SOME THOUGHTS ON PROCESS and WHERE THINGS ARE AT

So, the new issue of Tongues is out. Number five. Hooray. But it’s taken five years to get this far. So, like, one issue a year. Some of them are 56 pages long, but still. So where does that leave us? What's the story with this story? Are we almost done? What’s taking so long?

Since finishing up #5 and sending it off to the printer back in December I've been working on writing and thumbnailing the rest of the story – like, all the way to the end. Until now I've only been writing one issue at a time, basically. I do know where it’s all going, of course — there’s a giant chart on my door with post-it notes that outlines the whole story very roughly, onto which ideas get placed or discarded. and there are a variety of things rattling around in my head that will shape the later issues, but I haven’t generally sat down to actually script an issue until the last one is done and out the door.

This is my ‘plot diagram’. The four vertical columns represent the four main character’s threads, the horizontal boxes represent each issue (#5 is the second from the top). Each post-it is a scene or idea. The jumble of post-its on the left is possible scenes or ideas that might yet get added, the jumble on the right is ideas that have been discarded along with some notes from earlier points in the story’s evolution.

That probably isn't the way a project like this ought to be done, and I will never cease being surprised by the boggling array of other artist's or authors methods. But it's the way the process evolved for me, at least until now.

When I first started making actual comics, back when I was working on the beginnings of Big Questions, at the Chicago Art Institute in the dark ages of the early aughts, I didn't script anything at all. I just got out paper and started drawing a page. Comics are, of course a mash-up of writing and drawing. A frequent question I get is which of these comes first, which I never know quite how to answer. But I think it’s fair to say that most cartoonists arrive at the medium from the drawing side. Certainly that was true for me and so the idea of writing things down first just never occurred to me at the start. Part of what attracts me to the medium is the very fact that images work on the brain differently than text does. Indeed they are even processed in opposite hemispheres. So they are not interchangeable. In those early days I probably would have said something about how comics, being a visual medium, would be compromised in some way by being expressed first as text. I wanted images and the non-rational, non-textual way they are experienced to be privileged in my work. That was part of the point.

Which is all well and good, and I still feel that way to some extent. But drawing is laborious. That early process led to a lot of having to re-do whole pages. It was very inefficient. My first proper book, Dogs and Water, was done that way, too, and after the first draft of that book I discarded fully 25 finished pages before figuring out what the book actually wanted to be. I didn’t have a way of thinking through the stories – textually or visually – before I started telling them. And it wasn’t really working.

I muddled through making comics this not-very-efficient way until 2005 or 6 when a filmmaker approached me about turning Big Questions into a film, and asked me to write a script. Nothing ever happened with the film (as seems to generally be the case with these things… though they did make a little visual test at one point — see below), but I did write a script. And having that textual aid to work from turned out to be incredibly useful for the next several years as I finished the rest of that book. I still added things and deviated from it, but having that framework was, not surprisingly, tremendously helpful. The more work you do, paradoxically, the less work you end up having to do.

In the four years after Big Questions was released I put out three more books, but none were straightforward narrative comics in the vein of BQ or Dogs and Water, they were in more playful or experimental modes. I didn’t go back to traditional (or “traditional”) comics again until the mid-teens when I started working on what would become Tongues. Remembering how useful that accidental script had turned out to be for Big Questions I started writing one for the beginnings of this new story.

This is the first page of scripting that I did specifically for Tongues, from sometime in 2014 or so.

And this is me figuring out how I wanted the panelling to work for that scene, and, by extension, for the book as a whole.

In the intervening years, my concerns about keeping the two sides of my brain safely walled off from one another were a little less pressing. When you work at something for fifteen years you get better at it. I wasn’t that worried anymore that text would sully my pictures. And text, after all, is regularly used to tickle the right side of the brain, too. Ask anyone who’s ever come up with a metaphor. Or written a poem. And whoever draws those diagrams in your seat-back pocket about how to get out of an airplane that’s fallen in a lake knows that images can work pretty well with the left side, too. They can be made to convey concrete information. They can pluck the strings of the rational mind. The two sides can, of course, talk to one another. They can play in the same sandbox together now and then.

