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San Diego, July 2004. It's two whisky sours past midnight at the Hyatt Patio Bar, and I start talking to this guy whose hair says "Eraserhead" and whose suit says "Scarface". Then it all gets a little blurry. Nine months later, the guy contacts me again, saying he's had a forum, and it's mine.
I'm more than a little concerned by this development, but for you it means you have yet a third option for listening to my rants and raves. Some would say that's three options too many, and on bad days I agree with them. Choose your signal-to-noise ratio, ladies and gentlemen. The pure one-way transmission of my original website; the cozy little member's club of my LiveJournal; or the muddy, crowded waters of the Isotope Virtual Lounge.
Meanwhile, I just received the full pdf of SMOKE on the email. I am terrified to open it up and read it. The book - this thing in my head - will be on sale in actual shops in less than two months. People will read it. Some of them won't like it. A few may even hate it.
Oh my god, what have I done?
To the National Gallery yesterday afternoon, for the Caravaggio exhibit. Unsurprisingly, it was sold out. So instead I wandered around the permanent collection and said hello to old friends. Played "name that saint" (Barbara with her tower; Catherine with her wheel; poor perforated Sebastian) and marvelled anew at van Eyck's mastery. When van Eyck paints, the result is clearly a representation, but with details which achieve a dreamlike hyper-realism. That's his "Arnolfini Marriage", above. Hockney posits quite convincingly that these early masters used a camera obscura to achieve this perfection, but to me this doesn't diminish at all the achievement of turning a sticky, uncooperative mass of green paint into the delicate velvet folds of That Dress.
Afterwards, I wandered across the landing to "Paintings 1500 and later", but rapidly decided I couldn't deal with the bombast of Paolo Veronese and the cacophanous 16th century after the cool, mathematical precision of their earlier, Northern brethren. I escaped into the first evening of British Summer Time - a strange, grudging half-light, but with promise of better things to come.
Next to my bed is a huge pile of books. Comics, poetry, things I'm reading for research, things I'm reading for fun. And like any group of strangers thrown together, these books start having unexpected conversations between themselves. The most recent one began with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which to me is one of quantum physics' many conceptual beauties. It states that in the quantum mechanical world, you cannot know for certain a particle's position and momentum, because anything you do to measure it disturbs the system, and thus moves the particle. Even shining a light on the particle - bouncing a photon off it - changes its position and/or momentum.
Then along came Auden. I had finally bought a decent copy of THE SEA AND THE MIRROR to replace the few tattered pages of Prospero's farewell to Ariel I had photocopied from a university library over a decade ago and carried with me ever since. Excited to renew my old acquaintance, I picked up the book, and it fell open to this: "Man can never know his 'nature' because knowing is itself a spiritual and historical act; his physical sensations are always accompanied by conscious emotions." And now to Lacan, who I have been slowly wading through for several months: "...the real can never be completely absorbed into the symbolic, into social reality. No matter how often we try to put our pain and suffering into language, to symbolize it, there is always something left over." In other words, there is always an element of uncertainty to our selves, our identities, because by trying to express it through the filter of language we change it.
Lacan is fascinating on the development of identity. We are born, he says, and we develop our sense of self through two things. The first is our distorted reflections on the curved surfaces of our parents' eyes (and later, the eyes of our friends, our relatives, the people we pass in the street). The second is via language and social order. How do babies think before they are taught language? They obviously do think, but thoughts as we remember them do not exist in our conscious memory before we are taught language - as the occultist Colin Wilson writes, yet a fourth voice joining the conversation - "a delicate and intuitive business, not at all a matter of trial and error, of learning 'object words' and building them up into sentences, but something as complex as the faculty with which birds build nests". A nest for our conscious self to live in for all its days on Earth. As we grow, before we have any choice in the matter, our "self" is imposed on us, is structured, by the language and habits of those around us.
