Making Comics Weirdly

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I would love to be winding down for the year, but it’s not quite working out that way right now. So, while I’m trying to refit a spare room while trying to finish three scripts and two outlines and basically losing my mind from stress…

In this letter:

OPERATIONS

MAKING COMICS WEIRDLY

It must have been1990-ish when I first discovered the work of Krystine Kryttre, in the collection DEATH WARMED OVER. That jagged dark crackling energy. Fell in love with it immediately. And it took me a while to realise how she achieved those weird panels. She worked in scraperboard. I think maybe it’s called scratchboard in America?

You remember scraperboard from school art classes. You were given a black board and a little murder tool and you scraped away the black paint to reveal the white clay underneath. Which you had to blow away. And an hour later there would be a room of dizzy teenagers with oxygen starved brains from having to huff out all their tidal breath every three seconds.

DEATH WARMED OVER was a great book. I remember being particularly struck by her memoir/memorial piece to her friend Dori Seda. But also these damn pages, a few of which are helpfully archived on her website (1):

Scraperboard! Who the hell executes an entire comic in scraperboard pieces? The woman’s a genius.

You may have assumed there is a limited, agreed set of tools for making comics. Krystine Kryttre proves otherwise.

This is early-career art from the Italian magician Liberatore:

From Richard Corben’s intro to the Anglophone edition of RANXEROX IN NEW YORK in 1989:

Felt tip pens. That is some alchemical shit Incidentally, if you’re now moved to investigate the RANXEROX books, be advised they are extremely perverse.

A million years ago I did a book called DV8 for Wildstorm, the first issue of which was the best-selling comic in America for its month. It had eight variant covers, which at the time seemed excessive and now seems quaint, and one of them was a cover by Liberatore secured by Scott Dunbier.

Anyway. Around the same time as DEATH WARMED OVER, I remember having a conversation with someone at Titan Books, who did the outsize JUDGE DREDD book collections. (I bought the very first one with a postal order when I was a kid!) Memory is hazy, but I guess we were talking about weird ways to make comics. And this person, whose name has been lost in the fog of memory, told me about issues they’d had with the covers of those DREDD collections. At the time, the covers were being alternated between Dave McKean and Bill Sienkiewicz, and it seemed to this person like McKean and Sienkiewicz were trying to outdo each other with how ornate and worked they could make their covers. Which was making the art more and more difficult to shoot for print. Until, one day, a cover arrived from Sienkiewicz, and it might have been this one:

Because it arrived in a crate and had to be connected to a battery. Because it lit up. The story was that Sienkiewicz had wired blinking electric lights into the cover. Which made it a nightmare to shoot for print because you had to catch the lights at the right second.

I so want this partial memory of a story to be true.

Making comics weirdly. The only rules are whether or not it will stick to the page. Carol Swain has done a lot of books using only pencil and charcoal:

Jon J Muth did a glorious, luminous adaptation of Fritz Lang’s M.

And he did it weirdly (2):

Jon J Muth drew a graphic novel with silver. I am not overly worried about AI slopping over into this medium when there have always been people within the artform who make books with clay and silver.

(1) https://kryttre.com/home.html

(2) https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/apr/04/1

Now: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast. Forthcoming 2024: DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, FELL: FERAL CITY new printing. 2025: THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM, THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition.

Here’s what a DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT script looked like.

This is available as a print from the lordess.io store.

OTHER

LIGHTS OUT

The crowdfund for the LIGHTS OUT revival graphic novel, which includes me and Kody among many others, is still running.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

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And that’s me done for this week. I’m going to have some cheese and quince and a glass of something and sit outside and look at the sunlight. You should do something like that. It only takes five minutes. Do something that makes you feel better. See you next week.

W