Featuring Trampled By Turtles, Fishtank Ensemble, Mendoza Line, Carolina Chocolate Drops, Timber Timbre
Mr. America #8
Never has so much melodrama and action been so rushed and so crammed into tiny little boxes. I hate to criticize myself 35 years ago, but I must have seen that I didn’t need to make so many small panels since I would be left with empty ones at the end of the story. By my standards, that’s enough for a back-up story! But I was probably creatively exhausted after whipping out this mini epic. The Panther “returns” – as I said before, not for us, we missed an issue – and he’s quite a rebel compared to the establishment rock that is Mr. America. Dare I call The Panther a bit of a wild thing? He breaks Mr. America out of jail and proceeds to show no remorse. Mr. America goes along with it, sure, but that’s the point as I see it – after years of being a mentor, now he’s being taught a little something about being an anti-hero, about doing what you’ve got to do in order to fight for what’s right. So, as a nine-year-old, I apparently believed that in order to make the rules, you gotta’ break the rules. Sheesh, I never had a chance! I was doomed!
Anyhow, I love Oxen! I hope he pops up again!
Big Head Small Brain: A paid writing workshop
There’s a lot to be said for those self-indulgent writing exercises like journaling, and so much advice given out by professional writers often has to do with that sort of “follow your muse” model, even as it also gives some pointers to directing your prose to be of interest to others. You are not, it turns out, your ideal audience, though you are a segment of it.
To me, the best training I ever got in regard to writing for myself and clinging to my own self-indulgent flights of fancy was to not only write for someone else, not only write on assignment, but to write about things that not only I didn’t care about but might’ve even bored me to tears — and make it good writing, often produced fast.
This was first achieved through articles I wrote over a period of years for the Boston Globe, their special sections that would link up informational articles with advertising opportunities — the topical umbrellas could be anything from parenting to health to home improvement to weddings. I did a lot of wedding writing, actually, and the fact that my own wedding consisted of a justice of the peace, a Mexican restaurant, and the new Kate Bush album says a lot to our desire for ostentatious spectacle.
The trick, I always found, was to find the interest in the article through the interviews that I had to do for them, if there was nothing else to grab onto. So, if I was working on an article about alternative bridesmaid parties, and using spas as the setting, then I pulled from the rapport with the spa owners in order to make the article fun. Sometimes you could get more creative — I remember once doing an article on interesting spots on Cape Cod to have your wedding, so I decided to interview wedding photographers about the subject, because I thought they would offer interesting advice. They did, it turned out well and a little different for what it was.
Writing is, very often, a form of problem solving, and sometimes it’s good if you aren’t the one creating the problem that needs solving. If you’re not even remotely interested in the subject, writing about stove tops and sinks can be great challenges rather than drudgery — and, I think, better than journaling if you want to attempt to use them as a springboard for your own ideas and personality. That job ends up being a little subversive, definitely sneaky, but it might also make the article itself much more interesting than it might be from someone just going through the motions.
Besides, for many writers just trying to make a living, the best game plan is to take any paying work you can find early on in your career and go in with the attitude that everything is a learning experience. Every article you write is another exercise in becoming better at what you do, and if someone is going to pay you money to learn a little something about your craft by lobbing a great big challenge your way, I say rise to the occasion.
Big Head Small Brain: Square One
You have to start somewhere, and Jana and I started with “The Potato Sack Princess.”
Did you not see that one on the shelves at Barnes and Noble?
Here’s why.
It was toward the end of our stay in Brooklyn and during our year in New Paltz, New York, that we began working on project ideas together. The first was a comic based on an odd little man I knew named Fernando — he was friendly mentally challenged fellow who looked a bit like a mobster and walked around with a little dog named Blackie. I befriended him and used to talk to him all the time, and he used to say the funniest, most surreal things. I really liked him and he inspired me to write about him in a fantasy setting. The story would take place in another dimension and would involve his Japanese sister Sushi, his mother (who looked like Divine, I believe), and some evil woman who wanted to marry him. Sketching out the general story and characters was as far as we got.
Concurrent to that, Jana had been working on her own children’s book story that was based on something involving her job as a nanny. She hit a narrative snag and asked me for help — I did, ended up rewriting it, and it was a partnership.
Somewhere along the line we left Brooklyn for New Paltz — New York City seemed like it was falling apart at the time, this was 1987, and we needed to clear our heads. So we moved to the country, took menial jobs, and tried to figure out what we wanted to do with ourselves and where exactly we wanted to be. During all this we continued work on our story, “The Potato Sack Princess,” with the plan to try and sell it once it was in a place to present to publishers.
Eventually we did sell it to a small educational publisher also in upstate New York — it would be part of what they called their reading series, which I think meant it would be utilized in school for beginner readers. We were thrilled, we took it as a sign that we did something right, even though it was only for a limited, specific release, and the money was hardly the mother lode — $100 split between us.
We decided to build on it as an appeal to move forward with our lives and immediately set about a plan to move to Boston and get our lives started.
Before we left, we went to meet Mr. Kimnitz, the editor and publisher, in his house. He was a mumbly sort of guy who didn’t wear socks. He seemed nice. The business seemed real, and I still have no reason to doubt that it wasn’t.
