Art by Luis Guragna. Written by Matt Maxwell

Commentary follows.

I don’t really like splash pages.  When you’re as miserly as I am with page space, the idea of giving up an entire page to a single image is just unthinkable.  I only wrote one deliberate splash page in all of MURDER MOON (at the end of Chapter 3).  But that didn’t stop Luis from putting together pages that contained everything in a single panel and having things work beautifully.  I didn’t call these out, so pages like the above (and at the end of chapter 4, where he broke out some beautiful ones) were all his doing.

Containing everything in the darkened woods makes the isolation more palpable, makes the loneliness stronger (which also makes for an interesting contrast between this page and the end of Chapter 5 of MURDER MOON–though I used a different technique to enforce it there.)  Collins’ choice to protect Father Abbot instead of unloading his own guilt comes to serve as a defining character moment, served up with Luis’ blacks and moonlight.

This whole sequence is probably the most successful in all of chapter 1 of MURDER MOON.  Which really shouldn’t come as any surprise since we were all learning along the way (mostly me, but Luis, too–and you can see that over the course of the entire book, and even into the pages I’ve seen that he’s done for THE THIRSTY).  And if you’re not still learning,not still improving, then you gotta wonder why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Okay, there’s getting paid.  I won’t argue the practical utility of getting paid.

But even s0, like Mike Choi wisely said at the “How to Break into Marvel” panel “You’re never as good as you think you are.”  To which I’ll add, that if you’re not going to work at it, you’ll never get there.

STRANGEWAYS: THE THIRSTY will return in the first week of September to its normal MWF schedule, with bonus features in lieu of pages on Fridays.  Meanwhile, I’ve got to make sure the kids get adjusted to school starting again and I try to figure out how I can get everything done around a kindergarden timetable.  Wish me luck.  I’ll be back a couple times before the story starts up again, just not as frequently as usual.

Written by Matt Maxwell. Art by Luis Guragna.

Another of my favorite pages.  You know the drill.

And you all thought the wolf had gone, didn’t you?  Look closely in panel 5.  And there’s *two* of them now?  Aw geez, is life ever not fair.

Instead of baring his soul to Abbot, Collins backs down, unable or unwilling to deal with what he’s carrying around.  And then life intrudes, as it so often does.  Could be that the wolf is back.  Could be nothing.  Could be, like I said, that there’s a pair of wolves stalking him now.  We don’t know.  Collins doesn’t know.  And all of that uncertainty doesn’t prevent Collins from acting.  He’s standing ready, perhaps afraid, but not backing down from his task of keeping Abbot alive long enough for help to arrive.

That last panel gets me every time.  I liked it so much, it ended up on the banner art that I run at shows, as well as the back of the book itself, to give folks a taste of what’s to come.  I don’t know what it is, but to be able to conjure up entire worlds out of black ink scratchings on paper, that’s the real magic of comic art.  Sometimes, as a writer, I feel like I’m just along for the ride, particularly in the face of auteur theories of comics criticism, in that only writer/artists matter.  Needless to say, this makes writers like me (who can’t draw their way out of a paper bag) a little nervous.  Maybe we’re really not needed.  Maybe we’re just in the way.  Maybe those Image guys were right all along.

But then I’m reminded that it all starts with words on paper.  And while Luis wasn’t dictated directions completely, he didn’t come up with the story on his own either.

Still, I couldn’t do anything like panel 6 if my life depended on it.  Collins is sweating in spite of the cool, but his resolve is solid.  He’s not backing down.  He’s not going to abandon Abbot.  He’s going to gut that wolf with a calvary saber if he has to.

Let’s see how this all turns out on Monday, won’t we?

Art by Luis Guragna. Written by Matt Maxwell.

Find out why after the jump.

Panel 4.  That’s why.

There’s a lot of emotion, sadness, resignation, but not so much so that Collins is simply giving up.  In fact, if I were any kind of comics writer, I’d move that speech balloon to the following panel and let it sit all by itself and let the art do the heavy lifting.  This, as a writer coming from prose, is not always an easy thing to do.  It’s the same reason why a lot of writers over-dialogue their screenplays (not to mention that actors like to speak lines, ’cause the dialogue can do more of the work) instead of just letting the silent moments do the work.

And I’m far from the biggest fan of silent panels.  Often they’re used to say THIS IS AN IMPORTANT MOMENT, and not always subtly so.  You can argue about the subtlety of the above, and I’ll happily admit that I’m still learning this stuff.

I mean, the rest of the page is solid.  I like the use of symmetry in panels one and four, or rather asymmetry.  Again, if I had it to do over, I’d push panels five and six to the next page and let things breathe a bit more.  This isn’t an easy thing to do, either.  I mean, sure it is, but when you’re looking at twenty-two pages in a chapter, each one of them has to support its own weight or you’ll run out of room to actually tell the story.  Or you have to tell it differently, cutting out anything that isn’t the most absolutely essential story point.  That takes a lot of discipline, which I don’t always have.  It also takes the awareness of the work that only comes out of experience.  This is why you have to write comics to learn how to write them.  Anything else you’ve written simply won’t prepare you for the mechanics at work in sequential art.  So when those editors tell you that you need to write comics to learn to write comics, they’re not just blowing smoke.

