You Have Killed Me

by Jamie S. Rich, with art by Joëlle Jones

The comic book creative process is a mysterious, fascinating thing to both fans of comics and non-fans alike. People always want to know how a writer/artist team works. What comes first? The images or the words? How much detail does the writer demand in the script? How involved is the artist in plotting?

So, to clear some of this up, I decided to pick a four-page sequence from the middle of You Have Killed Me and show you the script pages side by side with the final art.

When planning a job, there are only a handful of basic steps. We begin with the germ of the idea, which generally gets discussed between Joëlle and I before I move on to Step 2, which is basically laying down notes. I am not a heavy outline guy, nor do I create detailed synopses. Usually I just keep a running computer document full of ideas that I can pull from whenever I need to. That also includes stuff that I might put into my Moleskin and then transfer to the computer. Later notes will usually be put into the script itself, either as a space marker or ahead of the last page I’ve written.

The script is Step 3. I write a pretty detailed page-by-page, working in full script format. With each successive collaboration with Joëlle, my level of description gets less and less exact, and I leave far more open to her. I rarely call out panel size, though I have been known to suggest a layout when I see something clearly. I usually end up thumbnailing 25% of the pages myself, it’s an excellent writing tool if a particular scene is proving troublesome, but I never show those thumbnails to the artist. I prefer to let my partner roam.

If there is a detail that is particularly important, I will emphasize it. I don’t play any cat-and-mouse games in my script. You can’t tell an artist that a shadowy figure is going to attack your private detective and then not tell her the identity of said shadow, because one assumes that this person’s silhouette would be the same shape as they are. Likewise, I have to lay props early, and so as I was writing You Have Killed Me and realized that on page 76 I needed a bottle to konk someone on the head, I double-checked that the first time we saw that room on page 41, the bottle was there, even if the reader isn’t going to notice it. (Hypothetically speaking, of course. Page 76 is actually a flashback.)

These pages from You Have Killed Me, pages 82 through 85, should give a pretty good example for the way, as a writer, I lay the scene, and how as an artist, Joëlle grows the material from there. I give a lot of descriptions of things that we don’t need to see, and stuff that maybe can’t even be drawn. The idea is to create the frame, set the mood, and move the pieces around, but to let Joëlle direct the reader’s eye through a scene as she sees fit. I don’t think I’ve ever made her go back and do something closer to how it was written, even when a change might frustrate me (I don’t even need the fingers on one hand to count those instances, though). I try to forget what was in the manuscript and see her drawings as if it were the first time the story is being told to me. Surprisingly, I’ve never had to rewrite dialogue to fit what she’s done, she never indulges on a flight of fancy that leaves the story behind.

Note when comparing script and finish product that there are moments where Joëlle stays very close to what was written, and moments she goes a different way. The first two pages are pretty close to the original script, though she does edit. Dropping the tray of chips from the third panel of the second page is a good example of deleting an unnecessary detail. Likewise, when she starts to deviate from the script on page 3, she saw correctly how Mercer’s false disguise probably wouldn’t work on the page. Fans of the Howard Hawks’ adaptation of The Big Sleep might see how I am borrowing from the bookstore scenes in that movie, when Bogie puts on glasses and flips the brim on his hat to pose as an effete book collector. The banter between Mercer and the girl is also inspired by that scene, and I would even rip it off again in the very next chapter. When Mercer goes to the hall of records in City Hall, I described the girl working the counter so that she would ultimately look like that lady bookseller. Though I never told Joëlle to reference that, she got it just right.

So, what does Joëlle do to replace Mercer’s hat and collar shenanigans? Makes the scene sexier! You’re not going to hear any complaints from me, that’s for sure.

You Have Killed Me, Page 82

You Have Killed Me, Page 83

You Have Killed Me, Page 84

You Have Killed Me, Page 85

Blacksad

PART I: THE RETURN OF BLACKSAD!

When planning out my week here at Robot 6, I considered writing something about how someone needed to get the rights to Juan Díaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido’s Blacksad series and not just put the first two volumes back in print so folks could get them at an affordable price, but finally release the third Spanish volume stateside so the fans of the wicked cool crime series could see how it ends at last. Then, lo and behold, Dark Horse Comics announces at Comic Con that they have gotten hold of the series. My prayers were answered! So, instead of writing about my wish for the book, I thought I’d talk to the editor responsible for the new printing, Katie Moody.

JAMIE S. RICH: So, Blacksad had become a bit of a Holy Grail for its fans over the last couple of years. I originally saw the book at Matt Wagner’s house. He had just gotten the sketchbook that had come out from its previous publisher, and it was the first time I had looked at the work closely, I think I had always dismissed it prior. It was then a game of catch-up to actually read it. I eventually tracked down a reasonably priced second volume at a used bookstore, but could only get the first volume from the library–and they had to borrow it from an out-of-town library as the local copy had been stolen. Dark Horse bringing it out is a great boon to comics readers. Can you tell us a little bit about how that came to pass and how you’ll be presenting it?

KATIE MOODY: Blacksad had been on my radar for a few years–I remember seeing the first album’s solicitation in Previews and reading the series after the 2004 Eisner nominations–but I hadn’t been proactive about getting my own copies of the albums. By the time I decided to get it in gear they were already out of print and I was out of luck. (A situation familiar to many by this point.)

Flash forward to last year at the San Diego con, on what has become my annual pilgrimage to Stuart Ng Books’ booth. For those who aren’t familiar, his booth is a veritable Mecca of hard-to-find art books from domestic and foreign markets…the man should be knighted by the comic-art-lovers’ community. So, lo and behold, they had two of the three iBooks albums. I inquired after the third, ended up talking to Mr. Ng himself, and he relayed how the title had been without an English-language publisher since the tragic passing of Byron Preiss, the driving force behind iBooks. After the shock of his death, and iBooks’ subsequent bankruptcy and auction proceedings, the title had been swept along and still remained in limbo. I knew that the work needed to be available in English and that Dark Horse would be a great fit for it, so I immediately asked our man in Licensing to inquire after the title once we returned from the show. But after only a couple days, Juanjo Guarnido independently emailed out of the blue! Stuart Ng had relayed Dark Horse’s interest to him, and–since Juanjo was in a position to sort out English-language deals himself–we were able to start discussions immediately.

The presentation is something that we talked about extensively, and we worked through a number of different format scenarios to see how the numbers would work out. Printing costs are a big obstacle, especially when it comes to oversized full-color books, but it’s a testament to Juanjo’s commitment and passion for the series (to say nothing of his patience!) that we emerged from that months-long process with something that satisfied everyone’s major concerns. It’ll be a hardcover of the same size as the Creepy and Eerie archives, collecting all three European albums published thus far, and with a matte cover finish. This’ll be the first time that the most recent album, Ame Rouge (“Red Soul”), will be available in English.

I’m thrilled. This is a dream project to work on.

Oh, my God. I’m even more excited than ever. That just sounds lovely. Just having read the first two volumes, I can see the character of Blacksad already changing, that the world he lives in is affecting him, and so it will be great to see it as one big book, to follow him from one case to the next and see his development.

Speaking of that, let’s talk some about the appeal of the books. I know it sounds ironic coming from a guy who once edited Usagi Yojimbo, but I actually didn’t pay attention to Blacksad due to the fact that it stars animals. Maybe it’s because I’ve see people do the “adult Disney” thing before, and it’s usually just a gimmick. That’s so not the case here. Like Stan Sakai, or like Art Spiegelman, to name a couple of contemporary “funny animal” cartoonists, Guarnido and writer Juan Diaz Canales use the abstraction for a variety of things. One, it creates a racial and social divide by playing on types but without the baggage of the human analogues, almost allowing the characters in the story to be more human as a result. Two, he also chooses his animals to fit the character. Blacksad is a black cat, so he is predatory, lithe, independent, but also a symbol of bad luck, which is rather funny when you consider private eye tropes.

You are spot on about the freedom to explore social and racial issues they get through this method, and I think that’s one of the (many) reasons why they’ve received such international critical acclaim with Blacksad. Not only is the reader removed from their own personal perspective through the use of animals–whereby racial differences read more metaphorically–but the realism with how the characters relate to one another can then show the absurdity of those prejudices.

So, Blacksad operates on a variety of different levels, since it’s a loving send-up of the noir tradition even while it’s making some social commentary. (It’s amazing how relevant 1950s America becomes in the hands of these two Spanish creators.) It satisfies readers after an enjoyable yarn, those who need more theme or metaphor to sink their teeth into, and aesthetes who just want to pore over Guarnido’s jaw-dropping paintings.