Yet there is this stubborn kernel that can't learn, won't learn. The part that is left over from before. The thing that moves when you shine light on it. Alan Moore in a recent interview talks about becoming interested in the occult due to fears about a tinge of madness and suspicions as to the true power of language. This made me wonder if you could turn Lacan's process on its head. What if, instead of being the prisoner of language, this truculent ur-self could rise up and own the structure imposed upon it? As they say, if you owe $2000, the bank owns you, but if you owe $20bn, you own the bank. If you take everything the system has, can you own it?
It's not such a strange idea as it seems. Language is imperfect, otherwise it could accommodate all of the self and there would be nothing left unexpressed. The measurement systems are imperfect, otherwise we would know where the particle is with certainty. And writers are, by nature, beasts who are always chasing this ephemeral thing, this last, inexpressible lacuna. Always travelling, as Yeats describes, "back to where the ladders start".
Language is imperfect, but also language is power. It is so inextricably tied up with our identities that those people who have a high comfort level with it naturally have an advantage over those who handle it clumsily. This can be something as simple as having an easier course through the social structure - better grades, better jobs - due to a skill with expression through language. Or it can be what Alan Moore hints at, that the un-assimilated self can work a sort of magic by infiltrating this structure, using language to shoot out photons aimed dead at the shadowy, suppressed selves of others, the better to change their position and/or momentum.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I hate bad grammar.
My three favourite films of last year are all coming out soon on DVD or to broader theatrical distribution. Yes, they are all pretentious subtitled foreign filth. But what do you expect, in a place like this?
THE RETURN is now available on DVD. It's a three-hander, a very simple tale of two boys whose father returns after an unexplained 12-year absence and takes them on a fishing trip. Despite the simple premise and dialogue so spare it makes POINT BLANK feel like Bendis on a bad day, THE RETURN is utterly gripping from start to finish. It's an object lesson in effective screenwriting. And it's also very, very pretty. The cinematography has all the luminous framing of Tarkovsky, but carries with it none of his sluggishness.
KONTROLL comes out on DVD in the UK on 11 April. A mad, absurdist, comedic, tragic story about people who live in the Budapest underground, it's more fun and more horrifying than it has any right to be. It's beautifully filmed - all rich, bluey artificial light and unexpected colour. And it has a kicking soundtrack.
TONY TAKITANI is an adaptation of a Murakami short story that has so far only appeared in English in the New Yorker. The film had a Western premiere at the London Film Festival last October, where I saw it. It was then a feature at Sundance this year and has been picked up for US distribution. Keep an eye on your local independent cinema for it; I think it's unmissable. A quiet tale of missed chances, fathers and sons, and relationships, its whispers are far more effective than all of Hollywood's shouts.
In between SMOKE marketing and jumping in at the last minute to help out Neil Kleid with this week's BIG POND column, I have gotten the square root of fuckall done on my French sci-fi story. This is killing me, because I am on Page 33 and I have so much momentum built up and now the explosions start and oh god I have to go write it RIGHT NOW.
Still, BIG POND, all about pitching: "Most importantly, your first pitch to an editor is nothing but an opening salvo in a long-term conversation. Often it will take you three or more rejected pitches before you understand what the editor is really looking for. Listen to what the editor says, and learn from it. You must not get all bent out of shape if your masterpiece dream story gets dinged first-off. Chances are, it will. You're a writer. Go out to the pub, bitch to your friends about how nobody recognizes your genius, then go the fuck home and write something else. Good thing you're only sending these pitches as 200 word springboards, isn't it?"
To promote Issue 1 of our IDW miniseries SMOKE (shipping in May), Igor Kordey and I are offering 300 limited-edition signed sketch bookplates to retailers. The first 30 retailers to contact us will get 10 bookplates each. The bookplates will have a new SMOKE sketch by Igor and be signed by both of us. I'll be mailing them out personally at the end of April before the book ships.
We're going to have fun with this. Igor and I may mix one or two different original sketches in, as little surprises; I'll be writing little notes and doodling on the bookplates... You can't sign 300 things without cutting loose a bit. Or at least, I can't.