Art by Luis Guragna. Written by Matt Maxwell

Commentary after the jump.

At least it wasn’t Clint Eastwood.  I mean, Clint’s as badass as they come, but Mitchum gets completely passed over when it comes to modelling western heroes.  Granted, Clint was the guy that broke the mold (well, Leone was, but Clint was the actor most clearly associated with it) so that’s probably why he sticks in people’s minds.

If’n you want to know the truth, I’d have cast Burt Lancaster in the role of Collins.  He could do that haunted thing.  Mitchum might be too forceful for what I had in mind, but I’d not have complained given a time machine and an opportunity to cast him.

So, here we have Collins not only confessing his former life as a soldier, but that he didn’t trade on it, given the opportunity.  This seems to me to be a pretty defining character trait.  Well, that and the fact that maybe he’s not just unwilling to trade on it, but that he doesn’t want people to know about it.  Maybe something bad happened back during the War.  Maybe.

Huh.  I used “sure” about three too many times in that dialogue in the second row there.  I really should learn to proofread.

But other than that, the dialogue does pretty well.  You’d be surprised how many expressions I didn’t actually make up.  I’ve had a number of people compliment me on the realistic nature of the dialogue (some of them wisely say “effective”) ’cause it’s about as accurate as Shakespeare’s was.  My guess is that if I took the effort to do 100% accurate to the period dialogue, it’d be 1) not particularly readable and 2) not much fun.  I’m not a cultural anthropologist or historian.  I do however, listen to how people talk (sure, I do) and know that there’s a lot of shortcuts going on in language, particularly when spoken, and that people sometimes like to make up interesting phrases to spice things up.

In short, don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.  There’s a number of western slang sites out there, and I’ve perused them, but I don’t study them religiously.  I don’t pepper every phrase with era-appropriate language.  I do try to keep the dialogue readable, however, and I do try to spice it with some authenticity (or at least something that sounds authentic) from time to time to anchor things in the period.  I’m pretty sure that there’s more linguistic anachronisms than not.  I’m okay with that.

You’d think, that lookng at most of the page, that Luis doesn’t really do facial expressions.  Aside from the closeup in the first panel, the faces are minimal, sketchy.  And it serves the art decently, but when you hit that last panel, with the tight zoom in on Collins, and the detailed expression in the firelight, you really get it then.  Abstract gets contrasted with concrete, making the concrete that much stronger when you finally get to it.  Don’t be afraid to mix up your style on the page to make a point or to make it stronger.  This isn’t something that you necessarily think out beforehand, but can present itself as the page is being made up.  I certainly didn’t call it out in explicit detail in the script, but it does work very effectively when you actually read it.

Okay, time for back-to-school shopping for the kids.  Did I mention that I can’t wait for the kids to get back to school?  Four whole hours by myself to work every day?  I don’t know that I’ve worked four hours in a single sitting since June.

Back on Wednesday.

Art by Luis Guragna. Written by Matt Maxwell

Commentary after the jump.

I have to say, I really liked how this last sequence played out.  Probably not enough *happened* for a lot of people’s tastes, but we get a real sense of the backstory of the characters, Collins in particular, and how they relate to one another.  A lot of that is done through the art.  Pay attention to the expressions that Luis chooses and how he draws them.  I’ve said it before.  I’m not really concerned if the artists I work with are the most conventional and beautiful draftsmen (or women, since at least two of the artists I’ve hired on for THE LAND WILL KNOW–aka STRANGEWAYS 3– are of the distaff persuasion), but that they can get the characters on the page.  And you do that by rendering recognizable emotions, not just action.  Don’t get me wrong, action is good and fine, but it’s not the whole enchilada.

We start off with a far shot, showing the isolation of the scene, even though there’s a cheery fire burning.  But we all know that when you light the scene with a campfire, you get a lot of shifting shadows that can play tricks on your eyes as easily as they can light the way.  Web’s wounded, but mobile.  Collins is shaken, but holding together and Father Abbot is is pretty haggard shape.  The wolf could be right out there, just no way of knowing.  This is far from secure.

A little more backstory sneaks in, but by way of conversation, not raw exposition.  Webster knows the Sheriff of Silver Branch.  Collins is an ex-Union officer, but keeps that well hidden.  Neither of them is sure what they’ve just come up against or how to stop it should it show up again.  All of these are critical story points that you can’t simply walk up and say out loud.  They have to come out in interactions between the characters, not by way of lecturing.  If I learned anything useful from the Robert McKee STORY book and seminar, it’s that you use “exposition as ammunition”.  If characters have backstory or history, have them use it in their confrontations or interactions so you can introduce it seamlessly.  Sometimes that works easily and sometimes it’s like pulling teeth.  You’re never going to get every nuance out, so don’t try.  Worry about what’s important to the characters and have them express it.

