And I Hope It Rains Forever

A phrase without context, one I've written a thousand times and will write thousands more, in every language I know, backwards, forwards, inside out. It's been in me for years and I've chased after it, even built a novel around it just so I could see it, feel it, be it. But it's still here, elusive.

i am the moon tonight

this is the last night in my body

there are better worlds than this

 Words. Phrases that haunt me and I can't place them. They may be mine, but likely they're not, though they now are. They possess me and so I must push back, bend them to me, consume and integrate them, find a whole through the neverness. And then there's the phrase I know I stole but has become so integral to me that it's neurologically deep.

i remember you

There are so many things I should be doing today, like preparing to leave this country I've called home for the last year [ten more days?], packing my life into a suitcase again. 90,000 words into editing/rewriting a novel staring at me, challenging, singing, screaming, Finish me.

Instead I've spent the day watching cartoons -- The Boondocks -- looping this and this and this, wandering the internet, where awesome things like this exist. It's been one of those days: scattered, incoherent, languid. Just me and my laptop, the mountains past my window, the rainbow of leaves, the skeletal trees. And pizza. I'll miss these bizarre Korean pizzas.

It makes me restless, knowing there are so many things to be done, like finishing the novel, writing about my travels for my friend's site, writing about ten e-mails, figuring out how to get to the national pension office, finding a place to sleep in Tokyo, but, instead, I'm living on cartoons, dropping pizza on my keyboard [which is, apparently, not terribly easy to clean], and thinking about images.

The problem of publication, even just the howevermany stories I have floating out there, is that some of my friends want to know more, and I find that awkward. But people want to know where your ideas come from, what drives you, what compels and feeds this disease. I know I do. When I read or see or hear the sublime, the desire to know grabs me. Where did this world come from? How did she ever think to use language this way? What makes a sentence into a character, a misheard song lyric into a novel?

This is where ideas come from for me: Images, visions, more than words or sounds. It's the image that floods and then the words are just the way I translate because, despite all my best efforts and years of trying, I just never was very good with my hands, drawing or painting or molding, and my mother never bought me a camera like I always wanted, so I rely on a medium of communication I find crippling, because words are made to fail. But, yeah, images. That's what today's about and what, I think, has caused me to do nothing that I'm meant to be doing, spending the day lying down, emptying myself into the air, flooded by this and this and an epicene singing her stories over a man caught forever dreaming. And it leads me to comic books or graphic novels, whichever the preferred term is, and how I'm trying to get two underway, but, because of my artistic limitations, I'm collaborating with two of my friends who will make the images, which I'll respond textually to, which is, apparently, backwards, but it's the way that makes sense to me.

I've never been one to collaborate as I'm kind of artistically controlling and probably never would've considered it, but my sister asked me to write a book for her soon to be born son, her first, my godson. I thought it would be better as a picture book and then the world sort of opened up and I realised I could do that all the time, if only I had someone to produce the images.

And then Angie Spoto's post last month solidified it for me, made it all shine a bit more, turn from an idea to a compulsion, showed me this medium I've [accidentally] largely ignored my whole life really has a unique and special quality to it. The way text and images not only exist together but the way they interact and affect one another keeps turning over and over in my head, opening possibilities that didn't exist here before. And so I contacted two of my friends about joining me on a collaborative book project.

Another problem with collaboration, however, is that one must wait.

But then I came across the work of Natsumi Hayashi, The Yowayowa Camera Woman and everything kind of clicked. All these images, the nebulae, the floating woman, and then they tied to these words I hold within me and it's all I can think about, how this could be a way for me to make the collaborative novel I want to make, driven by the language of visuals, housed by the language of english. And so I'll take what exists millions of lightyears away, the peculiar self-portraits of a japanese woman, and the ghosts of me to make something, maybe, worth holding.

Comics Do It Better: Becky Cloonan's Wolves

Comics can do things traditional writing cannot. After all, humans were pairing words with pictures long before even the Greeks carved up the Parthenon Marbles, which, if you think about it, is a form of ancient comic storytelling. The artwork of a comic can accentuate the tone of the script, captions allow the reader to access the thoughts of the characters, and reader pacing is manipulated by the spacing between panels.

Never read a comic? Never fear. Becky Cloonan’s “Wolves” is a short and sweet introduction to the world of sequential art. Although Cloonan has written for Marvel Comics, her self-published comic book is a dark, expressive foray into a simple but compelling fantasy world, not a blow-stuff-up-while-wearing-spandex superhero comic. This short twenty-page comic in which the readers follow the story of a hunter on a mission that will change his life syncs gorgeous black and white artwork with a memorable script.

In only using black and white (and greys in between), Cloonan’s artwork emphasizes the tone of the story: dark, sharp, stark.  With the black and white limitation, she dynamically uses white space to tell her tale. The shadows, a natural result of the lack of color, create a fantasy world that is primeval and melancholy. The forest world of the hunter is depicted as chilling and harsh by severe diagonal lines throughout.

A combination unique to comics of first-person captions with third-person artwork always thrills me. It makes comics such as these so personal yet comprehensive. The readers can understand the feelings and thoughts of the characters, but exciting techniques such as dramatic irony can still be expressed. In “Wolves,” we read the hunter’s anguished thoughts through the captions, yet still have a view detached enough to see this anguish expressed in his posture, eyes, and proximity to other characters.

Cloonan rarely uses dialogue, but reveals the depth of the characters through first-person captions and compelling full-panel close ups. Attempting to express character emotion through a pair of eyes filling the panel is risky. A bad artist will not be able to convey the emotion with a set of 2D irises, but Cloonan pulls it off.

Cloonen’s panels are expressive as well. Square panels enclose events happening in real time, rounded panels, the past. The space between panels, called “gutters” by comic writers, are used to express leaps in time and control the reader’s pace. Cloonan effectively uses the gutters, increasing space between panels to draw out a scene and pushing panels closer together to increase tension on the page.

“Wolves” employs sophisticated techniques unique to comic books. So if you’ve never read a comic, just know that basically, comics can do it better.