It's been a minute...
A surprise new comic, a con appearance, changes to my process, and what's next.
As you might have noticed, I haven’t sent out a newsletter in quite some time. There are a lot of reasons for this but the biggest is this: With the efficacy of social media fully cratered, this newsletter is my only reliable way to reach people, and I want to save my shots for when I’ve actually got something to promote. To wit…
At the risk of namedropping, Riley Gale, vocalist for crossover thrash legends Power Trip, was a dear friend of mine and his passing during the height of the pandemic took an enormous amount of wind out of my sails. Not only was it the first time I’d lost someone so close to my own age but Riley and I talked frequently about music, comics, art…everything, and we had only grown closer during the pandemic. What’s more, Power Trip was on the verge of such big things and it hurts to think of what the world lost at the same time as I lost my friend. Of course, not to mention the impact on his family, bandmates and other loved ones.
I last spoke with Riley about a week before he died, all about his wanting to get more involved in comics, not as a writer like so many carpetbaggers from other mediums, but as an editor and curator. He legitimately adored the medium and wanted desperately to get more eyes on the very specific types of comics that he loved and had begun pulling things together for an anthology. In the wake of his passing, Patrick Bryant and other fine folks leapt into the breach and have compiled Cicadas, available now from Lockin’ Out Records, with all proceeds going to Foundation 45, “which provides mental health and recovery services to the Dallas/Fort Worth creative community, in Riley’s honor.” For more details, visit Brooklyn Vegan.
For my contribution to Cicadas, I worked with another friend of Riley’s, my brother JB Roe. In the wake of a run of amazing Dick Tracy villain drawings, we’d been talking about using that approach for something that aligned better with our politics and philosophical outlook. Thus, BIG BRICK BRUISER was born.
Putting aside JB’s predictably incredibly drawing, colors, and letters (which he did all himself!), the most notable thing about this story is the process we used on it. Early on, JB asked if, along with a script, I’d be willing to do thumbnails off of which he could work. It wasn’t something I’d done in ages, when I was still trying to draw my own art comics.
I agreed, thinking that it would be a good exercise and help make me a stronger writer and, allow me be completely honest: I was right. In the course of doing thumbs, I realized that some of my script should change to better fit the page. Nothing major – just an additional close-up here, a few panels reordered there – but they were the type of changes that a writer wouldn’t even know were necessary unless they were actually grappling with the layout of the page. Many writers say that they do this in their head, including me in the past, but the simple fact is that just thinking about the page is insufficient.
To paraphrase my beloved uncle Howard Chaykin – one of comics’ foremost theorists and a national treasure to boot – comics’ core storytelling unit isn’t the issue, the scene, or even the panel; it’s the page. And, accordingly, page layout isn’t just an important thing, it’s the most crucial component of a comic, one of which most contemporary writers completely wash their hands. Doing these thumbs, and seeing the changes that JB made to make the final product even better, really drove this point home to me and has fundamentally impacted my approach to writing comics.
Following the pop culture infusion that comics received in the 1960s, the next big innovation began with writers of the 1970s, for whom the primary mass media delivery mechanism for fiction was paperback novels. This led to not only frequent adaptations of various sword and sorcery heroes but also a more densely written approach to comics that reached its apex with the 1980s work of folks like Chris Claremont and Alan Moore, who made frequent and compelling use of blocks of novel-esque narration as well as more complex and novelistic character arcs.
These days, however, people’s primary way of consuming fiction is no longer prose but television and movies. Beginning in the early 2000s, this began to be apparent in an approach to comics that mirrors those mediums, inclusive of film terminology in scripts, rat-a-tat back-and-forth dialogue, running inner monologues, and the centering of storytelling and plot, too often at the expense of making a compelling comic. Hell, during my days at Marvel, they even sent us to Robert McKee’s interminable Story lecture series, with the implicit direction that what works for mainstream US studio movies should be adapted to comics.