And as you also point out, it has a different flavor than the usual “funny animal” titles. I devoured the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics while growing up, am an ardent fan of Usagi Yojimbo [fist-bump of UY solidarity], and look forward to digging into Carl Barks’ Uncle Scrooge at some point, which is widely recognized as genius work. So in no way do I think that the visual trope is without fundamental merit. But each of these prominent books follows more of a cartooning tradition, and Guarnido’s realism is ultimately rooted in caricature. What he does in Blacksad transcends anthropomorphism–a boxer is literally a gorilla, a cold-hearted villain is an actual reptile–to the extent that the term “anthropomorphism” itself feels backwards; he’s not giving animals human-like qualities so much as he’s giving his human cast animal-like qualities. (Which would be what, bestepomorphism?) However you want to describe it, the result is creative alchemy, as the title’s “holy grail” popularity can attest.

So, are you a fan of the crime genre? In comics or otherwise?

It’s funny; for as much heartfelt enthusiasm as I have for this title, TV procedurals like Homicide: Life on the Streets, Ed Brubaker’s writing, and the early crime stuff from Bendis, I feel that my general appreciation for the hardboiled genre suffers from poor imitation. So many modern noir send-ups emphasize the macho nature of a male protagonist–an independent loner who is (more often than not) plagued by the presence of an extremely desirable femme fatale. That’s a setup that can work marvelously in talented hands, wherein the characters are fleshed-out and nuanced and their relationships are compelling. Unfortunately, in my experience the stylish scenario often leads to thin stories about a Manly Man who drinks alone a lot while the female characters have little going on besides sex appeal. That’s just not the kind of fiction I’m inclined to seek out.

I clearly need to go back to the source and read some old-school, 1930s Raymond Chandler.

Or read You Have Killed Me. I hear it’s pretty good, and despite at least one blogger’s opinion, I am actually a sissy. Har!

That said, I’m going to ask you a question people keep asking me about Mercer in You Have Killed Me and the role of the P.I. in modern society. Though Blacksad is set in the past, why is he a hero relevant to today?

Gosh, for the same reason that Batman has remained relevant after seventy years: John Blacksad is, above all, acting in the interest of justice. It’s a deeply satisfying pursuit to read about, since we’re in a world where horrible things can happen to decent people and criminals aren’t always caught, much less prosecuted to the full extent of the law. (And sometimes they’re given performance bonuses.) So the notion that the scum of the earth will someday get what’s coming to them is a gratifying one, and Blacksad has more flexibility as a P.I. than a cop would with regard to the law and vigilantism. As an added bonus, that puts him at odds with police, since his extralegal actions always risk arrest.

And yeah, most of my all-time favorite comics defy easy genre categories. Transmetropolitan is technically science-fiction, but it follows a journalist in a busy, near-future, media-saturated city that readers will find familiar. Usagi is primarily adventure, but it’s steeped in history and there’s plenty of drama and humor. Love and Rockets has elements of science-fiction and superheroes woven into the day-to-day lives of its pantheon of characters. It makes sense that Blacksad fits this bill, since any truly complex work is going to defy pigeonholes. I’ve got to say, the enthusiastic fan response to the San Diego Blacksad announcement has been very rewarding.

So, when is this out? Will it have the sketchbook, as well? Anything new?

It’ll hit bookstores in April 2010, or thereabouts. No sketchbook materials in this collection, but hopefully we’ll be able to do something with Juanjo’s amazing behind-the-scenes legwork in a separate collection at some point.

And what, is an entire album not enough “new” for you?

No, I am very demanding. To wrap this up, are there any other books you’re editing similar to Blacksad or that might appeal to the same readership that you want to make mention of?

Similar? Not personally, but Diana Schutz is putting together another of her acclaimed black-and-white anthologies of high-profile creators, and this one’s titled Noir. It’s been in the works for years, so it’s an easy bet that it’ll be well worth checking out.

And speaking of genre-defying comics, that’s the spirit behind a new imprint I’ve been shepherding for Editorial lately: Dark Horse Originals. You’ll be hearing a lot more about it later this year, now that we’ve accrued enough works for critical mass, but it’s an umbrella under which new, hard-to-categorize, stand-alone works will now be found at Dark Horse. The first was a hardcover collection of the acclaimed graphic novel Fluffy, the most recent was the character-driven Pixu, and works by Rick Geary, Larry Marder, Matt Kindt, and Jesse Reklaw, among others, have been in between, with many more to come. There tend to be only a handful of projects like these that we publish in a year and they’re all edited by different people, so it’s been marvelous to finally have a way to refer to them in toto–and in a way that won’t make our Marketing staff throw up their hands in despair.

You know, every time you see a penny in the street, it’s really a marketing man’s tears.

PART II: JANET EVANOVICH, RAFAEL GRAMPÁ, DR. HORRIBLE — SIERRA HAHN KNOWS WHERE THE BODIES ARE

I’ve known Sierra Hahn for a little while now. Most readers will recognize her name as one of the driving editorial forces behind some of Dark Horse’s top comics, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, Umbrella Academy, the aforementioned Pixu, and, of course, My Space Dark Horse Presents, the digital age remodeling of the flagship series I had edited for a short while when I was at the Horse. Like Katie, Sierra had several crime-related comics announced at San Diego, and so I took some time to catch up with her regarding those.

JAMIE S. RICH: It was announced just prior to Comic Con that Dark Horse is going to be teaming up with Janet Evanovich. This should be a fairly high profile project, as Janet is a best-selling author whose thrillers are very popular and attract a devoted following. What’s the premise, and what brings her to comics?

SIERRA HAHN: Janet Evanovich grew up reading comics like Little Lulu, and today, as a long time fan of Joss Whedon’s various projects, keeps up on Buffy Season Eight. Her obviously superb reading tastes made it inevitable that Dark Horse would want to work with her should she ever consider a career in comics. Fortunately, she was totally into the idea of working with us, and furthermore, wanted to bring some of her pre-existing characters in the comics world. Next year we’ll be publishing the third book in a series of pre-existing novels based on the misadventures of NASCAR mechanic Alexandra Barnaby, her on-again, off-again love interest, the smashing NASCAR driver, Hooker, and his ginormous St. Bernard, Beans.

That sounds cool, and a totally unique setting for a comic book. I like the idea that a novelist is continuing a successful franchise in comics, much like how Buffy Season Eight is keeping the Whedonverse going. Comics as a natural extension to the existing material, rather than just a place to dump stuff no one else wants. Coincidentally, too, you’re starting to corner the market on crime-tinged comics with motor vehicles. You are helming the reprint of Rafael Grampá‘s Mesmo Delivery, which I read in its self-published form. High-speed truckers and the dangerous stuff they encounter on the road.

Can you tell us a little bit about how that came about, and what his new series Furry Water entails?

One day I’m sittin’ at my desk and John Arcudi calls me and asks if I’ll buy him a copy of this book Mesmo Delivery by this crazy awesome artist that he’s totally stoked on. This was just prior to San Diego Comic Con in 2008. I checked out Rafael Grampá’s blog and was enthralled by his work. It was exciting and full of energy, and I couldn’t wait to meet the guy. I asked Gabriel Bá to introduce me to his artist friend. We met. I kept my cool, and after a few days I asked him to keep in touch and pitch me a series when he was ready. Grampá and I kept in touch for several months, and then finally…he pitched Furry Water, a series that he’s co-writing with Daniel Pellizzari.

Furry Water is a six-issue miniseries that follows the Nobunagas–five outlaw siblings on a mission to fulfill their mother’s dying wish to find their missing brother. The story takes place in a world devastated by a toxic rainfall that kills anything it touches, annihilating most of civilization. Cities are run by a strict military regime set on destroying the rebellious Nobunaga siblings, who are known for their dedication to a strict honor code–the Dalacarpa–and their revolutionary leanings. Furry Water is going to be a massive, powerful, heartbreaking, action-packed adventure. I’m so freakin’ excited!!!

But to backtrack a bit–I really lucked out when I was told that Mesmo Delivery was out of print. I mean, it sucks that it’s out of print, but had I not heard that piece of news (thanks, Mike Allred) I wouldn’t have pestered Grampá about the severe shortage of copies of his book. Turns out he’d only printed a limited number and that Mesmo needed a loving home if it was going to be seen on shelves again. So yeah, that was a no-brainer for me, and Dark Horse will re-publish Mesmo in February.

Mike Allred doesn’t know much, but when he knows something, it’s usually pretty good. Speaking of, crime is all about who you know, who is in your crew, and so are comics, and I remember sitting around at lunch with you and the Allreds and planning future hits on the sequential public at larger, and that was when you set us up with the killer Grampá pin-up we’re running in Madman Atomic Comics #17. You’re also working with Joëlle Jones, who is a crazy good artist and my own Bonnie Parker on You Have Killed Me. The Dr. Horrible one-shot is set for November, yes?

The Dr. Horrible one-shot goes on sale November 18th.

The whole Dr. Horrible writing crew are really psyched to have their very own single-issue comic that gives fans a peek into the life and times of a young Dr. Horrible. I’m a huge fan of Joëlle’s art, and when I recommended her for the project, the writer of the comic, Zack Whedon, was totally wowed and moved by her work. When everyone saw her character designs we all kinda went gaga for Joëlle. She nailed every character brilliantly–their personalities and likenesses. So good.