The bookplates will only be available through the 30 participating retailers, so do not email me and ask me to send you one directly. Instead, talk to your local comic shop ASAP and get them to sign up for this offer by emailing me on alex_de_campi *at* hotmail *dot* com. SMOKE is 3 48 page FC issues, shipping monthly from IDW. Order code for Issue 1 is MAR052962. You can see B&W sample pages here, here, and here. Or colour ones in my recent Newsarama interview.
This week on Ninth Art's Forecast I comment on Marvel Next's SPELLBINDERS and DC Humanoids' FRAGILE. And get all worked up about comics for girls. Again.
Unannounced, Spring arrives in London. In Hyde Park, the crocuses stretch skyward, yawning their purple-and-white mouths after a long winter's sleep underground. In Primrose Hill, the windows of my flat are open for the first time this year. I sit in the sunshine, gazing out at the street and thinking about pretty dresses.
COMMERCIAL SUICIDE needs artists willing to draw 2-5 pages of black and white 'zine sequentials for our May issue. We have several scripts going begging at the moment. Deadline is May 1st. Contact myself or Mr Gillen. Not for the easily offended.
"For 22-page American comics, the future is the screen. Kids have no problem reading floppies on the computer - or even manga. Look at all the scanslations on the Net. I know so many people who pirate-download scanned comics. Some friends of mine haven't bought a single comic in two years, yet read about 10 floppies a week this way. The fact that DC and Marvel haven't done an iTunes for comics continues to blow my mind. Their loss. " I talk to Kareem Aminu at Komikwerks about SMOKE, Joseph Heller, my Steranko fangirlishness, and the addictive pain of self-publishing. Go, read.
Someone will make millions organising the first comics download service. Think how quickly DC and Marvel could re-monetise their entire back catalogue - and imagine being able to have that old issue of NICK FURY #47 that you're lacking, instantly, on the 'puter, for 99 cents. Am I the only person that thinks this is a no-brainer?
I don't speak much about my film, mainly because I'm under confidentiality, and even though I am the worst corporate soldier on the planet, I do know what side my bread is buttered on. But here is a glimpse: at 6pm today I returned from two solid hours of story notes and analysis with my producers. I talked for 90% of it, clarifying character arcs, defending choices, discussing philosophical and logical underpinnings. My voice is shot.
In a bellicose sort of way, I love these sessions. Because when you get a story really right, and you have clear, intelligent, interesting reasons for every choice made in the script, it's fun. The story charges forwards with a terrifying singlemindedness, because at no point could any character logically make a decision other than the one they do.
And if you haven't got it right... well, that'll learn ya. No-one ever gets it right first off, which is why these sessions are great. In any case, the film goes well. I have work to do, but it's work I agree with, from people whose opinions I respect. Readers seem to be responding extremely positively to my characters and to the high concept. Fingers crossed for Cannes.
So yes, this has been the week that was. I have updated my comics section with Diamond order codes and previews of SMOKE 1, and have also re-jigged the right margin "coming soon" cover shots, as you can see. Simon Fraser has produced a delightfully wrong Vargas-esque pin-up for Commercial Suicide 3. I think our cover colour scheme will go all tropical this issue, like the Hawaiian beaches as seen through a badly-judged combination of hallucinogenics and dark rum. Rising star Jamie McKelvie is once again doing the back cover, and he muttered something about "that woman in the box from the first OMAC cover".
Variants 1 is at last out. Len O'Grady (the incredibly talented colourist on SMOKE) and I did HIGH & LONESOME, a 16-page Lovecraftian space horror story inspired by some of the exhaustion-induced hallucinations I used to have while offshore racing. At the time, it was a digest-sized anthology, and the story was written and drawn with that in mind. (I'm a real believer that you pace a story and compose a page completely differently for digest books than you do larger books). But somewhere in the 6 months since we completed the story, the format changed to a full size bimonthly. Le sigh. Hopefully the story will still hold up. Here's a one-page preview. It's actually set in the same universe as my French project, which is now all signed and under way.