Collins might not like bragging about his past in the Union Army, but here he’s making a point that he can take care of himself and it makes more sense for him to stay back and protect Father Abbot.  It works in the context of the scene, and gives the readers a look into how he works.  There’s a bit more of that in the coming pages, and I happen to think that it worked out pretty darn well.

But then I’m biased.

See you all on Monday.

Art by Luis Guragna. Written by Matt Maxwell

Commentary after the jump.

I really love the last panel on this one, not unlike the last panel on page, what was it, 14?  Good reaction shot on Collins, good expression.  While before, he was determined and ready to face anything, in this one we see him horrified at what the Wolf has done to the passengers that had been under his protection.  At least until he wandered off and tried to save Webster.

I don’t really love the quick fix on panel 3.  If I hadn’t printed too many of these in the first place, I’d have a new run and fix little stuff like that.  But then I’d try to fix all the little things that were wrong with the book in the first place.  Then I’d never write another thing again.  I’d constantly be polishing the old stuff, even when I’d ended up just rubbing it down to nothing.  You’ve got to be able to let some of this stuff go.  Though it’s tougher when you end up revisiting it.  I’d like to think that I’ve become a better writer.  There’s times that I feel that the guys at Estudio Haus did all the heavy lifting and made the script into something readable (in truth, it was a joint effort, but still, it’s easy to diminish your own contributions at times.)

But then I’m sure that Luis would pick apart the things that he sees wrong as well.  He’s pretty driven.  Just wish he lived closer by so that I could tap him on the shoulder instead of relying on email.

So, back to the page at hand.  Still a lot needing to be conveyed.  Collins has whacked the Wolf on the head with his shotgun and somehow turned him around.  What’s up with that?  He unloaded the shotgun at point blank range but didn’t drive it off, and yet, this has given the Wolf pause.

Then there’s the matter of the passengers in the coach.   He’s compelled to see this through even when Webster presents the purely rational or pragmatic angle that whatever was in there with the Wolf isn’t going to be more than hamburger.  There’s not a lot of reason to argue that point.

But sometimes the coldly rational isn’t the only way to go.

Back on Friday to see who made it out of that wreckage alive.

Written by Matt Maxwell. Art by Luis Guragna.

Commentary after the jump.

Even on an action-oriented page, I can still make the artists draw five panels.  If I had a brain in my head, I could spread this out over two pages and maybe get a slice of the original art sales as well.  I know, I was just being a naive first-time writer and trying to get the story on the page.  But that and stupid determination will get you far.

And I’ll admit here that it doesn’t resemble cowboys and werewolves so much as it’s a scene out of THE HOWLING, only not as well-lit.  That’s still my yardstick for a scary werewolf movie and is the one I keep coming back to.  Yeah, THE HOWLING was as much tongue-in-cheek (thanks, Joe Dante) as it was a “serious” horror movie.  And nobody tries for serious as hard as I do.  Someday I’ll learn to relax.  Maybe.

Funny, the new thing is “Hey, Hollywood is just catching up to comics now, isn’t that great?”  But when I was writing MURDER MOON, I was just trying to nail the basics of storytelling and get something on the page that the artists could make sense of.  Hell, there’s days when I’d settle for the most boring six-panel page layout of mine to make a lick of sense and have any reader be able to pick up and have it work.  Sure, I want comics to deliver stuff that I can’t see anywhere else, but I also want to be able to wrest a story out of it all, y’know?

This leads back to writing fight/action scenes and how it’s tougher than it might appear.  And it’s also why my directions for such are pretty minimal at best.  I wanted to make sure that 1) Collins shoots the wolf, 2) It apparently has no affect, 3) Webster has to get bit by the wolf, 4) Collins smashes the butt of his shotgun on the critter’s head, having no time to reload.  All that stuff got on the page.  I don’t care much *how* it got on the page.  And yes, for my personal taste, Luis could have made this page less fussy, with larger shapes dominating the action.  But this is collaboration.  If I want to be a panel fascist, then I get to draw my own material (and all of you should thank your lucky stars that I learned to let go on that point.)

See you all Wednesday.

Written by Matt Maxwell. Art by Luis Guragna.

My, Grandma.  What big OH MY GOD!

Commentary follows.

See, if I was a comic writer who knew what he was doing, I’d do the reveal of the wolf on a page turn.  Instead, I put it at the bottom of a page, on a large area where your eye is naturally going to gravitate towards in comparison to the smaller panels.  This is something you learn on your second project.  Well, that and learning to let the story to have an extra page here and there.

