I’m leaving this old site here in case anyone wants to reference it, but I have built a brand-new CalebMonroe.com from the ground up and my online activities are centered there now.
If you’d like to contact me, see what I’m up to or simply use the Creator Help section, that’s now the place to do it. See you there!
TUESDAY MORNING
Seifert emerges from the core of his satellite house into bright, bright sunlight. The spherical 6000-cubic-foot core is the innermost level of his home. He steps onto the core’s outer surface, which is the floor of the next layer of his home: the space deck. The third and final layer is above his head: a mostly-invisible energy shield that ionizes to keep him from going blind or burning to a crisp in the sun’s light and, of course, keeps atmosphere inside.
He carries his breakfast to his lawn chair, which is maintains itself at such a heading that it’s always facing the earthset. This is his morning ritual. Today he cues the agitators to create a refreshing breeze. The microspeakers in his ears respond by producing the sound of wind blowing through trees overhead. Seifert has never seen a tree, but he found the recording browsing a random aural archive and finds it inevitably helps set him at ease.
After breakfast he returns to the core. His Best Friend™ Rachel greets him on the door. She’s an AI tailored to be his perfect companion. Seifert had been unable to afford the hard-light hologram feature, but arranged the next-best thing: every surface in the house—from walls to dishes to knick-knack and books—was coated in a transparent photoresponsive material. Rachel could appear on any surface in the house she chose. He liked it best when she was on the bathroom mirror. It felt the most like there was a 3-D person in the room. Someday soon he’d mirror an entire wall of the living room.
Today’s Meditation for the Comic Creator. A good companion piece to the previous one:
The trick of complex comics–and this is something I learned from 80s publisher and comic activist Paul Gravett, later reinforced in a long conversation with Bryan Talbot while he was producing The Tale of One Bad Rat–is knowing that the hardest thing to do in comics is tell a story with absolute clarity. The point of experimentation is to find new ways of telling stories that people can understand. It doesn’t matter how cleverly you can jabber if, at the end of it, no-one’s understood a word you said. It’s not about dumbing down–it’s about speaking clearly. It’s one of the reasons why Alan Moore does his serious novels in the 9-pic grid (which One Bad Rat also riffs off of)–it imposes a cadence on the work. I tend to avoid anything other than 6-grid or 3-grid–I like a sound that’s a little more garage-y, a bit more clang and thump than Alan’s little symphonies.
–Warren Ellis, Bad Signal
, April 22, 2002
[My Leap Year is a 12-month life project (begun 11/01/07) at the end of which I intend to be writing full-time. 365 small steps = 1 giant leap.]
I have a lot of projects close to the edge, they just need a litle nudge. After that, their own momentum will do a lot of the work. I have decided that this week, starting today (Small Step 22 – 60% of the way through My Leap Year), will be the week I do all that nudging.
The first major development of My Leap Year happened last week, but I can’t talk about it yet. A mini-series I’m writing for a publisher I like. There will be a preview book out for SDCC, and when the project’s officially announced sometime between now and then I’ll be able to tell you more.
Today’s Meditation for the Comic Creator. The next several of these will be from Warren Ellis, due to all the great stuff I found when doing my Seed Culture search-reading.
It’s hard to do melody in comics. I’ve ben messing around with it for years, trying to duplicate My Bloody Valentine
Comics are drums. When I read a new comic, I want to hear the drums.
–Warren Ellis, Bad Signal
Here’s a video of me pitching my book SMOKER as one of the finalists in the inaugeral Comic Book Challenge in San Diego in 2006:
We had to submit one page of art with our original 1-page pitch. The art that they all (including Marc Silvestri) mention liking so much was this page, by the talented Ryan Sergeant:
Don’t worry. This project is still happening. That somewhat beleaguered hat I’m wearing was a hand-me-down from my dad. For a couple years, I used it and another thrift-store hat similar to it in an experiement to visually brand myself when I went to cons. Apparently it worked, because last month at NYCC I still had people I couldn’t remember recognize me as the “guy with the hat”.
Ultimately, I’m quite glad Comic Book Challenge didn’t work out, because I wouldn’t own SMOKER if it had. This is a pattern I’m noticing. I think maybe signing away something (even partially) will be worth it in terms of exposure, but as the reality gets closer and closer I cringe more and more until I can’t really do it. I simply believe too strongly in owning my won work. Case in point, I’ve been developing a Zuda entry. My friend David Gallaher was the first winner with his and Steve Ellis’s comic High Moon, and when I talked to him at NYCC he had nothing…nothing…bad to say about them. But still, as I develop the project, now I want to take it to Image instead. We’ll see. It may still need to go somewhere like Zuda so my artist can get paid…
Some more quotes I discovered in my reading yesterday, most along the same themes covered in the Seed Culture post.
