Alex de Campi: Gojira!

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WHO

FILM & TV

COMICS & BOOKS

28.6.06 A Woman Is A Sometimes Thing

Sometimes I am La Belle Dame Sans Merci, like on Monday when I cut through binding layers of idiocy, administrative tedium, and timewasters until I was fierce and free again. Sometimes I am a superhero, like on Tuesday when I nailed three high-stakes film production meetings stone, on 45 minutes sleep in the previous 24 hours, then walked up Primrose Hill with the afternoon sky looking like a slow-motion Constable painting and I stretched out my arms from Mile End to World's End and just breathed the cut-grass air. Sometimes I'm nothing but the shattered wreck of a human being, like today, when I rolled out of bed at 4pm and went straight to the Groucho Club to mumble my way through yet another film meeting. This is me, or a reasonable facsimile thereof:

Sometimes I'm even a writer. On July 1, the first book in my graphic novel series Kat & Mouse is released from Tokyopop. It's ostensibly the story of two misfit 7th-grade girls in a posh New England private school who solve mysteries in and around the school using science and math. But as with any of my books, that's really just a point of departure for telling stories about the interplay of personalities, seasoned with my usual absurdism. As with all proper kids' stories, some pretty nasty emotional violence goes on between the characters, which I feel is faithful to at least my junior-high experience.

It's always funny when a book comes out, as I finish them so long in advance of publication it feels like something dragged out of the attic, and I can never quite figure out what all the fuss is about. So with Kat & Mouse: Book 2 is written, and halfway through being drawn by Federica. If you think Book 1 is too mainstream, not "Alex" enough, wait until you see Book 2. That's where we start picking up the strands of stories very subtlely laid out in Book 1, and ramp the pace and the strangeness of the story up to 11. If you love film noir, or enjoyed Brick, you'll like where this series is going. There are all my usual easter-eggs and oblique references to things I adore. Plus, Federica's art gets even more beautiful, if that's possible:

Clicky on the picture to be taken to Amazon for pre-ordering Book 1. Please consider purchasing it for yourself or for the women and girls in your life. I think it's quite fun.

Hopefully tomorrow (the first day I've had to myself all week) I can go back to being a writer. My screenplay calls.

( 8:10 PM ) (1) comments

23.6.06 The Week of Acting Dangerously

To apologise for not writing in so long, I give you a mixtape (32MB, please be kind and download rather than stream). It is rather mopey, as I wasn't in a good mood when I made it. Link will be up until 30 June only; track list upon request.

In the past five days I've written off two one-sided friendships and pissed off a literary agent. The agent was patently an idiot, but I don't think he'd ever been told that to his face. Man, I got walked out of that dump of an office like he thought I was going to nick something. I had to dig my nails into my hand to keep from laughing. I make books and pictures. All he makes is phone calls. And he thinks I should worry about not kowtowing to him? I just have to worry about making sure my work doesn't suck.

Fear me, for I am in a taking out the trash kind of mood.

I also have a strange urge to write a song about this. When I next have money (ha!) I will actually start learning to play blues guitar. If any of you know a good teacher in the London area, let me know.

This afternoon I begin my second day of work on my next screenplay, Devil Town, for which I am at the perfect pitch of fury right now. But not before I email a theatre producer and tell him he's a waste of flesh.

Ah, I love the sulfuric tang of pure, undiluted truth in the morning.

( 11:08 AM ) (0) comments

16.6.06 Preach, Brother Mamet!

"You will encounter in your travels folks of your own age who chose the institutional path, who became the arts administrators rather than the actors, the casting agents rather than the writers. These folks chose to serve an institutional authority in exchange for a paycheck, and these folks are going to be with you for the rest of your life, and you actors and writers and people who come up off the street, who live without certainty day to day and year to year are going to have to bear with being called children by these institutional types; you will, as Shakespeare tells us, endure 'the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes'.

"It is not childish to live with uncertainty, to devote oneself to a craft rather than a career, to an idea rather than an institution. It's courageous and requires a courage of the order that the institutionally co-opted are ill equipped to perceive [...]

"Art is an expression of joy and awe. It is not an attempt to share one's virtues and accomplishments with the audience, but an act of selfless spirit. Our effect is not for us to know. It is not in our control. Only our intention is under our control. As we strive to make our intentions pure, devoid of the desire to manipulate, and clear, directed to a concrete, easily stated end, our performances become pure and clear.

"Eleven o'clock always comes. In the meantime, may you know the happiness of working to serve your own good opinion. Invent nothing, deny nothing, speak up, stand up, stay out of school."

From David Mamet's marvellously idealistic True and False: Heresy & Common Sense for the Actor.

( 5:20 PM ) (1) comments

12.6.06 Days Like These

It has been pointed out to me that I forgot to give the name of the very talented Hungarian artist who created these sketches for Queen of Spades:

He is Attila Futaki, and I am very much looking forward to working with him.

The daily fight of getting projects off the ground continues. I think I came out ahead today, if only just, if with certain cuts and bruises on the way... But if I cannot brighten my own day, here is a lovely picture of Adam from Luigi di Giammarino to perhaps brighten yours:

( 7:04 PM ) (0) comments

5.6.06 Received From Collaborators

The English summer - that perfect season - is at last upon us, and today in my Inbox I found these things:

From a new batch of Adam in Chromaland pages from Luigi di Giammarino. This isn't even the best or most spectacular page but, crucially, it is the page with the giant dinosaurs.

From my LA detective noir project The Queen of Spades, also with a French publisher. These are the try-out sketches of a new artist. The character he's drawn, Horatio Alvarez, is a riff on Horatio Alger, the American dime-novelist who really created the fiction of the American Dream, writing hundreds of stories about down and out boys who made it to the top through hard work and merit. Or in Alvarez's case, hard work, merit, and proficency with edged weapons.

From Alem Curin's pencils for my one and only piece of Work For Hire - my piece "The Conformist", coming up in Dark Horse's Escapist series. Again, not even the best or most spectacular page Alem has done so far, but look at that page design...

I love my job. I open these pages up in email, and I've a grin a mile wide, seeing them and thinking, "I did that! That's my story! And look how pretty they made it!"