This is The Voice In Your Head Is Mine. The date is February 9th, 2021. If you're receiving this email and have no idea what's going on, well, fuck. I guess I blew it. Or maybe you blew it. Either way, you're here and this is Zac Thompson's weekly newsletter.
It’s late Monday night after another long week. The sun was finally out in Vancouver this weekend. We don’t get a lot of winter light so I took advantage and got out both days. Sunday started with a long hike in Campbell Valley. Soaking in the sunlight outside some farmland, and doing some trails that led through the forest and onto some boardwalks over a marsh. The whole thing was positively refreshing. Hell, it was necessary.
On the comic front. Finally have some forward momentum this week on a project that I’ve been working on for almost a year now. The pandemic has caused a lot of well made plans to shuffle and change. Not much you can do but adapt. It’s funny working on something like this for so long because you’re rarely afforded such luxuries as time in comics. Trying to savor every minute of it.
This week we’re going to talk revealing characters in pieces through Darwyn Cooke’s excellent Parker graphic novels, Kathe Koja’s excellent weird horror novel The Cipher, Jackie Chan’s Police Story, and a collection of things I’m reading and listening too.
Writing Craft:
Revealing A Character In Pieces
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been reading Darwyn Cooke’s Parker graphic novels. For those who are unfamiliar, Parker is a hard boiled crime hero created by Donald E. Westlake under the pseudonym Richard Stark. Parker was a mainstay throughout the 1960’s pulp detective boom. Parker is a professional thief and has almost no redeeming qualities. He’s callous, meticulous and happy to murder people if they get in his way. Stark’s prose is cold and contains almost no sentimentality. So you get a ruthless read with a ruthless hero.
Each Parker novel is written in the same format. Something highly formalistic where each book is divided into four sections of roughly equal length. The prose is razor sharp and dense in places. So it’s no easy task to take something like this and translate it to comics. Unless your Darwyn Cooke…
For this I want to talk about the opening pages of THE HUNTER. Cooke’s adaptation of Stark’s first Parker novel. The book begins with a tiny bit of narration prose, helping us get a flavor for the world.
Parker has his back to us. With a single line of dialogue, we learn he’s a man with a hard edge. His posture is hunched and he’s towering over the man in the car. It’s all working together to tell you a story about the character from a distance. In a traditional comic, you’d turn the page and see Parker right away. Not so with Darwyn Cooke. The next pages show Parker storming through traffic. At a distance or in pieces.
We see the gait of his walk. The size of his hand. The look on the woman’s face as he passes by. He’s an imposing figure. The crowd parts around him in the last panel. The next page is no different.
Again, we see Parker from behind or at a distance, never showing his face. He’s walking down those subways steps like a beast. His large and imposing figure shrouded in darkness. We should fear this dude. He hops the turnstile without a single line of dialogue. He rides the subway, so he’s not a fancy thief with a nice car or anything of the sort.
This type of restraint goes on for 11 pages with little to no dialogue. This seems like an agonizingly long time in a traditional comic but through this use of restraint we learn everything we need to know about Parker. And in the moment where we see him for the first time. It lands hard.
Now, I realize not everyone has a mastery of the cartooning craft like Darwyn Cooke and certain limitations of the monthly comics format prevent a lot of books from doing something like this. But it’s a great exercise in purely visual storytelling that evokes a clear tone and tells you more about the character than a few narration captions ever could. The idea of showing your character in small visual pieces is something that I think about a lot. You’ve only got one opportunity to introduce a reader to a character in unique and interesting way. Fail to hook someone to your title character and they might put the book down.
Looking at the work of Steven Spielberg, you can see this is a tactic he employs often. He introduces characters in pieces, and creates a sense of mystery about the person and makes the reader an active participant in trying to figure out who they are. This evokes a quality of making the character larger than life.
Look at the opening to Raiders of The Lost Ark.