Now you know what it’s like to be me. Such a rare honor. She knocks my socks off every time. (Much to her chagrin. My feet aren’t pretty.)

What else should folks expect from your editorial docket that might pull a heist on our wallets in the coming months?

In September everyone should start picking up Beasts of Burden by Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson. Seriously. EVERYONE. I could get really preachy about this series (I’ll try to contain myself) but I’m just that passionate about the work they’ve done and the world they’ve created. The stories follow this incredible cast of characters that are, yeah, dogs and cats. They form this unit and find themselves involved with all sorts of paranormal mischief. It’s not for the faint of heart, to be honest. Some seriously creepy stuff happens, and some seriously funny stuff happens, too. Each issue feels self-contained, but all four issues create this big, fun world that these amazing little animals get to play around in. Jill Thompson–she’s a phenomenally talented artist. She just won another Eisner for her phenomenal work. Everyone has to read this series. It’s going to blow minds! (I got really preachy, didn’t I?)

Yeah, but I’m used to you trying to tell me what to do. And based on the stories Jill and Evan did in those Dark Horse Book of… horror anthologies, I’m a soft sell on this one. Maybe we can really milk things and have the Beasts meet Blacksad. One of the dogs gets lost, Blacksad has to go look for him…

I’ll have a pitch on your desk by morning!

Special thanks to both Katie and Sierra for taking the time to discuss their editorial docket with me. Tell your local retailer that you want these comics now. Maybe do it when you’re buying You Have Killed Me. Maximize your trip!

JAMIE S. RICH: So, Chris, I suppose the best way to start is how you and I met. We both have stories in Portland Noir, the Kevin Sampsell-edited anthology that features crime stories set in the town where we both live. You and I started talking at an event for the anthology that was at Powell’s Books, where you were reading and I was just hanging out. How did you end up in Portland Noir?

CHRIS A. BOLTON: First off, Jamie, thanks for inviting me to chat. In my day job, I work for Powells.com, sometimes doing data entry for book pages. A few years back, in 2005 or so, I was beefing up the pages for Akashic’s Noir series when it occurred to me that there should be a Portland Noir. I emailed Akashic to inquire about it and they said they were planning to do one at some point in the future.

Fast-forward to spring 2008: I read in The Oregonian that Akashic was seeking submissions for the Portland anthology. And it was being edited by my co-worker, Kevin Sampsell, whom I knew mainly through email exchanges.

And what led to your specific story, “The Red Room”? You get to use a setting that is pretty unique: your workplace, Powell’s City of Books. For folks who aren’t from Portland, that’s one of the largest and most revered bookstores in the U.S. It’s just huge, and it has both new and used books. The graphic novel sections would blow most comics fans’ minds.

I’d like to say it came to me instantly, but that would be lying. Each story in the Akashic Noir books is set in a different part of town, to give a feel for the overall city. My initial thought was to write about the Sunnyside area, since I’ve bounced around there for most of my ten years here, but that failed to generate much in the way of story ideas.

I can’t recall precisely when Powell’s jumped into my head, or why.

(Random aside: I need to start jotting down the genesis of ideas, because for some reason the lightning bolt is the first thing to eject from my memory. I’ve done a few interviews for Smash, and the first question is almost invariably, “What was your inspiration for the character?” I have a vague recollection–enough to provide a semi-coherent answer–but I cannot for the life of me recall my Dr. Frankenstein moment when I threw my head back and hollered to the stormy heavens, “Eureka! SMASH IS ALIVE!!!“)

Anyway, as soon as I thought of Powell’s, the years of colorful stories I’d heard from co-workers came flying at me, and I knew I had something. After all, it’s a bookstore that encompasses an entire city block and is four stories tall! A lot of devious things can happen in that much space, and a great many honorable intentions can go horribly, utterly awry. I emailed Kevin with the idea and he was intrigued.

What about you? Did you come up with “Gone Doggy Gone” on your own impetus, or was it conceived specifically for the anthology? And did Kevin approach you, or did you come to him?

Kevin came to me. He knew that there was such a vibrant comics scene in Portland that it had to be represented somehow, and so he started to feel around for someone who might be willing to do it. I knew him from the late ’90s or thereabouts, when we were both writing reviews for some of the Portland arts papers. He actually set me up with a reading at Powell’s in 2000 when my first novel, Cut My Hair, was coming out. It was only after that I found out what a big deal that was, you just don’t walk into Powell’s and get a reading.

It was the perfect book at the right time for Joëlle and I. We were already working on our own crime-related stuff and were maybe about halfway through You Have Killed Me and Oni Press was on board for publishing it. I had also written, and I think she already drew, “The Jailhouse Swing” for the third Popgun, which was our boxing story. We both like stories where boxers are used as the heavies.

Anyway, I doubt Kevin knew that, but I had heard of the Akashic Noir series and jumped at it. I almost immediately had the idea that I wanted to work in my neighborhood, the upper Northwest, and I wanted to do something about a lost dog. It’s loosely based on a sort of true, sort of urban legend from the neighborhood. A dog had gotten stolen, and there were these posters everywhere, it was on MySpace, the award kept getting bigger. I took that idea and thought, okay, where can that dog be and who should find him. I tied it back into the notion of Portland being a comics town by making our main character an indie cartoonist. It all kind of fit.

I remember asking you why you hadn’t done a comic when we ran into each other, actually.

Honestly, it never occurred to me to submit a comic–but after I heard what you and Joëlle were doing, I was instantly envious! Kyle and I have talked about doing a noir comic based on Prohibition Rose, Portland’s legendary bootlegger (who was, to my knowledge, the only woman bootlegger in the country), and I realized too late how perfect that would have been for this book. But you never know, maybe there will be a Portland Noir II…

There may have been one other city that had a comic story in the book, I am not sure. They kept calling it a “graphic story,” and I was like, “No! That makes it sound like it’s full of sex and violence!”

I’ve heard it was Wall Street Noir. Which… I mean, really? Does Wall Street scream “comics” to you? Makes me curious to check it out.

I guess we’ll never really come to terms with the whole graphic novel/comic book labeling issue. At least manga has a name everyone can agree on!

So, have you participated in any of the readings yet? (And how would that go, exactly? Would you describe the panel to the audience or use an overhead projector?) Kevin does a great job hosting the events, coming up with a noirish intro for each writer. In mine he mentions my “suspicious” middle initial, wondering what it could stand for: “Adolf, Anarchy, Abraham? The mind races with possibilities.”

For the record, it’s “Addison.” (Not nearly as cool as the suspicious versions.) I added it mainly because there are a great many Chris Boltons in this world. There was even another Chris Bolton working at Powell’s a few years back, which caused much confusion.

As a fellow middle-initialer, I wonder how you feel about this. Did you add the “S.” to be mysterious, or controversial…or because you run into a Jamie Rich everywhere you go?

I get asked about it all the time, and I haven’t told anyone what it is in years. I never go on the record, and it became a gag with some local baristas at a coffee shop where I used to go and write, they’d write different guesses on my coffee cup. For me, I don’t think I’ve ever run into another Jamie Rich, though I get Google Alerts for a guy who runs the Gay & Lesbian Film Festival in Kansas City. I added the middle initial when I was 10 or 11 because I was tired of being told I had a “girl’s name” and decided to spruce it up. It just kind of stuck. It’s funny, because I get annoyed when people refer to me verbally as Jamie S. Rich like it’s some ostentatious thing, and I get annoyed when they drop it from something in print. You can’t win with me.

I haven’t done any readings for this story, but I did a performance of “The Jailhouse Swing” once. I broke it down by panels and did a power point. I also once did a reading from 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, my first book with Joëlle, where I took a few pages of script and pared it down to the essential narration and read it as a dialogue between the two characters. It worked pretty well.

Now, people are always curious when they talk to me about the difference between writing comics and prose. It seems to boggle the mind that one might do both. Personally, I have no problem going from one to the other, they serve different functions for me. What draws you to do something in prose vs. doing it as a comic story?

The biggest factors in choosing my medium are probably difficulty and available resources. In July I premiered a web-series called “Wage Slaves” (www.WageSlaveSeries.com) that I shot last summer, and spent most of the past year doing postproduction. Shooting a film or web-series is a huge undertaking, even with a minimal budget, so I have to really love a project to endure all of that. [IMG: cast.jpg]

By comparison, sitting down by yourself and creating all of the characters, settings, and dialogue on a piece of paper feels like a vacation. When it comes to prose, the strongest advantage for me is Voice. You can work that into film and comics, of course, but prose is where the author’s voice is strongest because it’s pervasive; if all you have is the author’s words, then you’re completely at the mercy of her Voice.

The only comic artist I’m involved with creatively (or even personally know) is my brother Kyle, who’s too busy with the artwork for Smash to work on anything else, so that presently limits my options with comics. I hope that will change once we start hitting the convention circuit this year and I get to meet more artists.

