Using the right fuel
On research, Bakshi, Tarantino, and the new thing
Years ago, at a double screening of his Lord of the Rings and Wizards, Ralph Bakshi did a Q&A session at intermission. Someone asked him about his animation influences and it set the legendary filmmaker off. Paraphrasing, he said that he wasn’t influenced by any animation aside from what he saw as a child; after that, inspiration came from elsewhere, jazz foremostly. Bakshi went on to state, forcefully, that if you take inspiration solely from your medium, you’re condemned to mimicry.
It knocked me directly on my ass.
Like many storytellers since Pulp Fiction, I’ve thought extensively about stories as formulas, combining sundry ingredients into something new. That way of thinking – the Hollywood high concept “this meets/with/but/in that” – already existed but, for many of us, Quentin Tarantino’s work was something new: a piece of art that was also a proud act of genre curation.
Of course, mashing up genres and references to older movies isn’t why Tarantino has been so successful, as evidenced by numerous mostly forgotten knock-off flicks. Tarantino brought a crucial ingredient to the table: expertise. Though his movies traffic in film history, Tarantino deploys those tropes, cliches, even specific scenes in a way that indicates an understanding deeper than mere surface-level aesthetics. He impresses them into service of deeper themes, drafting off the viewer’s familiarity with genre to say something new.
There are no stones being issued forth from this glass house. While my cocreators and I have always endeavored to say something more with our work, their constituent parts aren’t terribly difficult to spot. If you signed up to this newsletter at a convention, it’s not unlikely I pointed them out as part of telling you about a book. It’s the precise reason why comics publishers request them in pitches: They’re a quick and dirty way to understand what a book is.
But even after the perennially selling The Comic Book Story of Professional Wrestling, which was both exhaustively and exhaustingly researched, I still shied away from research for my fiction work. I looked to other mediums, of course – novels and music primarily – but while better than reading only comics, it was a far cry from actual nonfiction research. As a result, my work – while exciting, well-written and always beautifully drawn – was not as rich in information and depth as it might have been.
While perhaps not a capital crime (e.g., making visually uninteresting pages), comics pages lacking in information density and richness are a serious offense. This density and richness, however, has little to do with the amount of artistic detail or number of words in a given page. This is because – in accordance with Chaykinian comics theory – the page, as comics’ primary storytelling unit, is ideally placed for the rich communication of information explicit, complex, ambiguous and enigmatic.
In my near-daily comics breakdown posts (also repurposed in these newsletters), I’ve been highlighting instances of page design done exceptionally. With its unique blend of writing, drawing and graphic design, comics has an overwhelming amount of freedom – not only in how a page is designed but in how much information it can communicate – and it’s inspiring to see and appreciate it being exercised.
It’s been a long time since I’ve had a new creator-owned book on the stands but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been working. Over the pandemic, I fell in love with historical research, poring over dense, 1,000 page tomes, all of which informed the writing of Jed Dougherty and my next creator-owned book, which will be announced next month.
This excessive level of research has been transformative for my writing and I’ve watched, overjoyed, as Jed matched my efforts with an overwhelming amount of research-led design work. Starting next month, with the long-awaited announcement of Jed and my new book, I’ll begin going through my extensive bibliography, writing about the influence of each of these doorstop tomes.
Thanks, as always, for reading, subscribing, liking, commenting and sharing; I’m still triangulating in on the best format and tone, so I welcome your feedback.
NEXT WEEK: I’m going to talk about one of the below. Maybe the one you pick, maybe not. Or maybe I’ll change my mind; it’s been known to happen.
Aubrey
"While perhaps not a capital crime (e.g., making visually uninteresting pages), comics pages lacking in information density and richness are a serious offense...."
I read this as I was listening to my coworker talk to a student about ignorance and I couldn't help but notice the coincidence. I think storytellers of all mediums sometimes get so caught up in telling their stories, they brush aside details going on in the world they are creating (an example I notice frequently is characters doing CPR is TV and movies and how it is usually wrong). I did appreciate all the details you included in the Comic Book History of Professional Wrestling. In teaching I see it in students who are so excited to show what they have learned, they don't take time to spell check their writing, and what they turn in is not readable. Could comic book writers, who sometimes are under the gun of a deadline, be so concerned with telling their story forget the little things?
Can't help but think about the recently departed David Lynch.
Lynch was a painter and that's all he ever really aspired to be. Yet, he had an idea one day, which was "moving paintings," which set him on his path. By the time he ended up at film school, he'd been immersed in the fine art world for so long, that unlike other filmmakers who were immersed solely in film, his approach was unique because of that different background. He still loved film and studied up on it, but a part of the reason why his work was successful (as in artistically successful, not commercially) was that he found a way to make his ideas work, and his ideas remained unique because he wasn't merely iterating on other work.