I just completed page 347 (arranging pages, word balloons, speakers' positions, etc). Less than 100 pages to go. I am aiming to be done by July 1 (7 days). But I've been at it for hours today and gotta shake up the slumbering synapses.
Why I’ll not win a Pulitzer Like Art Speigelman
- Art began his project at age 24, I at age 59.
- Art did massive background research, I none at all.
- Art’s story is rooted in history, the “central trauma of the twentieth century.” My story is abstract, obtuse, rarefied, talking heads.
- Art varied his time line, mixing chronologies. I, sticking to the text of Ecclesiastes line by line, am strictly linear.
- Art used multiple locations; I’m stuck in a university class room.
- Each of Art’s drawings went through multiple permutations, thumbnails, sketches, and drafts. I plan on doing just one rough and then ink the thing.
- Art took eleven years. I plan on finishing my work in one year.
- Art’s subject matter is gripping: suicide, genocide, survival. My subject matter will appeal only to the depressed.
- Art put himself in the book, self disclosing to the nth degree, and readers get to know him. In my work I make two or three goofy cameo appearances only and readers won’t know me at all.
- Art uses real characters (parents, guards, Poles, etc). My cast is entirely fictional.
- While creating his graphic novel he began meeting with a psychiatrist. Me, no.
- Art grapples with history; I grapple with existentialism, theodicy, theology, teleology, and faith.
- Art drew in black and white; I’ll draw in a pleasant, decorative Tin Tin style.
- Both of our works are “laced with despair.”
- Both of our works grapple with “crystalline ambiguity.” P. 33
- Both of our works ponder evil in the universe.
- Both of us “write what we know.” He knew Holocaust; I know epistemological perplexity.
Okay...back to those mind numbing word balloons.
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