I'm running HIGH & LONESOME in its original digest format as part of DEFECTIVE COMICS, my solo digest anthology. 120 pages of experimentation and weirdness from myself on words, and Arthur Goodman, Rob Croonenborghs, Paul Peart-Smith, Len O'Grady and Felipe Sobreiro on pictures. Lee O'Connor designing the cover. To be ready for Bristol, barring any self-publishing-related disasters. We're only printing 100 numbered copies of DEFECTIVE, plus about 4 artist proofs per artist, so bear that in mind. Our Bristol offerings tend to sell out very quickly. Yes, we could print more, but if we sell out quick then we can knock off to the pub at 3. Can you argue with this logic? No, I didn't think so.
The mad muse-induced horror story mentioned a few days ago is now a completed manga pitch sitting with a publisher, and with an artist doing utterly gorgeous work on sample pages and character sketches. Imagine Takehiro Inoue seasoned with a bit of Junji Ito and you've got it. I ran into the artist on LiveJournal - they friended me via Dean Haspiel, who friended me via Neil Kleid, who is an acquaintance on the Andy Diggle Forum. I am finding LJ to be a really important community resource for indie creators.
Today, in a bit of unplanned serendipity, the Brit Pack take over Newsarama. Tremble before our strange spellings and cunning use of sarcasm! I have a long interview about SMOKE (out in May! Pre-order now!); the always-original Antony Johnston talks about his Western THE LONG HAUL; and Rich Johnston discusses his love of V FOR VENDETTA. Go. Read.
(an occasional series devoted to that which makes me happy to be alive)
#412: Manta rays. Proof that God is interested in graphic design.
#1,093: Standing on Westminster Bridge at 9pm on a late-winter night, with the Thames rolling and tumbling below you like nightmares under grey satin sheets.
#21: CAN DIALECTICS BREAK BRICKS? Possibly the best film ever. I present the evidence:
Oh no! Not the Sociologists!
"You call them Middle Managers... we know them as SATAN!"
Run away! Run away!
Yes, why aren't you having sex right now?
I'm not going to tell you anything more about this film. It is a little gem you must go and truffle up for yourself.
#84: New places. Specifically, Cannes, where I may be going this May. Now, this in itself is not special or awesome. Cannes is an industry conference-on-sea... but that industry happens to be film. Everyone in film goes to Cannes. It's not any big badge of achievement to attend for a few days. But, importantly, it is the first time I am going, and I am terrifically excited.
Some days, you sit down to write and the muse joins you silently, laying her hand on your shoulder, and you tap the daylight hours away keystroke by keystroke.
Other days, the muse kicks the door down, holding a fifth of Wild Turkey and a gallon of black coffee, and screams, "It's on, baby!" as you try to hide under the covers.
"But I'm supposed to be doing the lettering script for SMOKE 2 today, and then there's that thing for Cath," you whine blearily, pulling the duvet back over your head.
"Don't care," she says, dragging you out of bed. "Today, you will be writing a horror story. Have another cup of coffee."
And that caffeine hits you like a broadband pipe of wrong being spiked straight into your cerebral cortex.
Oh, you say. Oh yes indeed.
You begin to type as fast as you can, terrified the words will evaporate, that the connection will be lost, and it all roars out of some dark place in your head like a black-diamond bullet of purest madness.
Today has been one of these days.
To W1, land of crucially misguided barnets, for the gig of New Favourite Band in a trendy basement bar. All the girls were ugly, except for a Latina who was chewing gum like she was marking time until she could bite someone's dick off. Usual Gig Companion and I thought our band - the exquisite Flipron - was playing first, and so arrived early. We were wrong. They played last. And so, poor sinners that we were, we had to suffer two "special guests".