If this was a manga series, I could have built in several pages of tension to this moment, instead of just one or two.  But when you’re trying to move a story along in a 22-page comic and you’re paying the artists by the page, sometimes reality eclipses what you’d like to pull off artistically.  As it stands, I still think MURDER MOON #1 (or what it would have been) is pretty lightweight in terms of the amount of story it tells.  But then I grew up reading bronze age comics that have the density of a white dwarf star on the verge of becoming a black hole.  Go ahead, try to skim one of those.  It’ll still take you twenty minutes.

I do like how the first four panels are very much shape-driven and not overly-rendered, but when you look at the last panel, you get a lot of detail and texture.  Maybe too much for the instant that panel takes place in, but that’s okay.  Sometimes little things like the hairiness of the hand that’s grabbing you is what sticks in your brain.  And lookit those fingernails.  It’s a safe bet that he’s never cleaned them.  Ever.

By the by, this was the last page of the ashcan version of the Strangeways preview that I circulated for awhile before the book itself came out.  I kinda wanted to leave folks hanging, wanting more by the time the first issue (and then finally the trade) came out.  Lucky you, however, you’ll get another couple weeks of pages.

Next week, people.

Written by Matt Maxwell. Art by Luis Guragna.

See, if this was a movie, they’d be playing the creepy music, ramping it up long and slow, so that you couldn’t remember exactly when you started hearing it.

Commentary after the jump.

I love how this page starts out with everything being fine, even Webster making jokes at the expense of Mr. Chilton’s courage.  Then Luis puts in that beautiful reaction shot that says it all, close in enough that the expressions of worry are unmistakable.  Following that is the shot from within the coach, and if you’ve ever watched a monster movie in your entire life, then that’s all you need to know about how bad things are going to get.

And hey, wasn’t that hole smaller earlier on?  It’s like something kinda opened it up some.  Or maybe that’s just your imagination.  Moonlight does funny things to your eyes.  Or maybe it makes you see things clearly, and maybe the situation was pretty scary all along.

Luis really did a great job with atmosphere on the page.  I could strip the dialogue right out of this and follow what’s going on just fine.  Though I’m pleased to say that it adds to things, like with Webster trying to crack wise and then try and explain what’s going on.  But that’s kinda the point.  If your dialogue is just reiterating what’s going on in the image, then maybe it doesn’t need to be there at all, or at the very least it needs to be re-examined.  Of course, I love to break all kinds of my own sweeping rules, such as you should never have a conversation run longer than two pages (I’m about to letter one that runs for three).  Maybe it’s just better to be cognizant of the fact that you are indeed going long on this scene and maybe you should really make it pay off to have it worth everyone’s while.

You know, the rest of that page could be pretty terrible (which it isn’t) and still, that last image would anchor the whole thing quite nicely. Look at it more closely, though and it’s really the first time you see Collins’ face clearly on the page, the rest of it being in shadow.  If you scan the page from top to bottom, you get a nice press-in effect, like the camera closing in on things.  In fact, you could almost read it as two columns top to bottom and still have things play out clearly.  Not really the intention when I wrote the page, but sometimes (quite often, really) the artists come up with ways to surprise you, even when you’re the guy who wrote the script in the first place.  Which is half the fun of writing these things, seeing how your collaborators take your script and really run with it.  I couldn’t ever pull off the absolute and total command of the page/panel that Alan Moore does, for instance.  I dunno, maybe in the future.  But even then, shouldn’t there be room for accidents and innovations?

Back on Friday.

Written by Matt Maxwell. Art by Luis Guragna.

Commentary after the jump.

Collins isn’t sure of what he’s seen, Webster seems pretty certain after a moment of thought.  All the same, he was sure it wasn’t all that friendly.  Guess the wolf stuck around to check out his handiwork.

By the by, “Crow Bait” is the name of the first chapter.  You don’t get that unless you’re reading the actual book, sorry.  But once you hear the phrase, it’s pretty clear what it means.  Western idioms were pretty pragmatic like that, though sometimes they had their moments of poetry, rough-hewn as it might be.  The language in MURDER MOON is as fake as any western dialect you’re going to hear.  But I tried to make it flow decently and tried to make it sound unique, downplaying the ‘pardners’ and ‘varmints’ and other Gabby Hayes-isms.  I’ve been told by people whose opinions I trust that the dialogue is the best thing about the book.

Which kinda makes me wonder about what the worst thing is.  I try not to dwell on that.

Yes, I named the horse “Joss.”  I didn’t think of any other famous Joss’s that would mind.  If so, I apologize in advance.

As for the rest of it, perhaps a touch obvious.  There’s some restating what’s going on in the panel, but sometimes a little reinforcement isn’t a bad thing.  At least I didn’t have Webster pointing into the night and screaming IT’S DARK.  But by the same token, there’s a lot of dialogue here.  One of these days I’ll get the balance right.

