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.