I imagine you have a handy list of artists you can call up besides Joëlle when you have a comic idea. Does the nature of the project determine who you want to draw it, or is it more a matter of who’s available and/or interested?

These days, I tend to write for the artist, I don’t sit there and dream up a story and then wonder who might come with me on the expedition. In finding both Joëlle for 12 Reasons and Marc Ellerby for Love the Way You Love, it seemed like an endless trek to cast the right artist. It wasn’t much fun, and I think part of that was trying to match something in my head, whatever vague image of what the book was supposed to look like. The flipside is now I have scripts, particularly for Joëlle, where I feel like I’d rather they not get done if she can’t draw them. I don’t want to readjust my thinking. I guess I’m an all or nothing kind of guy. Like, I would never want to work with anyone else on any follow-ups to You Have Killed Me. It just wouldn’t be right.

You Have Killed Me

I think, especially in that case, the reader would also feel it wasn’t right. More and more I find myself envying the writer/artist “two-fers,” creators like Jeff Smith, Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and Craig Thompson, who don’t have to rely on a creative partner to tell their stories in comic form.

On a related note, I love the portrait of the Portland comics scene in “Gone Doggy Gone,” with the split between mainstream and indie creators. How close-knit is the Portland comics scene? I’m still a stranger to the community, but I hope to get a little closer after next year’s Stumptown Fest. The fest has filled up before the application deadline two years in a row; next year we’re submitting our application two seconds after they open!

A couple of years ago, Scott McCloud gave a presentation at the main branch of the Portland library where he noted that comics tend to be tribal, and that Portland is full of many tribes. (Though, now that I say this, I am starting to wonder if it was Scott or Douglas Wolk who made that point…) I elbowed Joëlle and said we must be our own tribe, since we tend to mostly hang out with ourselves. It’s a little high school. The cliques all get along, but we still have cliques. That’s also just geography, we are scattered. When we do come together, though, it can be fun. The Top Shelf guys hang out with the Oni guys, the different comic book store owners go to each other’s events. I guess things have changed a little, too, since I’ve joined a book club that is all comic book professionals. It’s really fun, though sometimes our literature discussions get derailed by industry gossip.

I like the notion of comic tribes roaming this city. Right now I’m something of a ronin, but I’m always looking for a group to join forces with. Maybe that should be a Craigslist ad: “Comic-writing ronin seeks like-minded samurai for Southeast Portland-based tribe.”

Of course, in addition to your comics, you’ve written several novels yourself (including Cut My Hair, which I read in 2001 and completely related to). What makes you decide which form to use for which idea? What are the different functions that you mentioned?

Honestly, it’s never a question for me what form an idea will take. I either have a comic book idea or I have a prose idea. I just know when it hits me. It’s weird, I have a hard time getting some people to understand that, and I’ve been pretty adamant against switching gears midway. I have a script called This World and Body that was once suggested to me would be an easier “sell” as prose, and it made me have very violent thoughts against the person suggesting it. It’s a script that is so fundamentally visual, to turn it into prose would be to suck the specialness right out. Like plucking the feathers off a chicken and sending it on its way. People are just going to wonder what happened to that chicken.

I love that analogy! It’s just a shame Hollywood so often ignores the chicken and lunges for the handful of feathers. I wrote a screenplay for an animated film about lemmings that got some nibbles, but was ultimately deemed “too dark” for kids. Apparently, even the notion of mass suicide is a turn-off. But if you asked any child what a lemming is, they’d tell you (erroneously) it’s a little rodent that stampedes to its death in the ocean. So, what’s the problem here?

I’ve often considered trying to adapt it into a children’s book or a comic series in the Asterix vein, but each time I try…well, your chicken analogy never occurred to me before, but it certainly will from now on.

Recently, I wrote a prose sequel to Love the Way You Love, and it was one of the toughest things I’ve ever done, just changing how I viewed the characters, getting a prose groove going. Even though it was successful, the difficulty of it…well, I think it proved my point. “Don’t do that again!” For me, comics provide something a little looser, a little more free, while also more tightly structured–you must work within pages and panels, it must be a certain length. It’s where I can collaborate, where I can start the process and let someone else finish it and share ideas. Prose is more private, it’s all me. There’s a split that fits my Gemini personality. Again, it keeps being all or nothing with me.

In your “Red Room” story, there is a feeling that some of the participants in the crime aren’t really criminals. They are playing “dress-up,” as it were, they are taking on the role and almost living out a fantasy. Is this something you thought about? Is it maybe a theme of yours? I ask because I don’t think your Smash character is that different in that sense: it’s a little kid putting on a costume and being his favorite hero. It’s like Calvin actually getting powers in Calvin & Hobbes–which I guess would make him Captain Marvel, talking tiger and all, wouldn’t it?

I hadn’t really thought about that, but it makes a lot of sense. I try to avoid easy labels and flip expectations whenever possible, and I’m also enormously fascinated by the various roles people play in their own lives. Perhaps it comes from spending so much time in a day job and having to clarify to people that I’m really a writer/filmmaker/ballerina/what-have-you.

In the case of “The Red Room,” I didn’t want any of the characters to be what they seemed–the client wasn’t really an anarchist punk, the crooks are actually cops, and the main character is definitely not a detective or an action hero. In fact, strangely enough, I envisioned him very similarly to the way Joëlle draws Craig in “Gone Doggy Gone.”

Wow–I guess you’re right about Calvin turning into Captain Marvel. Although, I think Stupendous Man would have wreaked a lot more havoc…and I can’t imagine Calvin with actual powers staying on the side of good.

Incidentally, I like Captain Marvel (well, I liked Jeff Smith’s version of him), but I think the major flaw in that character is he becomes an ADULT superhero. When I was a kid, I didn’t want to be an adult–I didn’t really like or understand adults. I wanted to stay a KID, but have the freedom to do what I want–and super-powers, of course. Rather than the kid being the hero of the story, with Captain Marvel it’s like they just rolled the hero and the sidekick into one body.

Yeah, I wanted to be a kid that had extraordinary abilities and could whoop an adult’s butt. That’s the sweeter revenge. “You think I’m a weak kid? I’ll show you!”

I just took a Facebook quiz the other day, the one where it tells you which Calvin alter-ego you are, and funnily enough, I got his private detective persona, Tracer Bullet. I didn’t cheat or anything. And that oh-so-insightful quiz leads me to why I asked the question, that there is something inherent in what we do, regardless of genre, that is fundamentally us whether we know it or not. One of the common reactions to You Have Killed Me is surprise at how well I have transitioned from relationship literature to a pretty straightforward genre piece, and in answering that, I realized–and so did some of the askers–that my previous characters aren’t all that different. I write about people searching for something, looking for answers to big questions, and a dead body can just be a stand-in for a personal foible.

And maybe now people will stop wondering, “Did this really happen to you?” Or I can pull my gat out of my trenchcoat and say, “Yes, yes, it did.”

I took that same quiz and my result was “Safari Al,” a character so obscure that, despite re-reading every Calvin & Hobbes book each year for the past 20 years, I didn’t recognize him. (He was in one strip, which I remembered once I found it, but the mention of his name is so brief and insignificant that it sailed right past me.) I don’t know what to make of the implications of that, so I’m trying not to read too deeply into it. At least he carries a machete.

As for your “transition,” I’m not at all surprised by it. I felt that 12 Reasons Why I Love Her had a genuine noir edge: the search through the past for answers to something inherently unknowable, Joëlle’s use of chiaroscuro lighting (I recall at one point there’s even the noir staple of light slatted through blinds), and the nonlinear storytelling, which used to be almost exclusively confined to the crime genre (you had to go backwards and forwards to figure out how and why the crime happened) but has recently become more accepted into “mainstream” storytelling. It was noir looking for a crime, and I can’t wait to see what happens with You Have Killed Me.

12 Reasons is one of those books that jumped off the shelves at me, and every single page was impressive. I must confess, I did slip into the trap of wondering, “Is this based on the writer’s experience?” I think it’s nearly impossible to avoid that when it feels like a very personal and intimate story. That seems like it should be a compliment to the writer, but I think it’s more of a frustrating no-win situation. If you took it from your own life, there’s an implication that you didn’t actually have to write (as in, create) anything (WRONG). Whereas, if it is fiction, it’s great that you “fooled” the reader, but they’re probably going to think you just took it from your own life anyway.

Yeah, you have to be kind of polite and nod when people say that, and tell them no, it isn’t me, that didn’t happen, etc. Naturally, some of it did, some germ of reality makes it through, but I’m usually quite honest and say that the things that did happen would surprise them in how obscure and insignifcant they are. Though, none of You Have Killed Me is based on real life at all. Except me and Mercer both like having conversations with cats.

It’s funny, I have a hard enough time getting words on paper the way they first arrange themselves in my head, I can’t imagine trying to be true to an actual event. It always changes. It’s like when people look at a performance by someone in a movie and say, “He is just playing himself,” like that’s nothing. I always say, “Can I put a camera on you, then, and have you recite lines I wrote for you?” They’d find it’s not so easy.