As for me?  I’m writing this while preparing for SDCC, and you’ll read it as I make my way back.  I still don’t know how I’m getting there.  The drive sounds relaxing, oddly.  But would take a long time.  Well, hopefully I’ll decide before it’s too late.

EDIT to add that I completely panicked about whether or not I’d actually posted this and had to check from the gate at the airport to make sure that I hadn’t spaced out totally.  I guess I’m relieved that I didn’t.

Secondarily, belated congratulations to our host site, CBR and Jonah Weiland on their Eisner win for best comics-related publication.  Well-deserved and likely the closest this writer will ever come to that particular stage.  Take a bow and don’t forget to remember the moment from time to time, Jonah.

Art by Luis Guragna. Written by Matt Maxwell

Commenting stuff following jumping thing

Woah. Action? Running? Not just standing around being scared? Holy crap! Now we’re getting somewhere!

AND LOOK THERE’S A WEREWOLF RIGHT THERE!

Or is it. Could be a sasquatch. Bigfoot’s got a might big range. Dude gets around.

Sorry, it’s hard for me to get in the space of being serious and insightful. Just spent a little more than an hour being interviewed by Paula B. for http://www.writingshow.com/ and I think I used up all my serious writer talk about the medium. The interview will be going up sometime in August. I’ll let you all know when that goes up so you can spend an hour listening to me tell prose writers about the difference between that and writing for comics.

Okay, page 12. Ah, I do that “overlapping narration/dialogue” thing again. See that? I kinda like it still. Makes the panels seem less like isolated moments cut off from one another and more like continuous and flowing time. That panel with Collins and the wolf facing one another still knocks me out. I loved it the second I saw it.

Sure, the wolf is HUGE. Bulked out like Banner on Gamma Rays, big and imposing. Sure, he’s actually on the skinny, THE HOWLING side of the werewolf spectrum, but we get a shot of how Collins being all jacked up on adrenalin and fear actually SEES him. Go comics, you go.

Notice that Collins isn’t all “That was a goddamn werewolf and I know that the best way to kill a goddamn werewolf is with some goddammn silver bullets, end of story.” He doesn’t know what he just saw and took a shot at. He’s still not buying into Webster’s story (which Webster himself seems to believe a little too deeply in.)

Okay, breaktime next week. Everyone’s going to be at SDCC and on Twitter (remember, you can follow me at highway_62 on Twitter, where some wry observations may emerge from the show floor and you can have fun at other people’s expense along with me) so there’s no reason to update pages until I get back.

See y’all then. Have a real cool time.

Written by Matt Maxwell. Art by Luis Guragna.

Commentary follows immediately after the place where you jump to the rest of the article.

Huh.  Lookit that.  Webster seems to have made it.  Will wonders never cease?

Luis still strikes a nice balance between a graphic approach for the character renderings and more detailed backgrounds to anchor them (well, most of the time).  Funny how I’m so caught up in writing and producing the damn thing that I miss out on a lot of the little details that he put in.  The framing of that second panel is perfect, with Collins off-center enough and an expression that utterly captures the anxiety of having to step out into the dark unarmed with…something out there waiting for you to make a mistake.

I’m wondering how many rules I broke with placing dialogue balloons over panel borders and using them to link panels.  Granted, it’s not as clumsy as actually drawing arrows in to lead the reader over a confusing layout, but it’s probably not the best way to handle things.  Well, it was that or shrink it down so it was really teeny, tiny and not in the way of that second-to-last panel.  Really one day I’ll learn to script so that I can squeeze all the dialogue into the panels that I call for.

I dunno, though.  I kinda like it, but I imagine that it’s a stylistic tic that drives a lot of people nuts.  Though really, I did letter things too big, so it’s a problem of my own creation.

And again, this is a page heavy on atmosphere.  Lots of sizzle, but not a lot of steak yet.  This is an issue I’m still trying to deal with as well.  I read a lot of horror comics, but very very few are scary at all.  There’s plenty of horror comics that are just, you know, zombies and brains and guts and stuff.  NOT THAT THERE’S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT.  Put the cleavers down.  But there’s more to it than that.  Is anything in STRANGEWAYS scary?  Should I even be calling it horror?  The answer is “likely not, but it’s really a convenient label that’s not entirely inaccurate.”  You start calling things dark fantasy and people imagine black unicorns in sunglasses.  So horror it is.  Even if it’s not particularly scary.

On that note, is Webster okay?  Is he gonna make it through the night?  Only the werewolf knows.

See you all on Friday, after which we take a break because nobody’s going to be reading any of these and instead will be chasing down every scrap of info on BLACKEST NIGHT.  Yeah, I’m jealous.  I wish I had a tenth of Geoff Johns’ readers.  But at least I’ll admit it.

Written by Matt Maxwell. Art by Luis Guragna

Commentary after the jump.

Finally!  We’re out of that suffocating carriage.  I never thought we’d leave.