I also have no reason to believe it was ever published. And I have no memory of actually being paid for it. But all that is okay — the real point of making the book was making the book. It was part of our process to figuring out what in the world we wanted to do with our lives. The sale was just the little signal from the world that we needed, something we could interpret as “Good start! Keep moving!” and then do so.
In simple terms, it motivated us.
Exactly a month after we decided to move to Boston, we were there, hauling our stuff into our studio apartment in Back Bay, in a beautiful neighborhood just across from the Charles River. “The Potato Sack Princess” had more than paid us back for the time we put into it, and 20 years later I’m still very satisfied with the way it all came out.
Big Head Small Brain: People are just walking stories
Right now I make my main living at a newspaper and a portion of my work involves articles on artists and their work — by artists I mean the traditional sort, as well as filmmakers and musicians and writers and photographers. Over the time I’ve been doing it, I’ve come to realize that a good piece on a creative person — and certainly anyone else you care to do an article on — walks a very strange line between fictional writing technique and journalism.
The balance is like this — you are there to tell this person’s story. You are also there to provide some context for this person’s story and to sometimes pull meaning from the undercurrents of what they tell you. There’s a side to it that isn’t far from being a shrink — you’re looking for patterns in order to find your article’s theme, and much like a shrink, the best way to arrive at these patterns is through a freeform give-and-take. At its best, an interview is an aural collaboration between the two parties, and what transpires in print is a result of the work together.
I feel like the most successful articles I have written have always been followed up by notes from the person the article was about explaining in one way or another that what I wrote helped them frame their own work to them. I’ve had at least one artist tell me that she keeps the article I wrote about her tacked up near her workspace for moments when she has lost track and come unfocused from what she is doing with her art.
That, to me, is the most successful article you can write — and, I think, it’s something that should be adapted into critical work as well, but that’s for another time.
The real point of all this is to address how in the world you do that. Over time, I’ve seen a lot of younger people pass through the newsroom, and a majority of them studied to be a writer in general, and a journalist more specifically, in college. What this experience seems to have taught them is to be tidy in their information gathering, which demands a list of questions that give structure to the conversation and, later on, the story itself.
I say hogwash to all that. A good article is as much an artistic endeavor as a good story, and the same anguish and gut feelings need to be poured into it. I rarely come up with a list of questions for my interviews — instead, I approach it as if I were having a conversation over a beer with this person at its most amiable, and if it were a therapy session at its most professional. The important thing about this approach is that I let the subject guide the conversation, but I pay enough attention to what they say in order to get them to expand on the odd and interesting things people say when they are not being quizzed, when they are comfortable in an exchange.
When the process is done, I transcribe out the conversation and scour it for its own structure.
Why do I do it this way? Because I’m interviewing people the way I would have preferred to be interviewed — and was by the better reporters. Over the years, I’ve been interviewed by press for my comic book work, zine work, and my two published books, and as that was happening, I took every thing to heart, so that once I was in the position of sitting on the other side of the phone — the side with the recorder on — I had a pretty good idea of how to write a by-the-numbers article about a person and promptly decided to ignore that knowledge.
That is really where the fictional writing technique comes in — every person is a story that needs to unfold. They unfold through interviews that, like poetry, require interpretation. When you compile an article, you are crafting your subject’s official story — to do this, you need to get inside them, to write as if you are inhabiting a character in fiction.
Conversely, I think learning how to write non-fiction in this manner will only help you with your fiction. You never know what kind of person you will profile, and the challenge of that is invaluable if you are able to rise to the occasion. As you begin to live inside the three dimensions of other people, and hand yourself over to their reality, you’ll be able to apply that to your own characters, and they’ll come as alive for you as the people who taught you that sort of empathy.
Mr. America #7
I’m as dismayed as any big EL fan to discover that Mr. America issues #5 and #6 are missing, and that a lot apparently happened in those two issues. This is issue features a guest appearance by my cowboy superhero, Lance Larrow – I know he will pop up again later on – who starts out impersonating Mr. America and then does an astonishing between panel quick change into his own cowboy costume. Apparently in the previous issue – I’ve become pretty confident about multi-part stories at this point, I guess – he and Mr. America must have set up some ploy in order to trick The Skull … one that Lance is only too happy to give up at a moment’s notice. Strangely, The Skull has not appeared before, but he is obviously a rip-off of the Captain America villain, The Red Skull, who, at the time, was one of my favorite villains, so it’s no surprise that I would “borrow” him for my “tribute” to Captain America.
As we see in the end, Lance may fight villains, but he has a pretty air tight vision of what breaking the law is. In Mr. America’s case, it involves actually doing your job, though I guess he didn’t quite expect the shield to the airship ploy to end quite that way. “He’s gone. Because of murder.” That was actually a very confusing sequence. I think The Skull transported away, though. I think Mr. America and Lance Larrow didn’t quite notice his crafty plan of escape.
I’d say this was the most coherent action I’ve so far devised in the EL line – confusing as some of the minor details might be, I think the basic gist of it is fairly clear. Bravo! Watch out, Frank Miller!
Sadly, because of the missing issues, we didn’t get introduced to The Panther the first time around. I hope we didn’t miss anything important.