You and Joëlle seem like a perfect creative match. Is the collaboration as smooth as it appears, or are there ever disagreements and friction?

Nothing too dramatic. We’ve had points where we haven’t fully agreed on a decision, but we always talk it out. It’s never turned into a big deal. It’s usually just moving stuff around, maybe changing how we approach something. I’ve never changed a word of dialogue, though, I don’t think, and I’ve never made her redraw a panel to match my own vision. We both are pretty respectful of the other’s instincts, and once we hear the case for why something is the way it is, we trust the other person. With You Have Killed Me, we talked about the story as I wrote it, so any major objections on her part could be sorted out sooner rather than later. Stuff like layouts or small, inconsequential details that don’t play well on the page, that’s her prerogative to edit out.

What about you? You’re working with your brother, so is there sibling rivalry or old childhood resentments that ever come out? Did you guys create Smash together?

Most of our friction comes from the involuntary muscle spasm siblings develop when they have to share a bedroom for the first ten years of their lives. Luckily, we’ve managed to overcome that “You aren’t the boss of me!” pettiness. I almost never give Kyle notes on his art anymore–I agree with your notion that it’s the artist’s prerogative. However, I sometimes have to remind him that I need to include a large chunk of exposition in a given panel, and if he doesn’t leave me room at the top, someone is going to get his head chopped off by a razor-sharp plot point.

The only real difficulty I have anymore is having to defend small details that are present for the sake of the narrative. I like to toss out a lot of plot/character seeds that can sprout later, or just lie there unnoticed if I decide not to use them. But if Kyle doesn’t understand why something’s there, he’ll challenge me on it–which is good, because then I have to explain my thought process: “This is because, in episode three of Season 2, the Magus is going to buy a Cold Stone franchise, so I’m setting up his childhood love of ice cream that the reader didn’t realize at the time would be a major plot development…” In doing so, I sometimes realize what a lame idea it is (the Magus is not buying a Cold Stone franchise). Other times, Kyle confirms that it’s a good idea, and even seems impressed that his older brother is capable of plotting that far ahead.

We didn’t actually create Smash together: I came up with the initial concept, he designed the character, and it evolved from there. Since then, I would say it’s been a very mutual collaboration–there’s no element of the series, from the characters and their backstories to their costumes and powers, that we don’t contribute to equally. And sometimes, fight about passionately…but always for the good of the comic!

In writing crime, I find it’s far more exacting than the relationship stuff. I had to go back a lot and lay down things I didn’t now I needed. Like, “Stick a razor in his desk drawer on this page so people won’t be confused when he shaves on this next page.” I was done with You Have Killed Me before Joëlle even started, so it was pretty easy to make sure she knew what was important and what may just be my fanciful thinking.

What’s next for you, Jamie? Do you have any plans to revisit Craig from “Gone Doggy Gone”? Could there be a noir series about a down-on-his-luck indie comic creator who keeps stumbling into the criminal underbelly of Northwest Portland?

Nah, Craig is dead and buried in my mind. I had such a hard time writing that story, he’s not really my favorite boyfriend right now, anyway. It’s funny, it was one of the more difficult things I’ve ever worked on. There is an unfinished earlier draft, and a whole other separate script called “You Cross My Path” that has nothing to do with a dog or cartoonists or anything that we decided not to do in favor of “Doggy.” It’s way, way darker, plays up the anti-California xenophobia you find in Portland, as well as an old school punk vs. young hip-hop white suburbanites. And indie rockers. And drug-dealing cabbies.

My immediate future is another left turn, a high-school comedy about witches called Spell Checkers that Joëlle and I co-created, and we’re working with an artist from France named Nicolas Hitori de. That’s the one thing that’s in production. I have some prose that I am currently shopping around, some stuff with Joëlle we hope to get to one day–she’s a busy girl. She’s doing Dr. Horrible comics for Dark Horse, and some issues of Madame Xanadu for Vertigo, and she’s got lots of offers besides.

What about you? To wrap this up, what’s the plan for Smash? You have “Season One” just about finished, correct? What is next for the little guy, and are there non-Smash comics in your future?

I’ve caught an online preview of Spell Checkers and I’m really looking forward to it. However, I’m dismayed to discover I haven’t pointed something out yet, so let me say for the record: Joëlle’s art is fantastic! The idea of her illustrating a Dr. Horrible comic fills me with enough glee to break into song. (Almost.)

Right now I’m busy planning and writing the next seasons of Smash and “Wage Slaves.” This summer, Kyle and I had planned to work on a pitch for a new comic series, a supernatural comedy-thriller, during our (brief) hiatus from Smash. But we’re also seeking a publisher to put out a Season One collection, so we’re finding our hands a little fuller than we’d anticipated. Still, it’s hard to complain about that.

Every now and again, I find myself pulling out the ol’ Moleskin notebook and scribbling another chapter of a novel with my protagonist from the Portland Noir story. Except I’m going to have to change his name. He was dubbed “Jacob Black” a long time before a young adult romance novel about vampires became a huge success and the former Cedric Diggory forever claimed that title for himself.

And on that note…thanks again, Jamie, it’s been fun! Anytime you want to continue this chat over beers, just drop me a line.

Sure. But if we’re going to sit around and talk about more crime, make it something stiffer. We’re writers, we’ve got a reputation to uphold! [insert laughter here]

Francesca Ghermandi is one of the people whose packages I cherished when they used to come to me. I think she wrote me twice, and as a result, I have copies of Helter Skelter and Hiawata Pete, both in Italian, both absolutely brimming with amazing cartooning. These would be great candidates for that Robot 6 column where they demand books get translated, and boy, I’d sure love to read them someday. For now, I just look at the pictures.

In with these is a plastic comb notebook with a clear cover and photocopied pages of the first several chapters of Pop. 666, then called Suburbia. It only had one chapter in English, the one published by David Mazzuchelli in Rubber Blanket, the rest was not translated. Like the hardbound cartoon books Francesca had sent me, however, the strange and grotesquely beautiful world she drew sucked me in. I really wanted to publish this stuff in Dark Horse Presents. I don’t know why it didn’t come to pass, maybe I couldn’t get anyone else to see what I saw. There is no date on the letter, Francesca could have sent the same packet to Fantagraphics right about then. The timing makes sense. They started serializing the story off and on in their anthology Zero Zero beginning with the 19th issue in the summer of 1997. They eventually printed all 90 pages, but unlike some of the other strips from the magazine, Pop. 666 has never gotten its own collected edition.

I’m not sure who came up with the title Pop. 666, but it calls to mind the title of Jim Thompson’s western novel Pop. 1280. Thompson is one of the best of the hardboiled school, having written classic genre pieces like After Dark, My Sweet and The Grifters, inspiring many a modern crime writer and filmmaker. Thompson’s book is about a sheriff at odds with his town, the kind of squalid community where all life is a give-and-take proposition. These people are damned by their own evil deeds, they are the future populace of hell. Pop. 666.

Ghermandi and Semerano’s story is set in an unspecified slum village out in the middle of nowhere. As the tragically lost and soon-to-be-dead married couple who accidentally arrive there in the first chapter let us know, you’ve got to be plenty off the beaten path to land down in this sub-Dante inferno. Despite this being a junkyard society for the homeless, the folks in the area are muscled by a fat, one-eyed lout named Rocco. There may be no landlord, no deeds of ownership, but Rocco collects taxes all the same. He would rule the area completely if not for two things: the sinister Snake Eyes who refuses to pay this sweaty hood tribute and the fading movie star Hilde Historietta. Fear and love, many a villain and many a hero have fallen into the fire because of those two emotions.

All of this is pretty much set up in the first two chapters, and the storytellers take us through a labyrinth of weird twists and creepy scenarios from there. Social workers with a mean streak, mad scientist labs, vain television hosts–all of these get sucked into the overall plot. When life is on the skids, there are those who just lean into it and those who try to drive their way out. Some get run over, some step on the gas. In Pop. 666, fortunes change at moment’s notice, and events are never anything short of bizarre.

If Pop. 666 were a movie, it might actually be too bizarre for its own good. No matter how wicked the special effects, the filmmakers would run the risk of making it seem like it’s weird for no reason. They’d end up with something like Dan Ackroyd’s Nothing but Trouble rather than Jeunet’s City of Lost Children or von Trier’s The Element of Crime. Comics have always had the benefit of being their own self-contained worlds without having to rely on any fleshy things or real world stumbling blocks to build on. It’s all paper and pen, and with a clear vision like Francesca Ghermandi’s, the world is complete and need no justification to seem believable. In his profile of the cartoonist, Paul Gravett mentions both Tex Avery and Chester Gould, both of whom provide pointers to Ghermandi’s sense of slapstick and monstrous mugs. Her flare for tarnished glitz also reminds me of her fellow Italian, Federico Fellini, whose later cinematic portrayals of the dimming glamour of the performing life may have influenced Hilde Historietta. Maybe some David Lynch, as well? The 1950s monster movie tropes and the strange snouts Ghermandi gives a lot of her characters also recall the skewed work of Charles Burns. Her ink lines are as fluid as Burns’, flowing naturally into rounder shapes, avoiding harsh angles. (No surprise, then, that she would invent Pastil, the girl with the aspirin tablet for a head.)