There have now been generations of people who have grown up with this as the approach, who see comics primarily as a story problem, one that is solved by “breaking a story” and segmenting it into the correct scenes, which are then hammered into an average of four to five panels per page. While this approach works tolerably for assembly-line, IP-management comics, it is, frankly, completely backwards, with page layout considerations left for the absolute end of the process and generally abandoned for the artist to figure out on their own, with no opportunity to adjust the story for what will look good on a printed page and inspire people to want to spend time with it, i.e., everything that makes an actually good comic. Big thanks to my brother Matt Bors for enduring a telephonic early draft of this rant.
So, what’s to be done? In light of my working on a new book with my Savage Hearts cocreator Jed Dougherty that just happens to be lined up at my dream publisher, it’s been a question at the front of my mind. To address what I see as the primary deficiency in contemporary comics, I’ve developed a new, still-evolving process for myself. While I still plot relentlessly and have reams of text written about backstory, the story’s world, and even full character dossiers, I try to use that material as suggestions and color, not a Bible to which I must adhere.
Instead, I think constantly about page design, with an eye toward making sure that every spread is something that people are incentivized to spend time with. Reading Phillipe Druillet has been truly inspirational in this regard, as there are clearly sequences in his Lone Sloan work that were drawn primarily to look awesome, with things like dialogue, plot, and character figured out at a later date. Thus, when I have an idea for a page design, I sketch it immediately and prioritize finding a way to work it into the issue, even changing preexisting story elements to better accommodate it.
And, of course, I’m also doing thumbnails for every issue (not for Jed to follow; just for me), sometimes ahead of scripting, sometimes in tandem with it. But regardless of the order, another mandatory step is looking at every page and thinking “How do we make this visually compelling enough to stop people in their tracks?” Instead of defaulting to the four-to-five panel page, pieced together into a four-or-five page scene, I’m endeavoring to make using that type of layout a choice in and of itself, meant to achieve a certain pacing or other effect.
Alongside the above, I’m also working to make sure that the actual words are not just informed by the layouts, but impart additional meaning beyond what they’re merely saying. It’s an approach meant to reward study, rumination, and even rereading and, as you can probably put together, it’s an enormous amount of work compared to the standard approach of figuring out how to force scenes into pages.
This project is receiving the entirety of my creative energies and focus right now and the same is true of Jed, who always comes back with layouts that work inordinately better than what I’d sketched out. Truthfully, it’s no surprise that he jives with this approach, as he’s an erstwhile assistant of my Uncle Chaykin.
Not despite the level of effort but because of it, this book (still unannounced for now) isn’t just the best comic I’ve ever done; it’s a combination of everything I’ve ever tried to do and the purest possible expression of what I think comics can accomplish. If it’s my last book, I’ll be content, knowing that it’s a proof of concept for what comics should be and so infrequently are.
Which, of course, is my long way of apologizing for being so absent from shelves and this newsletter and a promise that the wait will be more than worth it.
If you miss my ramblings and are in the Los Angeles area, you’re in luck: I’ll, once again, be appearing all three days at my hometown convention, L.A. Comic Con! I’ll have all my books, including BEEF BROS and Stoned Master, and, if you’re lucky, Jed might even give you a glimpse at the awe-inspiring original pages for our new project.
Finally, I’m now on BlueSky, where I’m decidedly more active than on other social media, which is an exceptionally low bar and mostly means that I check it occasionally to signal boost pals and post pictures of Warhammer 40K: TACTICUS characters I’ve unlocked.
Thanks for making it to the end of this rambling check-in. On account of my having largely abandoned social media, I desperately miss hearing from you, so I hope you’ll shoot me an email in response, even if it’s to tell me that my latest theory of comics is complete and utter lunacy.
xoxo,
Aubrey
So sorry to hear about your friend, Aubrey! But the Cicadas anthology looks incredible and I purchased a copy right quick. Also can't wait to see this wild-sounding new book by you and Jed!
Ya know what I feel scratches the social media itch? Discord
You should start a Discord