On first was a quintet of acoustic wannabes: fiddle, slide guitar and three-part harmony sung by a skinny sensitive with black turtleneck and glasses, a bearded ginger git in a jumper earnestly strumming an acoustic guitar, and the worst dressed girl I have ever seen. I bet even her underwear wasn't salvageable. Ginger git sung the sort of deeply maladroit and heartfelt lyrics that first-year uni students use to get their leg over: "I want to lay you down / Lay you down..." I didn't even like them when they were called Peter Paul & Mary, and could sing on key.
Now, there is one simple rule to follow when confronted with bad folk music and no emergency exit: whatever happens, never run out of bourbon. The more you drink, the better they sound. Unfortunately there wasn't enough bourbon on earth to lift the second act, a Beth Gibbons wannabe with another earnest jumper-wearing guitar-basher (do they clone them?) to even the dizzying heights of "mediocre". I lay my head on the table, covered it with my shawl and asked Usual Companion to administer whisky-based cocktails to me at regular intervals. Usual Companion debated hiding in the loos.
Too many songs later, it finally came. "Thank you", said un-Gibbons. "We were Mimosa."
I snort Manhattan all over the table.
By the time I regained a vague ability to focus, Flipron had festooned the minute stage's drumkit and synth rack with fairy lights and chains of fake Hawaiian luau flowers. The few bad-barnet folkies left are staring at the stage with blank incomprehension and a rising sense of dread. Clever people in scary black shoes materialise from nowhere, adding to their intense discomfort. Then Flipron launch into one of my favourite songs, "Raindrops Keep Falling On the Dead". They go on to sing love songs to possessed cars, tangos about being chased by pensioners, and a lyrically inventive song about the guard dog of Hell. Usual Companion discovered Flipron as he stumbled through the cabaret tent at Glasto at 3am, not quite himself. He woke the next day with a smile on his face and a CD in his pocket. A CD which contained song lyrics like "Parallel to the breakdown of my psychological health / Was the increasing ability of the car to drive itself".
I blearily tell Flipron I love them. Perhaps it's the bourbon talking. It wouldn't be the first time. I hope it won't be the last. But it is, after all, only Monday night.
SYNDICATION: LiveJournal
ARCHIVES: October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007
& FOR HER NEXT TRICKS:
KAT & MOUSE 2
January 2007
ISBN-10: 1598165496
$5.99 / All Ages
AGENT BOO 2
January 2007
ISBN-10: 1598168037
$4.99 / All Ages
***
RECENTLY:
MESSIAH COMPLEX 1
October 2006
ISBN-10: 2731617667
EUR12,90 / Teen
AGENT BOO 1
Sept 2006
ISBN-10: 1598168029
ISBN-13: 9781598168020
$4.99 / All Ages
KAT & MOUSE 1
July 2006
ISBN-10: 1598165488
ISBN-13: 9781598165487
$5.99 / All Ages
SMOKE
December 2005
ISBN-10: 193323928X
$24.99 / Teen
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Brief Loves:
Music: Berlin Cabaret Songs
Film: Chetyre (4)
Book: Camera Lucida
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Friends & Conspirators:
Kieron Gillen
Alasdair Watson
Evil Genius
Paul O'Brien
Jonny Nagl
Chad Michael Ward
The Graf von Sarll
Delirium des Anges
Jeremy Love
Frazer Irving
Antony Johnston
Tristan Crane
Laurenn McCubbin
Dan Evans
Farel Dalrymple
Brendan McFeely
Warren Ellis
Dean Haspiel
Brian Wood
Igor Kordey
Kelly Sue DeConnick
Flipron
Tiny Dog Records
Admired Strangers:
Bob Mould
Popbitch
Revenant Records
Grand Central Records
Tom Phillips
The Starn Brothers
The Real Tuesday Weld
Misty's Big Adventure
The Earlies
Menlo Park
Akira the Don
Coop
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Musical Exotica:
Planet Xtabay
Poison To The Mind