Whaddya mean “that was only two pages.”?

So yeah, there’s the infamous Clint Eastwood panel.  Could’ve even been a swipe for all I know.  Again, great character shorthand, but I didn’t want to write Collins like that, nor did I want him to look like that.  Truthfully, I might’ve been better off keeping Collins as a greenhorn, a tenderfoot, an…Easterner through and through.  Every time you have a grizzled cowboy, it’s only natural to impose the Eastwood template on him.

Here’s one of the things that got overlooked that I probably should have punched up a little bit.  Collins refers to his shotgun as “fancy”.  This gets paid out in about seven or so pages, and I’ll talk ya through it once I get there.  Just remember it when things get hairy is all I’m saying.

Luis, as usual, did a great job with the atmosphere here.  I really shouldn’t have wrecked it with my word balloons that don’t need to be there, other than to reassure insecure writers that their input is important and vital to the continuing telling of the story.  I harp a lot on comics writers who don’t add text when there’s space for it, or when it could flesh things out a little more fully.  But by the same token, putting in stuff just to put stuff in will take away more than it contributes.  Do we really need Collins asking “What the hell happened to you?” to the maimed horse?

Now, could this sequence be shortened a bit?  Sure.  Not much story being imparted, other than Collins being as full of bravado as any cowboy when he’s got a gun at the ready.  Is that important?  Probably just as important as him not looking as Clint Eastwood.

See you on Wednesday, where I break the shocking news that I won’t be running the strip the week of Comic-Con because, really, who the heck wants to read old stuff when there’s going to be SO MUCH PRESS coming out of SDCC to compete with.  It’s like shouting in a hurricane.  Maybe it makes you feel better, but its not going to get your message across.

Written by Matt Maxwell. Art by Luis Guragna.

Commentary after the jump, y’all.

This one doesn’t read so well all by itself, it seems.  But then I think that having to deliver one page at a time isn’t the best way to tell stories.  However, if I dropped a chapter at a time, I bet it’d slip through the cracks.  This one of the parts of this whole webcomics thing that I don’t really like.  I guess people can group up pages if they really want to.

Okay, enough digressing.  The content’s free, right?  That’s the really important thing.  It keeps you from going back to work for a minute or so.

But in reality, I probably should have found a way to combine this page and the previous page.  Not the most egregious error I’ve committed, but doesn’t really do much to enhance things.  Here, I was really aiming for some more atmosphere and tension, and it would be a lot more effective in a film presentation as opposed to comics.  I probably could have called out more interesting shots or had a “Hush up a second!” moment with the wolf half-visible.  Hindsight is a harsh mistress.

Though I did manage to make it so that Collins handicapped himself a bit further by giving up his pistol and going out there unarmed.  That plays out a little bit more on the following page.  I’ll also note here that the last panel is really the first instance of Luis going out of his way to do Collins as Clint Eastwood, which I had to discourage.  Blondie, aka the Man With No Name does cast a long shadow over modern westerns.  And rightfully so.  But all the same, I wanted to have Collins be his own man as it were.  I’m sure that I still lean a little heavily on that character for shorthand, which I should probably be more aware of in the future.  Live and learn.

Luis still has a nice command of shadow and light here, though the renderings are rougher than what his final work would end up looking like by the time chapter 4 finished off.

Anyways, let’s move past this kinda superfluous page and see what’s waiting outside for Collins on Monday.

Written by Matt Maxwell. Art by Luis Guragna.

Commentary follows the jump

Interestingly, this is the first page that Luis drew, as part of a five-page tryout for the book several years ago.  I started with this sequence because it balanced between heavy atmosphere, characterization and some backgrounds/environments.  In other words, allowing a range of drawings and seeing if the story could be told on the page as it was more or less written.

If you’re ever in the position of having to evaluate artists for books that you’re writing, you’d be well advised to do the same.  Don’t trust a pinup.  Not to be snide, but anyone can draw a static drawing.  It can show off rendering skills, sure, but doesn’t really show off storytelling skills, which is the most important thing when it comes to drawing comics.  I mean, unless you’re putting together a whole book of pinups.  In that case, go nuts.  But it’s rare that a single page can or even tries to tell a story.  This would lead back to one of my pet peeves in comics (of which I have surprisingly few).  That being the “iconic” static shot of a character for the cover of your book.  Boy does that ever not sell your book.  Unless you’re putting Scott Campbell on the artwork or something.  Still, that won’t sell it to *me.*

So this page is something of a challenge in that it’s a pretty static setting.  How do you make that interesting (particularly when there’s a second page in the same setting following this one).  So I was curious to see how things would get laid out.  Granted it’s not the most exciting layout, but it’s not all six panels of the same thing over and over.  However, Luis conveyed Collins’ attempting to calm the passengers, the edginess of Mr. Chilton and the pained perseverance of Father Abbot.