Having dipped my toes into film and telly recently, I’m struck by how different we are from other writers. Most TV people spend all day sitting around in wine-bars and talking about a project they’ve had in development for three years. Comics are the modern-day pulps. We work ten hour days, five or six days a week and see our work in print only weeks or months after coming up with the idea. We’re more prolific and have a wide-ranging imagination TV and movie people can seldom match. Maybe it’s because we’re never restricted by budget. Comics are also, on the whole, much better than books, TV or movies. The percentage of comics I read every month as a fraction of the overall market far outweighs the number of other media worth paying attention to. There’s a lot of high quality products out there.
I like comics because they still retain an outlaw nature, because they’re not quite acceptable. I like comics because they pay better than novels and they allow more creative control, in most cases, than “big media” like films or television. I like comics because they’re rife with untapped potential.
Comics are harder to write than TV, radio, prose or film, and pay at least 10 times less. In many ways, though, they can be more satisfying because it’s your story, and it’s all on paper, nothing about having to wait for over 50 people to get it done. And the Punk rock philosophy of comics — that anyone can do it — is nicely democratic
I don’t really want to be writing this right now. It’s been a long day and I want to do something mindless. But this is an idea I had in the shower this morning and haven’t been able to get out of my head. I was scratching notes about it at work, read 90 pages and skimmed another 200 of Warren Ellis Bad Signals, From the Desk ofs and Come in Alones looking for a single quote I wanted to insert here (you’ll probably hear echoes of all that reading in this writing), and was literally crawling through my office on my hands and knees a few minutes ago looking for a book I needed an excerpt from, all so I can write whatever this thing is out instead of doing the something mindless I want to do.
I’m warning you right now, before you feel the need to point it out, that this is me thinking out loud. It is not necessarily a proclamation of Truth, and it is probably a half-congealed concept at best.
The worst part is this is not really a new idea, just an amalgam of plenty of stuff that’s gone before. I think maybe all I’m adding is a name. But it’s a flashpoint in my thinking right now, thinking about my future as a comics creator, which is what my entire Leap Year project has been all about. So here it is, and I make no guarantees about how coherant it will be.
Pop Culture is short for Popular Culture. Comics are not popular. People in comics wet their pants if an issue sells a measly 150,000 copies. Terrible, terrible movies show on more screens than excellant, excellant comics can sell copies of in a month.
Comics are not Pop Culture.
Comics are better. Comics are Seed Culture.
And now, today’s Meditation for the Comic Creator:
Mammals invest a lot of energy in keeping track of the disposition of each copy we spawn. It’s only natural, of course: we invest so much energy and so many resources in our offspring that it would be a shocking waste if they were to wander away and fall off the balcony or flush themselves down the garbage disposal. We’re hard-wired, as mammals, to view this kind of misfortune as a moral tragedy, a massive trauma to our psyches so deep that some of us never recover from it.
It follows naturally that we invest a lot of importance in the individual disposition of every copy of our artistic works as well, wringing our hands over “not for resale” advance review copies that show up on Amazon and tugging our beards at the thought of Google making a scan of our books in order to index them for searchers. And while printing a book doesn’t take nearly as much out of us as growing a baby, there’s no getting around the fact that every copy printed is money spent, and every copy sold without being accounted for is money taken away from us.
There are other organisms with other reproductive strategies. Take the dandelion: a single dandelion may produce 2,000 seeds per year, indiscriminately firing them off into the sky at the slightest breeze, without any care for where the seeds are heading and whether they’ll get an hospitable reception when they touch down.
And indeed, most of those thousands of seeds will likely fall on hard, unyielding pavement, there to lie fallow and unconsummated, a failure in the genetic race to survive and copy.
But the disposition of each — or even most — of the seeds aren’t the important thing, from a dandelion’s point of view. The important thing is that every spring, every crack in every pavement is filled with dandelions.
Cory Doctorow, in his column for Locus Online
[My Leap Year is a 12-month life project (begun 11/01/07) at the end of which I intend to be writing full-time. 365 small steps = 1 giant leap.]
Warren Ellis mentioned Sleepbot in a twitter last week and I checked it out because I didn’t know what it was.
So here I am, a week later, totally addicted to writing to the sounds of Sleepbot. Totally.
