think maybe it’s called scratchboard in America?
You remember scraperboard from school art classes. You were given a black board and a little murder tool and you scraped away the black paint to reveal the white clay underneath. Which you had to blow away. And an hour later there would be a room of dizzy teenagers with oxygen starved brains from having to huff out all their tidal breath every three seconds.
DEATH WARMED OVER was a great book. I remember being particularly struck by her memoir/memorial piece to her friend Dori Seda. But also these damn pages, a few of which are helpfully archived on her website (1):
Scraperboard! Who the hell executes an entire comic in scraperboard pieces? The woman’s a genius.
You may have assumed there is a limited, agreed set of tools for making comics. Krystine Kryttre proves otherwise.
This is early-career art from the Italian magician Liberatore:
From Richard Corben’s intro to the Anglophone edition of RANXEROX IN NEW YORK in 1989:
Our newest champion is Liberatore. Drawing apparently comes easily to this giant. His skill with anatomical forms is beautiful; yet he is not enslaved to this skill but uses it as a tool to further portray the characters. This guy can really draw flesh-and-blood people. He uses shaded, rounded forms -a rarity in comic art- and he does it with felt-tip markers! The ability to render soft edges with such a tool borders on the supernatural!
Felt tip pens. That is some alchemical shit Incidentally, if you’re now moved to investigate the RANXEROX books, be advised they are extremely perverse.
A million years ago I did a book called DV8 for Wildstorm, the first issue of which was the best-selling comic in America for its month. It had eight variant covers, which at the time seemed excessive and now seems quaint, and one of them was a cover by Liberatore secured by Scott Dunbier.
Anyway. Around the same time as DEATH WARMED OVER, I remember having a conversation with someone at Titan Books, who did the outsize JUDGE DREDD book collections. (I bought the very first one with a postal order when I was a kid!) Memory is hazy, but I guess we were talking about weird ways to make comics. And this person, whose name has been lost in the fog of memory, told me about issues they’d had with the covers of those DREDD collections. At the time, the covers were being alternated between Dave McKean and Bill Sienkiewicz, and it seemed to this person like McKean and Sienkiewicz were trying to outdo each other with how ornate and worked they could make their covers. Which was making the art more and more difficult to shoot for print. Until, one day, a cover arrived from Sienkiewicz, and it might have been this one:
Because it arrived in a crate and had to be connected to a battery. Because it lit up. The story was that Sienkiewicz had wired blinking electric lights into the cover. Which made it a nightmare to shoot for print because you had to catch the lights at the right second.
I so want this partial memory of a story to be true.
Making comics weirdly. The only rules are whether or not it will stick to the page. Carol Swain has done a lot of books using only pencil and charcoal:
Jon J Muth did a glorious, luminous adaptation of Fritz Lang’s M.
And he did it weirdly (2):
After directing and photographing a scene, I would make my drawings from the photographs. I used silverpoint, literally drawing thousands of little lines with silver. Then I added graphite, powdered charcoal applied with a brush, and pastel.
Jon J Muth drew a graphic novel with silver. I am not overly worried about AI slopping over into this medium when there have always been people within the artform who make books with clay and silver.
Now: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast. Forthcoming 2024: DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, FELL: FERAL CITY new printing. 2025: THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM, THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition.
Here’s what a DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT script looked like.
THE NEWS, With Lordess Foudre
This is available as a print from the lordess.io store.
OTHER
LIGHTS OUT
The crowdfund for the LIGHTS OUT revival graphic novel, which includes me and Kody among many others, is still running.
GOT MORE TIME?
LTD
I found a copy of ESCAPE magazine in the house, the comic that taught me about the world of comics
Linton Kwesi Johnson’s legendary radio series about Jamaican music, which dazzled me when I listened to it in 1983, rediscovered and uploaded. Hold on until he starts talking for the second or third time, when he presents his thesis, and understand this was aired on the most popular radio station in Britain in the middle of Saturday afternoons and that Johnson is among other things one of Britain’s most celebrated poets.
(listen, among the many things that happened to my generation, I’m from the two-tone years)
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And that’s me done for this week. I’m going to have some cheese and quince and a glass of something and sit outside and look at the sunlight. You should do something like that. It only takes five minutes. Do something that makes you feel better. See you next week.
W
I’m represented by Angela Cheng Caplan at the Cheng Caplan Company and David Hale Smith at Inkwell Management. Please add
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