Also note that that we’re not getting the werewolf shoved in our face right now.  We’re seeing it through the sound effects and the reactions of the characters, and I think pretty effectively so.  And here’s where I fess up in that I only did about seven pieces of effects lettering in all of MURDER MOON (most of which jump out with their amateurishness).  Have fun and see if you can spot the ones I did (and no, there’s none on this page.)

More on Friday.  See you all then.

Written by Matt Maxwell. Art by Luis Guragna.

Commentary after the jump

Ah, the magic of comics and having big things happening by implication.  I’d have loved to have a couple pages to really give a sense of the chaos and confusion caused by the wagon overturning and having everything thrown topsy turvy, with some nice shots of the reins twisting around and all.  But the truth of it was that I had more than 21 more pages of story to shove in and not enough space to do it in.  I’ve said this before and I’ll keep saying it.  Writing for a single issue is pretty tough unless you just want to air things out and give them a lot of space.

But when you’re paying for the artists to draw that seven-page-coffeeshop scene, you look at pacing a little differently.  Might not be a good thing.

So in this case I gave myself all of one page to get this piece of the story out there.

And really, by not showing all of what went on, we get heightened tension and confusion.  Is Webster okay?  Did the wolf eat him?  Is the wolf right out there just waiting for someone to stick their head out and get it bitten off.  This all pays out a bit more over the next couple pages.  The confusion is amplified by the unusual panel layouts, which start out pretty straightforward on the top of the page and then get a lot crazier along the bottom, with the “camera” at dutch angles and reinforcing the feeling of the world being turned round and round.

Funny, but I never noticed the wolf sound effect in the last panel until just now.  And I wrote the damn thing.  Guess I wasn’t paying as much attention as I’d have liked to.

Oh, and “CRUNK” might be my favorite sound effect in the whole book.  Makes me wanna dance, it does.

See you all back on Wednesday.

Art by Luis Guaragna. Written by Matt Maxwell

Commentary after the jump.

Now we get a look at who else the coach is carrying.  Light load.  Just a father with a daughter of indeterminate age and an older priest.  Guess there’s not a lot of people who want to ride out into the haunted frontier after dark.  Or maybe I didn’t want to invent any other characters.  Could be.

Oh yeah, and there’s the werewolf who’s now chewing on the lead horse.

This was one of my favorite pages out of chapter one, mostly for the great shot of the coach and the werewolf taking it down.  But it was also tricky, since I didn’t want to give too much of the monster away so quickly.  That last panel was actually redrawn to obscure the wolf even further, which probably wasn’t needed, given the size I was going to print the book at.

But, truth be told, I’m always going to err on the side of showing less, not more.  I’m not a big believer in over the top gore or shock scenes.  This does come around to bite me on the butt later, and things get overly dark and overly shadowy in an effort to promote atmosphere over visual scares.  It’s a tricky balance.  Have I said that before.

Remember, in horror comics, the reader gets to control the pace.  Comics reading is much more active than movie viewing.  In a movie (not a video), the viewer is subject to the whims of the director (and editor) and all they can do is close their eyes or bite their nails.  Comics readers can flip around, stop time, change which slice of time they’re looking at, flip forward effortlessly.  This is why real horror is hard to pull off (and I’m not suggesting that I have, just making a statement about the mechanics at work.)  You can toss bucketfuls of blood and guts and have bad guys violating victims in all kinds of horrible ways, but I’m not sure that exactly makes for real horror.

However, I’m a guy who has, with a straight face, recommended CHINATOWN and FIGHT CLUB as examples of “modern” horror movies, so I may be insane.

So, I wonder.  What happens when you take out a coach’s lead horse at speed?  Bet it isn’t pretty.

But you’ll have to wait until Monday to find out.

Without further blather, however, is page 5 of the MURDER MOON preview that’ll be running over the summer.

Written by Matt Maxwell. Art by Luis Guragna

Commentary after the jump.

Here we get a good look at the kind of grace that Luis uses to draw the werewolf.  Instead of a big hulking brute (which the wolf does appear as from time to time), he’s all agility and focused strength.

Webster continues to be bothered by something that he won’t really talk about directly, maybe he feels that Collins won’t believe him?  Maybe it’s too frightening to talk about?  But we do get the feeling that he knows about the wolf and that the stories really do get to him.  Collins isn’t taking any of it.

And we get a little payoff from Webster’s dialogue a couple of pages back too.  I’m pretty sure I totally planned that.

I will say that the page ends up being more interesting than it probably has any right to be, since the script is effectively “two guys talking on a stagecoach”.  Sure, there’s the shot of the wolf at the start to show that they’re actively being pursued.  So the reader gets to know something that the characters can only suspect.  That’s suspense, baby!

Okay, well, at least it was an attempt at suspense.

I do like how the last two panels turned out, neatly elapsing time as Collins makes his way to the stagecoach’s interior.