Fantagraphics has been promising Ghermandi’s latest book, Grenuord, for a while now. Last explanation I read was that it was taking Kim Thompson longer than expected to translate, and since the third issue was published in 2006, we’ve been patiently waiting for the rest to be translated and one big book to be released. While this production continues, might I suggest a repackaging of Pop. 666 in the meantime? This weird and creepy sci-fi horror crime comic is a loopy piece of work, and it deserves to be experienced by more readers and might even lead the way to reminding some about Ghermandi in anticipation of Grenuord.

I mean, stranger things have happened. And if they did, it was probably in a Francesca Ghermandi comic.

When it came down to writing You Have Killed Me, style came before plot. Joëlle Jones and I knew we wanted to do a comic book that paid tribute to the private detective lore that we loved, but we had to decide how. No irony, no modern context, no gimmicks–we wanted to do it straight. But how straight was too straight? Where does homage become rip-off?

You Have Killed Me p. 83

Before I sat down to type a word, I had what could be called “the Hollywood pitch.” It’s that thing they do in the picture business, where everything is broken down into two comparable things and, by their combination, we can believe the new thing will be twice as successful as the old. I want to make Movie C, and it’s Movie A meets Movie B.

You Have Killed Me is Michelangelo Antonioni directing The Big Sleep.

That’s how the pitch began, and it’s the descriptive that has stuck with the book since. I’ve said it often, and it still holds true.

If The Big Sleep isn’t the quintessential private detective movie, it’s at least the quintessential Bogart and Bacall movie. Directed by Howard Hawks, based on a novel by Raymond Chandler and adapted by three writers, including William Faulkner and Leigh Brackett (the writer of Rio Bravo and later, the most non-quintessential Philip Marlowe picture, Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye), it was released in 1946. Though it has shades of film noir, it’s not a snug fit in terms of that artistic movement. Not as dark, not as cynical, it’s rooted more firmly in the pulpy traditions that spawned it. Humphrey Bogart stars as Marlowe, a PI that Chandler described as “a white knight in a trenchcoat,” and indeed, he would come to embody the idea of the shamus as a sort of modern-day noble warrior whose armor has seen better days. Marlowe’s outer shell can use a bit of a polish, but he essentially stands for something. Though The Maltese Falcon was the movie that made me fall for Bogie, over the years I’ve come to begrudgingly admit that The Big Sleep is the superior picture.

The plot of the film is anything but simple. Marlowe is hired by old man Sternwood (Charles Waldron) to take care of a blackmailer in possession of gambling notes owed by his youngest daughter, the petulant party girl Carmen (Martha Vickers). Turns out Carmen runs with a dangerous crowd, and on the first night of his trailing her, Marlowe ends up with two bodies on his hands and several more not long after. He also ends up trading barbs with Carmen’s older sister, Vivian (Bacall). She’s the one that Marlowe will fall in love with, and the one he hopes and prays isn’t tangled up in this mess of gamblers, con artists, and wanton women any more than having a dizzy sister sitting in the middle of it.

Howard Hawks is a director who is as efficient as he is stylish. If there is anything that a visual storyteller should take away from his movies is his speed of delivery. There is hardly any time to pause for a breath in his best pictures. When he made His Girl Friday in 1940, he famously amped up the comedy by turning up the speed, instructing his actors to remove all the pauses after a line, for the first word of one bit of dialogue to come immediately on top of the punctuation of the preceding dialogue, resulting in two pages of script for every one minute of film, as opposed to the usual one-to-one ratio. He sticks to that kind of speed in The Big Sleep. It’s particularly noticeable in the male/female dynamic, just as it was in Friday, though now it’s Bogart and Bacall rather than Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell.

This keeps the story moving at a pace that keeps the audience as confused as the hero they are following, but since it’s coming so rapidly, there’s no time to pause and worry about it. Hawks and his writers expertly insert exposition throughout the movie, layering it naturally into the conversation so we don’t realize we’re playing catch-up. I also like how Marlowe moves his case along, usually by pretending to know more than he does and playing his hunches, letting his target’s reaction confirm what he suspects. He can be rather playful and tricky about it. It’s a trait that was even more obvious when Dick Powell played the snooper two years earlier in Murder, My Sweet, and a tactic I borrowed for Antonio Mercer in You Have Killed Me. Vivian asks Marlowe, “You like to play games, don’t you?” In response, he smiles slyly and says he does.

Outside of the dialogue, Hawks used his mis en scene to drop clues on his audience, to tease the confusion and evoke intrigue. He often did this by hiding details, by only showing part of the picture. Watch the scene outside the house of the effete bookseller, when the first murder happens, and look at the details that both the moviegoer and Marlowe are privy to, thanks to Hawks and editor Christian Nyby. A flash of light, a gunshot, a scream, a door opening, feet running by, a speeding car. We don’t yet know anything, but we know someone was killed, a girl saw it, and someone else got away. It’s a very quick scene, and you could isolate each element into a single comic book panel to achieve the same effect. The details are specific. It’s obfuscation through precision.

Conversely, Antonioni’s 1960 film L’avventura is precise in its obfuscation. It explores, but it avoids discovering. The object is to go through the motions of looking for the answers while trying to eventually create as much distance between you and them as possible–though, whether the characters know that or not is up to interpretation. At one point, the main male figure refuses to tell his new lover he loves her. Why? Because she already knows!

Here is the story: society girl Anna (Lea Massari), her fiancé Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), and her sister Claudia (Monica Vitti) go out on a daytime boat trip with their affluent friends to visit some rocky islands out in the middle of the ocean. When it comes time to leave–the visual/narrative symbolism: a shark sighting drove them out of the water and to shore, a weather change is forcing them back to the boat–Anna is nowhere to be found. Is she hiding? Did she fall off the cliff? Did she find another way off the island? There are no clues. Claudia knows that Anna and Sandro were fighting, so whatever measure her sister took, Claudia blames her future brother-in-law. Determined to prove his dedication, Sandro goes looking for Anna, and he eventually reconnects with Claudia. They follow some leads–a newspaper reporter points them to a druggist in a nearby town–but only end up in each other’s arms. First Claudia denies Sandro, but she is drawn to him, perhaps drawn by the common bond of searching for Anna. Ultimately, though, she stops denying her desires, and as she does, not only does the search for the missing girl all but sputter out, but Claudia finds herself in her sister’s same boring shoes.

I wanted to construct the dilemma of You Have Killed Me‘s missing debutante, Julie, to be like Antonioni’s. Keeping the same two sisters device that both he and Chandler used, I had an older sister disappear from a locked bathroom. The younger sibling is in the bedroom outside of it, and to get out, Julie would conceivably have to pass Jennie. There are no other doors, no other windows, only a sheer cliff’s drop to the ocean on the other side of the wall. Engaged just the way Anna was, about to be married, what made Julie run?

I was pretty conscious of the basic conceit I was lifting from Antonioni (who wrote the screenplay alongside Elio Bartolini and Tonino Guerra), but until I watched the movie again to write this column, I wasn’t aware of how much the Italian filmmaker tapped in to the noirish tropes and how much I had really absorbed on my single viewing of the movie eight years ago. For a film that I’ve touted as one of my favorites, my memory of L’avventura was patchy, to say the least. For instance, I had no recollection of the overbearing father (Renzo Ricci) in L’avventura, and the conversation between he and Anna at the very start of the movie sets up a conflict that is similar to much of what is hinted at about Julie’s past with the jilted detective, Antonio Mercer, in You Have Killed Me. Antonioni is establishing a conflict between old tradition and modernity, between the past generation and the present. Daddy wants Anna to marry someone that fits her station, Anna will marry Sandro just to spite him.

Because she clearly doesn’t love him anymore. From what we see, Anna barely knows what she feels. As Antonioni sees them, people have become disconnected and out of touch with one another. Anna has cold feet, most likely because Sandro offers a marriage of convenience and a life that will trap her with its conformity. There is a scene where a distraught and lonely Claudia walks through an art gallery where baffled admirers look at abstract art. It appears to be leaping off the canvas, but yet confined by the square frame (not unlike a dynamic comic book panel). At the same time, the gallery building is crumbling and decomposing, and the stucco pattern on its walls could swallow the art into its own dying swirls if the barriers could be broken down. The threat of conformity is everywhere. Did Anna choose to run rather than be swallowed by it? Or did she choose the flux of the ocean, the ever-changing sea, as an escape? Is this the same choice Julie saw herself facing in You Have Killed Me?

