Ramping Up This Project Again

Vicki Johnson, drawing by
nephew Jeff Anderson

Since my last entry (March 2013) my wife was put on hospice (April), lingered for months (till August), I did vigil during her final week, and she passed away Sept. 1, 2013. My anguish need not concern this blog other than to say the grief and absurdity and senselessness of her death is beyond belief. To honor her memory, eight months after her passing, I once again ramp up my efforts to complete this graphic novel, Ecclesiastes U. Vicki would want that.

To review, the purpose of this blog is threefold: to help me think, to hold me accountable, and to document both my process and my progress.

Another hoped for by-product, to understand the creative process. Even if the finished project is a flop aesthetically, financially, philosophically, or theologically, it is still a massive undertaking and being the student of creativity that I am, I hope to discover while writing and drawing this book the keys to creativity, the obstacles to writer's/artist's block, and the mental disciplines necessary for finishing a project of this magnitude.

For example, I know that some artists love working in chaos. Not me. I require clear psychic decks, tidy categories, neat piles, tools within easy reach, and reference materials at my finger tips.

On an even deeper level, before returning to this project I needed to ransack 40 years of journals, files, memoirs, drawings, sketchbooks, invention journals, and itemize all my undone projects, started but unfinished manuscripts, rough drafts of plays, poems, songs, sculptures, half done drawings, posters, wheels, businesses, memoirs, letters, handouts, and games.

It took several weeks but doing so was liberating. As David Allen says in Getting Things Done, you can't know how much to take on until you know how much you've taken on. My Catalog of Creativity lists over 125 projects I'd like to complete before I die. After pondering that list for a week I sifted out the probably-nevers, maybe-nevers, someday-maybes, and must-do priorities. Ecclesiastes U is a must-do priority (for reasons I may describe here some day).

I've also un-boxed piles and piles of EU rough drafts, am sifting through them, and arranging them into manageable drafts. Not sure if this is how others work but discrete piles help me visualize the whole project and how all the parts fit together.

In other news, I'm back to work 3/4 time, adjusting to living alone, and am eager to dedicate my mind to this task as therapy.

Last year I completed about 35 pages (I've lost track; haven't checked yet) which represents the graphic novelization of Ecclesiastes chapters 1 and 2. I got the brainstorm to get that book into print ASAP as the first of 6 projected titles. There are twelve chapters in Ecclesiastes so this will make the finished project manageable.


I've long forgotten what all the buttons on GIMP software do, how to add gradations, scanning sizes, and a thousand other little details. I hope the relearning curve will not be too steep.

While working on EU I'll continue to blog on my other sites and collect data for the other works in progress I've got going (this is a habit I can't break).


Two months after my wife's funeral I moved my mom to Florida and took a leisurely one month train ride home, stopping in famous museums as I went. I describe that trip here. It was visual overload the whole time for this befuddled griever, so you'll have to forgive me when I tell you I did not take photos of the Art Speigleman exhibit at the Jewish Museum. (Maybe they wouldn't allow photos, I don't remember).

When I try to describe what it was like standing in front of every original page of Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel MAUS words fail me. But I'll try. I was stunned, giddy, speechless, awed. My mouth went dry and my palms got sweaty. Saying it was a spiritual experience sounds cheezy. But there was something going on in my fertile cerebrum that was ineffible, noetic, and transcendent. Speigelman's creative output was? Was? Was? Inspirational! I returned home determined to follow in his footsteps.

There are other developments in the evolution of this therapist turning graphic essayist, novelist, cartoonist. But they'll have to wait. This blog post is already way too long.

Page 5a

This half page took about 3.5 hours with breaks to schedule clients, wash clothes, and cook. I'm still having technical difficulties which are aggravating to the max. For some reason I'm obsessed with speed; if I were to slow down and enjoy the process my output might improve. Why speed? I'm staring at 500+ half pages (many alien pages are not even written or sketched yet) of rough drafts that need to be printed as empty text/panel pages, inked by hand with pencils, light table, and fine tip fountain pen (fun but labor intensive as I'm still fleshing out each character [costume, physiognomy, age, skin color, size], scanned, colored (fun and highly labor intensive as I continue to flail around in the deep end of this digital pool), shaded (not fun as I haven't a clue at what I'm doing both technologically or light/shade and value-wise), merged, and posted. If I increase my speed to 3 hours per half page (an ambitious estimate at this point) that's 1500 hours. If I work 25 hours a week that's 60 weeks. Even though I've been hacking away at this graphic novel for 15 months (with a 3 month hiatus), can I sustain interest for another year+? Speigelman took 11 years to draw MAUS but he was young when he started. I'm racing against my biological clock which, once the alarm goes off, I'll be infirm, decrepit, and unable to conceive--IE., manipulate pens, mouse, touch pads, scanners, etc. Also, there's a weird symbiotic relationship between my wife's deteriorating health and my obsession with mental challenges. Distracting myself with 101 tasks of creating a graphic novel is therapeutic, or so I like to believe.

Second First Color Job

Every journey begins with a first step. Here are my first steps applying color. I begin with faces traced (from a model book) with black fine tip pen, scanned at 600 dpi, and uploaded to COREL Essentials. 

 I use the paint bucket to apply solid colors on the guy's face and shirt. So far, so good.

Then I leap into the unknown and fling paint everywhere applying shadows. You should see my living room; there are spattered pixels all over my rug, walls, and shirt. (My first digital joke). These shadows are haphazard, helter-skelter, and savage. But I gotta start somewhere.