Man, this lettering is getting painful to look at.  Those balloons are sooo wide.  Too bad I have other, far more important things, to take care of instead of fixing lettering on a book that will likely not need reprinting for a long time.

Back on Friday.  And remember, I can’t answer questions if there aren’t any asked.  Feel free to jump in on the comments section and ask me what the hell I was thinking.

Art by Luis Guragna. Written by Matt Maxwell

Commentary after the jump

The second page of talking heads continues.  Though I was able to break it up a little bit.  And Luis does interesting things with the shadowing that keeps the monotony back for at least a little bit.

Ah, and there’s the first appearance of the internal monologuing.  At least I didn’t use thought balloons (or as I’ve been told, “bubbles”).  I’m still not clear on the current disdain for internal monologue.  Granted, I’m not having it run for pages and pages, usually as an ironic addition or comment on the dialogue.  Though I know I end up doing it at times that I perhaps shouldn’t (“Must…grab…branch…”).

I’m convinced that writers hate internal monologuing because it’s considered passé in motion pictures.  What’s the single most reviled part of the otherwise revered BLADE RUNNER?  You guessed it.  Not sure that it’ll ever swing back around.  But to my mind, leaving that out is like leaving out the color green or refusing to use a Phillips-head screwdriver because “Phillips-head is stupid.”  They’re all tools, just you need to use them judiciously.

We get a lot more of what’s eating at Collins, and we’re more or less led to believe that this is the inciting incident for the story and perhaps central to it.  I’ll tell you, I got a lot of grief for how I chose to handle it.  But more of that later.

For some reason I always loved panel two here, where Luis puts Webster in a vignette.  That rendering was always very appealing to me and I was bothered that I had to lay so much dialogue over it.  I like to think I recognize now when I need to re-flow things, but I bet I don’t.  And again, so much of the story was being carried in the dialogue, that trimming it would be trimming out backstory that helped flesh things out.

Look carefully in panel six and you’ll note that it’s not a shrubbery that’s drooling at them, but the wolf.  This is one of the very few things that made it in from the original, original Strangeways script to what actually got printed.  I wanted to expand this, to have the wolf hunting the stage and give it a little more time to breathe.  But there’s very little breathing space in this script.

See you all on Wednesday.

Art by Luis Guragna. Written by Matt Maxwell

Commentary after the jump.

Finally!  Cowboys!  Well, coachmen, at any rate.  They’re almost like cowboys.

Truthfully, I had a lot of issues with this page.  Dialogue placement mostly.  I didn’t want to lose any of it, but fitting it and being able to follow it was a big headache.  Only seven panels, but five of them are in about half of the page.  That’s madness.  And it’s a pretty dialogue-heavy page too.  I’d just come off a screenwriting seminar and unfortunately I’d retained habits that work decently on the screen but make for jammed pages.

The back and forth works great when you don’t have a space limitation.  I could see dragging this to a second page, but I had a lot of ground to cover and asking artists to draw talking heads for page after page is unfair.  And it’s boring.  But writers often like to talk stuff out, so you have to balance the two.  I still need to keep that in mind.

Of course, the first time we hear Collins say anything (though the balloons don’t have a tail pointing to him), he’s not only swearing, but borderline blaspheming.  There’s a point to that, but believe it or not, I’ve heard retailers complain about comics that bear this same level of language, specifically the blaspheming part.  Community standards and all that, which I notice, but wasn’t going to change, particularly in a book that wasn’t ever aimed at little varmints.  Or marmots, or whatever.

The towns mentioned, but for Silver Branch, by the by, are all places named in Tom Waits songs.  But you all knew that already, right?

So back to the dialogue.  Again, there’s a lot going on in here.  We have to establish Collins right out of the gate, establish that the driver, Webster, is pushing things hard, that he’s on edge.  And really both men are, but for different reasons.  Collins is on edge because of something that he’s carrying with him, and Webster is because they’re out in this particular area after dark.  And additionally, that there’s a concrete reason for doing so, even it’s a little nebulous at the moment.

You can choose to connect it to the Wolf’s impending hunt/rampage from the previous page or not.  But it’ll be made explicit soon enough.

In that second to last panel, I love the use of the word “worry”.  We don’t get to use that enough.

Looking at the art on these pages, it’s amazing for me to see how much Luis progressed.  Not that these pages are bad.  Rough perhaps, and a little cluttered.  But as the book progressed, I was stunned to see his development as an artist.  If you’d seen the pages for “Red Hands” like I have (that being the second feature in THE THIRSTY) you could be forgiven for suspecting that they were by different artists.

Oh, that lettering…  I better not look at it any longer, else I’ll end up redoing it all.  But I can’t justify the time expenditure.  You can see how I sorta overdid the “rounded corner/picture tube” shape that I read about, probably in Starkings’ lettering guide.  Don’t blame him for my indiscretions.  They’re mine alone.

Back on Monday.