You open on a mountain. You see Indiana Jones from behind. The whip on his hip. His trademark hat floats into the center of the frame. You see he’s leading a large adventuring party through a thick jungle but you never see his face. You see him walk directly toward something that scares the shit out of someone else and say nothing. He finds a poisonous dart in a tree, rubs it on his thumb and forefinger in a telling manner before dropping it. Everything about this scene is restrained up until the last seconds. Where he finally uses that whip and steps out from the shadows.
In the span of 3 minutes, you know everything you need to know about Indiana Jones. There’s a lot of power to that restraint and it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot in my own storytelling. Resist the urge to give everything up front, leave the reader wanting more and use that sense of mystery to invite them in. It seems counterintuitive but it works wonders.
The Cipher
Last month I had the sincere pleasure of finally devouring Kathe Koja’s incredible horror novel, The Cipher. Words cannot do this insane thing justice. It’s a surreal horror masterpiece that burrows into your mind. I recommend going into it knowing absolutely nothing. Trust me when I say it’ll hook you immediately and scare the ever-living-fuck out of you.
For those of you looking for a little more information. The Cipher follows Nicholas. He’s a would-be poet and video-store clerk with a shitty girlfriend, Nakota. One day they find a black hole. They name it The Funhole. They stick different things into the hole including bugs, a mouse, and a human hand. Everything comes out changed.
The Funhole is not a villain or a monster. It’s not even really a thing. It’s just terrifying. Perfectly round, pitch black, and infinitely deep. Anything that goes near it changes. It’s capable of feeling pain and pleasure beyond earthly limits. The existential threat posed by this hole is at the heart of the novel and it will burrow deep into your psyche as you watch Nicholas and Nakota become more obsessed with it. There is no meaning to the Funhole, so you must impose your own onto it. And in the process, it changes you.
The Cipher is a surreal descent unlike anything else I’ve read. It’s not a book that ever gives you more than the characters. In that, you’ll never have all the pieces. The process of taking this journey will change you. It will linger with you long after you finish the last page. You’ll find your own meaning in the Funhole, and that is perhaps, what makes it so fucking scary.
Police Story
Jackie Chan’s excellent Police Story is now streaming on the Criterion channel. I watched it this weekend after having a vague recollection of seeing it as a kid and honestly, I think it’s one of the best action films ever made. For this one, Chan is staring, writing, directing, and choreographing all the action. Everything about the film is larger than life, but in a way that feels entirely grounded.
The movie has this raw and gritty quality to the stunts that make every fight bone crunching. You’ll wince and probably scream while watching this. But it’s also incredibly exciting in a way that few American films are. Everything about the action is shot in nice wide angles with very few cuts. It makes the action easy to follow and exciting to watch. Everything jumps off the screen.
So when you see Jackie hanging off the side of a double decker bus with just an umbrella, it actually feels tense and exciting. And somehow for the entire 90 minute runtime, the film keeps upping the ante. Until you get to a final fight scene taking place in a Hong Kong mall that goes on for 8 minutes and features mind-blowing stunts and choreography. If you’ve never seen one of Chan’s Chinese language films, this is a perfect place to start. Trust me.
Tiny Scabs
A collection of links you might find interesting. Click at your own peril.
PT Anderson on why you shouldn’t go to film school. I’d entirely agree with this assessment. Apart from the folks I met at school, I didn’t gain much from the experience save for massive debt.
Read an excerpt from Robbie Arnott’s The Rain Heron. An eco sci-fi book that’s out today. Described by the publisher as “Two women embark on a grueling quest in search of a legendary creature called the rain heron—a mythical, dangerous, form-shifting bird with the ability to change the weather.” My copy is en route and I can’t wait to read it.
Why you should be concerned by the new COVID-19 variants from The Atlantic. It’s a little bit of a bummer read but it helped me understand the threat(s) posed by these new variants and why we now need to be more vigilant than ever.
This week’s playlist:
Peace
I can’t believe it’s almost been a year living in this pandemic, I imagine you’re feeling the disbelief too, but we’re almost there. Don’t take on more than you can manage, speak up when you need help, and don’t be afraid to take some time for yourself. The world is stressful right now.
Until next week,
Z