My quandary: do I postpone drawing pen/ink finished pages until I gain competence as a colorist? This means coloring all 22 characters before drawing any pages. That will require weeks of coloring before drawing any pages.

Or do I start drawing finished pages (I've got 50 pages scripted, blocked, and ready for images) and  learn to color as I go? The problem with that plan is that as my technique improves the finished book will be of uneven quality. The earlier pages will be amateurish while later pages become less amateurish.

I think I'll keep improving my coloring technique. Certainly I can exceed the level of skill on display above. This'll put my schedule off once again...but since I'm really under no deadline I can putter at a leisurely pace.

I do have this fear somebody, somewhere on the planet is working on a comic book based on Ecclesiastes and every day I delay publishing they get closer to beating me to the punch. This was Art Speigelman's challenge when Steven Spielberg was coming out with An American Tale. Art was halfway through MAUS when he got wind of Spielberg's plan to use immigrant mice with nasty cats in 1890's NY city. So he published half of his work (Jewish mice; Nazi cats) before completion. Hey Spielberg, you got any plans to do a film about Ecclesiastes? Please don't. 

Boredom Busters and More Maus

I must not hate whining enough to quit, because here comes another whiny rant. I am simply not cut out for the tedium of connecting word balloons. There are personality strengths which allow some people to engage in repetitive work day after day. Bless them! Somebody's got to assemble lap tops, pick lettuce, or paste labels on cans of corn. But I am not possessed of those strengths. I need frequent breaks!

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

1. Art began his project at age 24, I at age 59.
2. Art did massive background research, I none at all.
3. Art’s story is rooted in history, the “central trauma of the twentieth century.” My story is abstract, obtuse, rarefied, talking heads.
4. Art varied his time line, mixing chronologies. I, sticking to the text of Ecclesiastes line by line, am strictly linear.
5. Art used multiple locations; I’m stuck in a university class room.
6. 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.
7. Art took eleven years. I plan on finishing my work in one year.
8. Art’s subject matter is gripping: suicide, genocide, survival. My subject matter will appeal only to the depressed.
9. 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.
10. Art uses real characters (parents, guards, Poles, etc). My cast is entirely fictional.
11. While creating his graphic novel he began meeting with a psychiatrist. Me, no.
12. Art grapples with history; I grapple with existentialism, theodicy, theology, teleology, and faith.
13. Art drew in black and white; I’ll draw in a pleasant, decorative Tin Tin style.

 Why I Might Win a Pulitzer

1. Both of our works are “laced with despair.”
2. Both of our works grapple with “crystalline ambiguity.” P. 33
3. Both of our works ponder evil in the universe.
4. Both of us “write what we know.” He knew Holocaust; I know epistemological perplexity.

Okay...back to those mind numbing word balloons.

Musings on MetaMaus by Art Spiegelman

To break up the mind numbing tedium of tweaking panels and word balloons I gave my synapses a break and devoured Art Spiegelman's memoir of how he created the Pulitzer prizewinning graphic novel, Maus.

Here are comments I found most stimulating.

“…in making this kind of work, one has to inhabit and identify with each character. You have to act out their poses, you have to think them through…it is true that there is a kind of gestalting necessary just to be able to inhabit each character.” P. 35

I've written elsewhere about sub-personalities but this was a nice reminder that I am in my creation.

“I’d conceived of making some long comic book that needed a bookmark…and had to find something actually worth doing. I didn't have the stamina to devote myself to a one-hundred, two-hundred, three-hundred-page book just to serve up a lot of yucks or escapist melodrama.” P. 42

I relate. My work includes humor because "the sweetness of lips increases learning," (Proverbs). But humor isn't the point. My pictures and text will serve a greater purpose, simplifying one of history's most under appreciated existential texts.

“I guess I've always preferred research to writing or drawing.” P. 43

I'm doing hardly any research (other than arranging with a college professor friend of mine permission to take reference photos inside a large classroom). I'm making no trips to Poland or the New York Public library. 

“I remember a line from Shoah. A Jewish commander of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising says, ‘If you could lick my heart it would poison you.’ It indicates just how complete the absence of sunlight can be. To find a tone that could be informed by that bleakness and not be an inevitable prescription for suicide was difficult…To avoid that and still allow for the small moments that are what make a life worth living demanded a tone that I needed to find in Maus: how to avoid despair or cynicism without becoming fatuous. And Pavel’s discussion of what it means to soberly take stock of just how fucking meaningless everything is and what one nevertheless does from moment to moment was very useful for me—not just as a cartoonist, but as a model to aspire to.” P. 70

Dr. Q's bleak pessimism could inspire suicidal thoughts in the vulnerable, so my purpose is to validate his pessimism (if world affairs don't make you depressed you're not paying attention) while hoping to call attention to as Art says, what one nevertheless does from moment to moment. This is the existentialist challenge.

“In 2007 the Anne Frank House published a fictionalized color series of graphic novels specifically for an international teaching aid about the Holocaust. They’re very earnest and drawn in a pleasant Tin Tin style.” P. 127

Oh-oh. Tin Tin has been my inspiration. Looks like Ecclesiastes University will be drawn in a "pleasant" style.

“During that period of groping for a style, I also thought about cutting between the present and the past by having black and white line drawings intercut with gray wash drawings, or using full-color, which would have been way too decorative….” P. 145

And EU will be drawn in a decorative style! If the medium is the message, and the medium is pleasant and decorative, how will that "carry" the angst? The in-congruent juxtaposition may serve me well: an absurd linkage of pleasant decoration with philosophical nihilism may just be the absurd boost I'll need to pull this off.

More musings later.