The other very useful thing about scripts is that because they can get written so much faster than the drawings can get drawn they allow you to begin to figure out how long a book will be before it is finished. It’s like magic. But again, a magic I have not availed myself of in the past. Both my previous efforts at traditional comics sprawled out. The more I worked on them, it seemed, the further the endings receded away from me as I went. Dogs and Water was originally commissioned as a 30-40 page story for an anthology. And then had to get cut from the anthology because it was too long. In my figuring, every issue after Big Questions #3 or 4 was just a few issues away from wrapping the story up. It didn’t end up actually happening until #15.

So now I’m trying, 260ish pages into this current story, to figure out what the future actually holds for Tongues. It’s slightly daunting. Scripting gives you some idea of where you are, but of course some scenes are more dialogue-heavy than others, so there isn’t a truly reliable equation of pages of script to pages of comics. In film they say a page of script is about a minute. A single page of my scripts seem to very roughly equate to two pages of comics. Usually. More or less. A somewhat better way to know is to take one more step. Take that script and thumbnail out each scene. But the term “thumbnail” means different things to different people. For me it does not mean making a little compositional rough of a page. To me the fundamental unit of comics is the panel, not a page. In literature the fundamental unit is the sentence. Sure, words and phrases and letters are more basic, in a sense, but it’s the sentence that conveys the discrete, coherent single thoughts and ideas that get stacked up to make a story. In comics that happens with panels. Each one contains a single action or thought. Stacked up together they make a story. A comics page, likewise, should roughly equate to a literary paragraph — a collection of contained ideas all working toward one larger point. Ideally.

So my ‘thumbnails’ are just stacks of very roughly sketched panels in order. I’m not considering the page, yet at all. Just the panels. It’s a process of me figuring out what information, what action, what text needs to be conveyed in each panel. And how those elements need to be broken up to be comprehensible or readable. I’m thinking about point of view, the arrangement of bodies, whether things are seen close up or far away. It’s a second pass at thinking through the storytelling. I often add or change things at this point. It’s my second look at any dialogue that’s happening, so the text will often change a bit, redundant phrases cut, wording clarified. And it’s the first pass with visuals, so if, for example, two characters are talking, whcih might have been my focus in the script, it might be at this point that I’ll figure out what else is happening around them that may be important.

Thumbnails from Tongues 5 that eventually became parts of several pages and two different scenes.

Once the thumbnailing is done, and I have a collection of sketched out panels, in sequence, then I go back and figure out where the page-breaks go. How many panels will fit on a page, considering that some will be bigger than others and that the page should, best case, end on some note that propels the reader forward. And once those things are decided I can go back through and simply count the number of pages I’ve divided the thumbs into. This number might change a bit once I start drawing — at each stage I’m editing a bit more, re-reading the text, and feeling out the rhythm of the storytelling, trying to figure out if anything is missing, or extraneous. But generally speaking it’s a pretty reliable number.

So that’s what I’ve been doing the last several months for the rest of this story. Writing scripts, then dividing action into panels, figuring out where the pauses go and how to depict things that happen simultaneously or one by one, thumbnailing out scenes, dividing them into pages, placing the cliffhangers, major and minor, and trying to get a feel for the rhythms of the story as it carries us to the end.

I really was hoping that I had about three issues to go, that I would end on number eight. But at this point it’s looking likely that it’ll go to ten. I’m still writing the last of these — basically one long scene toward the end that concludes the primary character’s stories and then a couple of short epilogues (I love epilogues), so I don’t have a final page count in hand quite yet, but it’s going to be at least 180.

Which means we are more than halfway there. Which is good news. Another question I get asked with some regularity is whether it’s hard to sustain interest in or energy for telling these long stories. I know for some cartoonists it can be. But for whatever reason it hasn’t been for me, generally speaking. I was always happy to returnt o the world of those little birds after taking a break from Big Questions for this or that side project, and I am still fully engaged in Tongues’ world and its ideas and characters. I genuinely love following them and seeing what they do when confronted with the various obstacles that fall into their paths. But that said… this one is hard work. It’s easily the most complex piece I’ve ever undertaken — and probably ever will. Big Questions might have had almost as many named characters, but they were all little birds, drawn with four lines and a dot for the eye. And they were all black and white. This book is just far more complex. I’m in love with pretty much all the characters. Even the villains. But it’s a lot of labor. The color in particular is hard work. Light and shadow and hue and value and brightness take up a lot of brain space. So it is, to me, good news that I’m on the back half. I’m delighted to be telling this story, and excited to watch it unfold under my pen and brush and stylus. And I will be ready for a very very long nap when it is done.