There are signs of a certain age ending everywhere. The sisters talk of summer ending, inspired in this sad thinking, a rumination on carefree youth passing, by the shark that swims by, sniffing for blood. The encroaching modernity pops up again and again, often with a sexual or predatory guise, be it the foreign man who tries to trick the young girl on the train or the hungry pack of fellows making a spectacle out of a high-price hooker. Claudia will experience the same thing when left alone in one of the towns she and Sandro are searching, and she will also see the disrespect of lust up close when she meets the young artist who paints only nude pictures of women, and yet has no reverence for art. Anyone can pick up a brush, he says. Throughout, Antonioni uses motifs that suggest that his characters are at once pushing something old away and embracing something new, but that their eagerness to be free of puritanical restrictions has caused them to leap before they look. They are running to embrace new values, but they don’t know what they are. There is a recurring image of Claudia closing a door on infidelity, first with Anna and Sandro and then with her friend (Dominique Blanchar) and the painter, and it’s both her trying to keep these indiscretions a secret and to outrun them.

Antonioni also uses various touches straight out of crime stories to mark the path Claudia and Sandro are searching. Dishonest smugglers, disinterested police, rendezvous by train, and, of course, doppelgangers. The expensive prostitute looks like Anna, a more mature brunette to Claudia’s younger-looking blonde. There is even some confusion with the druggist–was the girl he saw a blonde or brunette? A customer or his mistress? In addition to trying on her sister’s boyfriend, Claudia tries out being her, wearing a shirt Anna gave her, and even once donning a brown wig. These sisterly entanglements are all basically variations on a theme, and though they may end up in different places, the Sternwood girls in The Big Sleep and the Roman girls in You Have Killed Me are all part of the same sorority.

The difference may be that in L’avventura, neither Anna nor Claudia is aggressor or victim, there is no crime or jealousy that passes between them, except for maybe a little early jealousy on Claudia’s part. I suppose some argue that Anna gets out of Claudia’s way and makes room for the romance, but Claudia might do better to interpret Anna’s actions as a warning rather than opening any doors (the ones you keep closing, Claudia! Yeesh!). Once Sandro and Claudia fully embrace their passion, Claudia starts to regret it, starts to see that Sandro is just a man who goes through the motions. He laments that modern buildings aren’t built to last–another case of where modern ideas are fleeting compared to the solid structures of yore–yet refuses to be an architect and design his own; instead, he prices out the ones others design. So, when Claudia wants to retreat to a new life, to stay indoors and avoid social obligation, Sandro returns to it, he doesn’t change at all. Now that he changes his tactic and tells her he loves her, he’s pretty much said the romance is dead. Claudia can choose to crawl in the casket with him, to accept the ennui and sadness, or she can follow Anna.

I made mention of how Howard Hawks and his editor used their cutting technique to tease out the information, to make scenes more exciting and heighten the mystery. Given that this is an article that is also comparing comics to film, I’d be remiss not to note that both directors would be nothing without their cinematographers, just as a comics writer would be nothing without his artist. In The Big Sleep, Hawks uses Sid Hickox’s sense of shadow and his expert maneuvering of a confined place to create sinister scenes where the room often seemed to close in on the two people trapped inside it, leaving them alone with their secrets. On the flip, Aldo Scavarda creates a world for Antonioni that is expansive and alienating, gritty with its own detritus. The hallways of the estate at the end of L’avventura dwarf Claudia, and her smallness emphasizes her shame (compare the hotel hallways and spatial grounds Sacha Vierny shot for Alain Resnais a year later in Last Year at Marienbad; last year at Antonioni’s?); when Scavarda moves away from these wide shots and in for a close-up, the effect is that the subject appears to be giant, once again emphasizing their singularity in a world that does not fit them. Both understand the variables of black-and-white, even if Hickox is more starkly defined and Scavarda is trying to smudge the very air into gray.

Joëlle Jones is my cinematographer for You Have Killed Me, and though I am fairly certain that she has never seen either The Big Sleep or L’avventura, she might find kindred spirits in both of their cameramen. Like them, she carves out space with an expert eye, whether it be the cramped basement where Mercer gets the daylights beat out of him or the wide shots of cliffside houses and racetracks, the scary hallways of abandoned hotels or the glitz of a jazz club. Her main tool is pure ink, and so she has more in common with Hickox’s clearly defined shadows, but her use of tones gives her some of the ambiguity of Scavarda. The pattern on a man’s suit, the sparkle of a woman’s dress–these things smudge the lines between good and bad, ugly and beautiful, moral and immoral. That’s why the auteur theory always breaks down, be it comics or cinema–unless you do it all exactly yourself, there is a shared vision at work. From the novel to the screen, through a director’s suggestion and out a camera lens, off my script page to Joëlle’s bristol board–it’s all interconnected.

Desk after desk was spotless, immaculate, the very height of order and organization. Yeah, right. Just like I wore that nice shirt and had my cowlick pasted down every day I went to school, not just yearbook day. Pull the other leg, Swifty, that one gives milk.

I know those scumbags all cleaned up their desks and then took the picture. I know that, as a species, comics creators are dirty, sloppy, scatterbrained louts. No way do they keep a clean desk! So, I took pictures of my desk as it was every day, a paper and pen version of a trailer park after a tornado.

You know, just like it is now:

That second one is a close-up of what we comically call my reference shelf, full of old drats of manuscripts, dictionaries, and, for whatever reason, a biography of the band Suede. Good luck getting any of them out without causing an avalanche.

I’ve turned having a mess into a work of art, and like all works of art, they begin with a single idea, a seed of something that blooms and sometimes grows out of control. A garden with many a lovely flower but with also a ton of weeds. Once my desk was organized, now it has grown wild.

So, too, are my bookshelves organized at their core, but they have long since been overgrown. Examine them shelf by shelf, and you will find order, a method to the madness, but the fences need to come down, more acreage is required.

This is the main room of my apartment, and since it is the place where I watch movies, either for review purposes or entertainment, the spot in my home that I look at almost as much as I look at the my computer and my desk:

I designed this bookshelf myself for my dad, a carpenter, to build. He ended up having my cousin do it, and they picked a ridiculously sturdy wood, making that the heaviest piece of furniture I own. Every time I move, I threaten to leave it for the next tenant to deal with. Maybe I should just get a cartoonist to help me? You know, coz they are so good at moving. (In comedy, that’s referred to as a “callback.”)

Top row left is my vanity shelf, full of books I’ve written and books by close collaborators like Joëlle Jones and Marc Ellerby. Below that are two sections of Oni Press books, which are now totally inadequate to handle the load.

There are various different sizes to the compartments because I designed it to hold not just books, but CDs and LPs, too. That means it’s a deep shelf, going at lest a foot back to accommodate the vinyl records. Believe it or not, but fifteen years ago when this was built, just about everything I owned could fit in this monstrosity.

I can’t keep that lower left shelf as densely packed as the rest because Sadie will just pull the books out to get back in.

To the left of the TV is the above shelf, full of Criterion DVDs, and to the right of the room, the area below.

One of the big pluses of my apartment is that the kitchen has a wide cabinet space with two shelves and glass doors. I use those two shelves, as well as the cabinets underneath, for more books. One of the many reasons not to have a significant other is that there are no arguments over whether or not this is a misuse of the kitchen. Yes, that’s right, it’s my desire to have my space the way I want it that keeps me single. It has nothing to do with me being old, ugly, and rotten of personality.

My kitchen also has room for this shelf:

That about covers my books, but I have more DVDs and CDs in my bedroom. This here is to the left of my desk.

And by the door as you come in:

The door is rarely closed except to get back to that other shelf, which is probably how that ancient Madonna poster has survived. It’s like she’s shushing folks so they don’t figure out what is hiding back there.

I’m about out of space in my place, so I’d better make some big money soon so I can afford to move someplace larger. Either that, or I’ll need to learn to live with less stuff. Nah, money and moving is probably easier. Plus, I know some comic book freelancers that could use my relocation as their dodge to get out of work.

You Have Killed Me

My name is Jamie S. Rich, and I am a crime junkie. Movies are my major poison, particularly of the classic film noir variety. You know, moody black-and-white flicks from the 1940s and 1950s featuring tough guys in nice suits slapping bad guys in even nicer suits all because of something going on with a girl who may or may not be nice, but who cares, because she dresses better than both of the fellas combined. That said, I also like crime comics, and thanks to some gentle urging from my artist, Joëlle Jones, I decided to act on that love and write my own. My week amongst the CBR blogosphere is meant to promote just that–the newly released Oni Press hardcover comic book You Have Killed Me. Written by myself and illustrated by Joëlle, it’s got all those things I mentioned above–including the slap!–and more. It’s been about two years in the making, and we’re excited to be getting it out on the shelves.

I realize that, for many, the idea of me writing a hardboiled crime comic book seems like a departure. I’m known as the goopy romance guy who likes to write dark relationship stories full of references to excellent bands no one has ever heard of. It’s a fair reputation, though a limited one, and soon to be shaken all to pieces once You Have Killed Me drops its foot on the collective neck of the reading public. I think followers of my work will be a little surprised that I have more range than they might have expected, but also that what I have done with Joëlle is exactly where my other work has been leading all this time.

