• "My Grandmother's Funeral", the process •
Since I had the scans, I thought I'd do a page about my process.
I teach college writing and I'm always emphasizing the need for revision. But with comix, revision is very difficult and time consuming. So over the years, I've realized that when you're doing comix you need to put the time into planning that you would put into revising if you were writing. "My Grandmother's Funeral" started as a script. On my new stories, I am starting with the thumbnail stage and scripting later if need be (to make the story envisioned as a comic first, not as a piece of writing). But "My Grandmother's Funeral" was originally a proposal for an anthology and the editor wanted a script.
I actually had a lot written already. "My Grandmother's Funeral" was originally intended to be an autobiographical piece. I had worked it and reworked it, and it just got too big and unwieldy. Once I decided to fictionalize the story, I was able to focus on a managable narrative. The first draft went pretty quickly. Certain pieces of dialogue, however, were reworked many times. Some I even changed after inking the whole story. Anyway, here's the final script for page one:
Page 1
[panel 1- woman in car, surrounded by American flags flapping from aerials] It’s January 2002. I’m driving to the airport in a sea of American flags. It’s like I’m in a convoy of U.S. ambassadors, welcoming me to the country.
[panel 2- curved borders for memories. woman as girl on tree swing with grandmother- is she singing something?] My grandmother is dead. She was my last living relative. [separate text box] Except for my father, I guess.
[panel 3- same shot as above, but closer. The grandmother is singing a song about an apple tree] So I’m flying out to Iowa to arrange the funeral.
After the script was written, I started doing thumbnail sketches of the pages on ruled paper.
Then I did a blue line and pencil of the first page.
But I hated that first page, so I replanned it and did it again. Notice how a bunch of words got dropped, too. This often happens. I tend to be overly verbose in my early drafts.
Then I added some more spot blacks and grays in Photoshop. Once the story was completed, I also decided to change the snowflake slightly.
(added September 9, 2007) After awhile, I decided (with the added encouragement of my wife) that the first three lines were too much. It seemed better to simplfy things. So:
Some artists say that planning takes the life out of creating comix. But I like planning. Yet I also allow things to change at every stage of the process. For example, I have found that some of the best ideas for how dialogue should flow come in when you are about to ink the page. The various stages above are a process of refinement. Though it's not as if I get closer to my original idea. I just get closer to an idea that works best on the page.
"my grandmother's funeral"
comix