Adjunct Grist for the Mill

It's very hard for me NOT to start drawing yet. The delicious anticipation of seeing how pictures will enhance, change, and challenge the dialog is what eggs me on. It's like building a brick wall but making the bricks first. The shape of the wall will be determined by the number and shape of the bricks I create. But these bricks are living in that the dialog informs the character AND the character will inform the dialog. But as I said, I'm making myself write a first draft of the dialog before character development.

I do have rough ideas of who the students will be. There will be philosophy majors of course (since Mr. Q teaches in the philosophy dept). But there will also be pre law, marketing, English, and science majors. I also get to throw in players, materialists, Tea Partiers, aging hippies, hedonists, home school students, and computer gaming geeks. Mr. Q will have a TA, useful to me as the one to elaborate on Mr. Q's more confusing utterances.

Earnest Hemingway will make a cameo appearance (quoting his book The Sun Also Rises, taken from a line of Ecclesiastes). I think I'll refrain from putting in Timon from the Lion King saying, "It's a circle of life sort of thing," since animals in the class room is a bit too far fetched.

Yesterday I took a one day art class just for the fun of it and the 20 year old kid teaching it (a fabulous artist, by the way) was covered in tattoos and wore a hooligan hat. Here he is sans tattoos drawing on a Cintiq tablet and interactive pen.

The class, all 20 somethings, wore beanies, hoodies, and tight jeans. Since I'm an old guy unaccustomed to schmoozing with students 1/3 my age (I'm almost 60), I jotted phrases the teacher used which I hope to put into the mouths of the students in my graphic novel. The list included these gems:

Crappy
Do you want to know my truth?
I'm gunna be raw, honest, real
I'm like Simon Cowell, brutal and honest
Go crazy
Knock yourself out
His stuff is insane
There's good pizza and bad pizza
The music of the Black Keys is awesome
I sell tee shirts
It's really cool
I know, it's retarded
Good on you

Not sure how many of these I'll use but they'll come in handy, I'm sure.

The Writing Process

I photocopied the book of Ecclesiastes from the New International Version (NIV). I then cut out each verse (or portion of a verse) and taped it to a large piece of paper (14" x 18") in a column on the left hand side. With pen in hand I then muse, interact, create dialog of what certain students may think about what Mr. Q just said. Here are some photos of those large "first drafts."

I don't expect viewers to understand any of this. I add it simply to document how chaotic the first draft is. This is important to note because there's tremendous freedom in giving one's self permission to "do it wrong." I know this dialog is going to go through several refining processes so I'm not worried about perfection or getting it just right.

Also, I am disciplining myself to write student dialog without looking ahead. That is, I'm putting myself in the shoes (sandals? flip flops? fancy boots?) of the students as though hearing Mr. Q for the first time. This is difficult (since I've read Ecclesiastes for years) but I feel it's necessary to "discover" what Mr. Q is saying as he says it.

Tasks Accomplished So Far

I've read six commentaries on Ecclesiastes as well as a number of related works (I'm currently reading Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl and just finished Tom Sawyer where Mark Twain puts in Huck Finn's mouth these Ecclesiastic-like words, "Bein' rich aint what it's cracked up to be. It's just worry and worry, and  sweat and sweat and wishin' you was dead all the time").

I've plotted the "story line" of the graphic novel as follows:

Setting: university classroom packed with students of all and no philosophical/theological persuasions.

Professor: Mr. Q. Q stands for Qoheleth, the author of Ecclesiastes.

Dialog: Mr. Q will stand in front of the class and his word balloons will contain every word/phrase of Ecclesiastes. Readers (hopefully) won't know his "lecture" is really taken from a written manuscript; few things are as boring as listening to someone read their speech. Students will then discuss with each other their impressions, reactions, and puzzlement over Mr. Q's unorthodox philosophy.

Title: I began calling the graphic novel ANGST 101. I then changed it to HAPPINESS 101. I dropped that and settled on ECCLESIASTES U. This is subject to change as well but that's the working title at present.

Humor: I'm no Conan O'Brien but I do aspire to balance the pessimism of Mr. Q's lectures with the wit and wisdom of class members.

Layout: As I create this classroom dialog between Mr. Q and a variety of students, I'm typing text into six panels in Publisher 8.5" x 11" (landscape). Mr. Q gets first panel, each of his sentences beginning with a capital Old English font. Student reactions take up the remaining five panels. Here's a sample taken at random.

Current status:  I have written the dialog for Ecclesiastes chapters 1-6. I've six chapters to go.

My Ambition

In December 2011 I got inspired to tackle a long dreamed of project, creating a cartoon graphic novel based on the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes. I should have started blogging about it then rather than now, three months into to project, but oh well. I'm gong to use this blog to document my progress for several reasons.

1.  It helps me think clearer.
2.  It keeps me accountable. I'm sadly notorious for starting projects and not finishing them (a violation of the words of Ecclesiastes 7:8, "the end of a mater is better than it's beginning").
3.  Novice cartoonists such as myself may enjoy seeing the creative process at work.

Why a graphic novel on Ecclesiastes?

Ever since discovering Tin Tin in 1981 I've had a desire to create my own graphic novel. Ever since getting a degree in theology in 1985 from Regent College (BC) I've had a desire to understand this puzzling book of Ecclesiastes. And ever since my wife was diagnosed with Alzheimer's dementia in 2006 I've experienced the existential angst I believe the author of Ecclesiastes experienced. What better way to pull these disparate threads together into one work than to create a graphic novel?