Folks would also do well to remember that I spent a decade editing comics, starting at Dark Horse in 1994 at the tender age of 22 and then moving to Oni Press in 1998. In my time, I naturally gravitated to certain crime-related books. I assisted on some comics starring the Shadow, as well as Paul Pope’s futuristic con The One-Trick Rip-Off. I was part of the team on the Whiteout books by Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber, one of the more straightforward crime/mystery series you’re likely to find in comics, as well as editing Scott Morse’s more off-center Volcanic Revolver and Spaghetti Western. I even worked with Ed Brubaker, long before Criminal, serializing stories he and Jason Lutes were doing together and separately in Dark Horse Presents.

What I’m saying is, I have a pedigree. This dog is ready to show!

For this inaugural column, I have decided to write a little about four of my favorite crime comics that I was lucky enough to be editor on. That way, I can pretend it’s not entirely about me, when really, it still kind of is. (Egotists are cagey creatures.) The first three comics on my list are all books that, like You Have Killed Me, have a classic or historical setting; the third is a more innovative take on traditional noir tropes.

Dark Horse Presents

To lead, I’d like to resurrect what I consider to be one of the great lost comics of the 1990s and one of my favorite things I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching go from pencilled idea to inked masterpiece. As a longtime fan of Grendel, I was familiar with Pat McEown‘s work but not entirely hip to what a good cartoonist he really was. That started to change when we were doing Grendel Tales: Homecoming and I got to see him go with a more personal style than the one he had used on War Child, but it really struck home when he submitted a little short called “Wanted Man” to Dark Horse Presents.

Printed in DHP #130 (March 1998) as the cover feature, “Wanted Man” is at once an homage to private detective stories, both in the tradition of Raymond Chandler and Chester Gould, and a clever send-up of the same. In eight story-packed pages, Pat tells the tale of Frank Glock, a private dick who one day goes into his office only to discover that his all-important secretary has vanished. Determined to find his gal before anything bad happens to her, he goes around town shaking down friend and foe alike looking for information.

Wanted Man

Sounds like a pretty standard plot, I know, but most crime story plots are at this point. It’s in the telling that a comic like this really shines, and Pat McEown’s technique is a sight to behold. (When the story came out, we got enthusiastic fan letters from both Mike Mignola and Mike Allred.) Drawn with a clean line that fills out the roundness of Ernie Bushmiller with the lush inkwork of Dave Stevens, “Wanted Man” is taut with masterful cartooning. Beyond the quality of the story, it’s the quality of the storytelling. Pat boils standard pulp fiction devices down to iconic panels. When Frank Glock is racing against the clock, he is a mere shadow on the timepiece’s face, a puff of smoke trailing behind. “Going back to square one” ends up being Frank on a board game. When he has to give a rundown of his nemeses, it’s done as a diagram to show all of their nasty parts. In fact, the way he gives us the scoop on some of the possible suspects is part of the ingenious satirical device Pat employs to deconstruct the average detective story. “Wanted Man” is less a tale of an investigation and more the image of a gumshoe running through his mental rolodex. Any peeper worth his weight has picked up a cast of characters over the years, each with his or her own story to tell, and thus a P.I. of Frank’s years becomes burdened in the yarns he must relate. Every person, every object, has a history. If Frank can’t handle it, he’d better move to another town–though he’ll be sorry if he does before he reaches the punch line.

Far more serious in tone is the docudrama Union Station by Ande Parks and Eduardo Barreto. Originally published by Oni Press in 2003, the book is just now returning to print in a brand new edition, most likely to make sure that there are plenty of copies around now that the Michael Mann movie Public Enemies has hit theatres. You see, the two stories contain some of the same characters–the real-life lawman Melvin Purvis and outlaw Pretty Boy Floyd–and they even cover some of the same events. Ande Parks has a weird way of predicting movie trends. We had his Capote in Kansas book underway before either the dual Truman Capote celluloid projects, Capote or Infamous, had been announced. I am hoping to convince him to write his next book about how I get married to Public Enemies lead actress Marion Cotillard just to see if he can make stuff come true in real life, as well.

Union Station

Union Station is a semi-fictionalized account of a massacre that occurred at the train depot in Kansas City in 1933. It was a messy story, no one sure who fired first. If it was the feds, then a cover-up could be underway; if the crooks set it up, it’s a dangerous fraud; and what price will be paid by the reporter and the honest public servant who want to make sure the truth comes out? Ande heavily researched his story and approached the script with an exacting detail, and when Eduardo came on board to draw the book, we couldn’t believe our luck. Eduardo and I were pals from our time together on a comic series that is best left unnamed, but we had made the most of a bad experience. Within those scripts, there were chances for him to draw brief western and 1950s sci-fi sequences, and I knew those were his favorite parts. Honestly, I think doing a book like Union Station, an old-fashioned story about men with jobs to do and the gangsters who get in their way, was a dream come true for both of us.

The realistic style of Union Station couldn’t have been farther away from the cartoony aesthetic of “Wanted Man,” but the two approaches would meet and meld in a fantastic way in J. Torres and Scott Chantler’s Scandalous (Oni, 2004). Set in Hollywood during the Red Scare, this tale of backbiting, blackmail, and even some sex and violence exposes the dirty underpinnings of an alleged golden age. Torres’ story tells the tale of two scandal sheet rumormongers battling it out for the top of the celebrity gossip heap. What they forget in their rush to be the big cheese is that real lives are at stake, and if you threaten them, there will be a price to pay.

Scandalous reminds me of another favorite cinematic genre of mine: Hollywood movies about Hollywood. Humphrey Bogart playing a washed-up screenwriter in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place, Kirk Douglas’ unscrupulous producer in The Bad & the Beautiful (which is also how we referred to J. and Scott), or the entire cast of L.A. Confidential would have been right at home in this story. Like Pat McEown, however, Scott Chantler draws from a classic tradition of cartooning, which in its way gives Scandalous a feel more akin to the golden age of Hollywood it depicts by making it look almost innocent. Don’t be fooled, however, as any hardboiled anti-hero who has ever run into a femme fatale knows, the sweeter the package, the deadlier the aim.

My last choice of a book to highlight is not one that will immediately come to mind for most people when they think “crime fiction;” in fact, the writer and I even got into an argument about it at the time. When the photographic cover for the book came in, he thought it looked too much like an old paperback novel. I told him I thought that was a good thing. In my mind, Neal Shaffer, Christopher Mitten, and Dawn Pietrusko’s Last Exit Before Toll had the ultimate noirish plot, the story of a criminal on the lam–only there was no crime.

Last Exit Before Toll

One morning, fatigued business man Charles Pierce decides that, instead of taking his usual route to work, he will turn his car and go in the other direction. He will drive as long and as far as he can and eventually stops when his car goes kaput just outside of a small town where no one knows who he is or likely cares. There, Charles sets up a brand new life, meets a brand new girl, and begins to find the peace he has lacked. Even so, for as happy as he becomes, there is always the sense that what he left behind might catch up with him. He’s like Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past or Burt Lancaster in The Killers, two hoods who hide in the rural middle of nowhere to try to escape the criminal underworld after double-crossing their old bosses. Charles has no stolen loot and the mob boss is now an abandoned wife, but it’s still life or death for the poor sap. Having to go back would be just as bad as paying the piper in a hail of bullets.

I love Neal Shaffer’s writing. I am sure the more obvious pick for this column would be his seedy card-sharp comic One Plus One, but for as much as I liked that series, Last Exit Before Toll has more resonance for me. The script had the sparseness of an Antonioni movie (more on him in a couple of days) while also recontextualizing what to me was a standard man-on-the-run story and making it something more existential. By doing so, it revealed the philosophical structure that is often obscured by the glister of the ill-gotten gains in your standard cops-and-robbers tale. Plus, it was the debut book of Christopher Mitten, one of my last great finds as a comic book editor. No one knew him then, but people are paying attention to him now. His book Wasteland with Antony Johnston is soon to be Oni’s longest-running ongoing. All of that started here.

Last Exit Before Toll

And in a way, all of the above informed You Have Killed Me. Editing these books helped me cut my crime fiction teeth and showed me how the stories I loved could be tackled in the comic book format. More than ten years after Pat McEown’s “Wanted Man,” Frank Glock now hands the P.I. license to Antonio Mercer, the latest bloodhound to pick up a lost dame’s trail. When and if he finds her in You Have Killed Me, it’s likely to be in a different kind of place than Frank found his missing secretary, but if Joëlle Jones and I did our jobs right, it will be just as sexy and just as fun.

Guest blogger Jamie S. Rich is the author of many fine books, the latest of which is You Have Killed Me, reteaming him with Joëlle Jones. They previously collaborated on the acclaimed romance comic 12 Reasons Why I Love Her and have also co-created the forthcoming Oni comedy Spell Checkers. Rich is a novelist and a film reviewer, and his work can be followed at his blog, Confessions of a Pop Fan.