First Second Books - Doodles and Dailies

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[from the drawing boards of Leland Myrick and Lark Pien]

Over My Shoulder

[From the Drawing Board of Leland Myrick]

Illustrating a biography is different from anything else I've done -- exhilarating and frightening at once. Usually when I am writing or drawing, I feel quite alone with my work, sitting or standing at my drawing table out in my studio. But the project I'm working on now, illustrating a biography of physicist Richard Feynman, is different.

[UP NEXT WEEK: GREG COOK]

The Poetry of Comics

From the drawing board of Leland Myrick

“If I read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry”

Emily Dickinson

I took part in a panel discussion at last summer’s San Diego comic convention that started me thinking again about a subject that’s been spinning around in my head for a while—the relationship between comics and poetry, and whether some comics can be called poetry. It didn’t take me long, honestly, to come to the conclusion that many comics, though they might not have started out as poems, are in their finished forms closer to poetry than anything else.

During the panel discussion in San Diego, I got quite a few questions from the audience about the process I went through with my :01 graphic novel MISSOURI BOY. I had mentioned in my introduction on the panel that each chapter in MISSOURI BOY had begun life as a poem, none of which (except for the last chapter) were meant at the time of their writing to be anything but poems, poems to be put away in a drawer somewhere or possibly to be read aloud to friends and family at a poetry reading. Much of what I’d written around that time was about my early life in rural Missouri, and the poems that eventually became MISSOURI BOY were written over a span of almost ten years and were quite different in form, ranging from blank verse to haiku. When the idea finally gelled that I would take all these disparate poems and meld them into one coherent graphic novel, I began to think about the process of turning poetry into comics, and in thinking about the process, I began to feel my way toward the kind of book I wanted MISSOURI BOY to be when it was finished. What I did NOT want was a book of illustrated poems. What I wanted was a graphic novel that moved through time and in the end told one large story through a bunch of little moments strung together, the little moments fairly clear in themselves, but the larger story more indistinct as seen through the scattered lenses of the individual chapters.

One of the most important things that happened in the transformation from poem to comic was the loss of words. My editor, Mark Siegel used what became an important phrase for me in the early stages of the book when I was still struggling with keeping the language of the original poems intact—Let the words fall away. And so I did. In my head I saw the words falling away, floating leaves settling on the floor around my drawing table. And when I did, the transformations occurred for me, small enchantments twisting poetry into comics. When I told my friend Jane (who taught me more about poetry than anyone else) about this process, she said, “Oh...don’t let the words fall away! Let me have them.” One of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received, and I’ll always love her for saying that.

When I finished MISSOURI BOY, I didn’t stop thinking about the connection between poetry and comics, because the chapters still felt like poems to me, and I began to think about the other graphic novels and comics I’ve loved, and I began to think about which ones felt like poems to me. And a lot of them came to my mind. And I decided that, for me, certain books are poetry, in the same way that MISSOURI BOY is still poetry. They feel like poems when I read them. The magic mix of the language, the arrangement of the words on the page and the pictures conjures poetry.

The moment near the end of Dave McKean’s CAGES when the artist and his love are talking about creativity and then walk out on the balcony to see the city rising beneath them—that’s poetry. The moment in Taiyo Matsumoto’s BLACK & WHITE when Kimura has a leisurely conversation with Suzuki and then kills him, Suzuki knowing all along that he’s going to die—that’s poetry. The moment at the end of Lark Pien’s LONG TAIL KITTY, when Long Tail Kitty carries the bunny-chewed shoe to the sleeping woman—that’s poetry. The moment in Keiko Nishi’s shojo manga, THE SKIN OF HER HEART, when Lin-Lin turns down an offer of marriage from the factory chief’s son and the rain stops. That’s poetry. And I think even if Dave McKean or Lark came up to me and pointed a finger in my face and told me absolutely not, their books are NOT poetry, I’d smile and nod, and they’d still be poetry in my head and in my heart.

This all may lead one to say that I am just playing with words. And that would be true. But, if I stretch my mind and try to come up with a definition for poetry, I can never settle on anything that strays very far from Miss Dickinson’s definition that I started with. Novels can be poetry, and graphic novels can be poetry, and films can be poetry, and sometimes, for a little while, people can be poetry. They may not be verse, the physical manifestation of poetry that usually starts on the left side of the page and turns back on itself. But poetry is not the same as verse. Not for me, and not for Emily Dickinson.

[UP NEXT WEEK: GREG COOK]

guest Blogger: LELAND MYRICK

World War II

guest Blogger: LELAND MYRICK

Union

guest Blogger: LELAND MYRICK

(click to enlarge)

The Tank

guest Blogger: LELAND MYRICK

The Patriot

guest Blogger: LELAND MYRICK

The Hussar

guest Blogger: LELAND MYRICK

At the bar...

guest Blogger: LELAND MYRICK

[NOTE: Leland Myrick joins the inspired gang of guest-bloggers. His MISSOURI BOY is on the First Second FALL '06 list. Leland's entry includes a few magnificent behind-the-scene sketches for it.]

***Missouri Boy Origins***

I didn't set out to make an autobiographical graphic novel. I really didn't. For years I'd been writing poems about my early years growing up in Missouri. And then one day I decided to turn one of those poems into comic form, and that became PAPER AIRPLANES, which was published in a Dark Horse Comics anthology. That was it, I thought at the time--a nice, short one-shot autobiographical story. Sweet, to the point, no more needed.

But then as I finished my last book, BRIGHT ELEGY, and I was busy at my drawing board sketching out ideas for the next book, my wife came up behind me and said, "You know, your poems are the best stuff you've written. You should turn them all into comic stories, make that your new book."

I laughed the idea off. But the seed of autobiographical temptation had been planted in my brain and would only grow. I began work on several ideas, but kept coming back to the poems that would eventually become the basis of MISSOURI BOY, and so I put everything else aside.

Poetry and comics have a lot in common, really--a brief amount of time to tell a story or make a point or express a sentiment, a visual flow on the page. To turn one into the other, some stanzas became images, and some words just fell away, unnecessary. And like a book of poetry, I realized it would be a memoir, not an autobiography, a series of specific moments rather than a single story.