Reading Time: 1 Min.
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter— sign up here . I like to think I’m spectacularly good at having a bad time. A few years ago, I was asked by my best friend from college to be his best man. What an honor! Except I was in the middle of early transition and not out to this particular group of guys yet. The bachelor weekend came quickly, in Las Vegas, where I suffered a rather severe existential break—mostly of my own making. I was too afraid of making a scene or running into real prejudice, so I chose to forgo any difficult conversations in lieu of simply boymoding. One bright side—I returned home with the kernel of an idea for a story that would eventually become my graphic novel, Boys Weekend . For me, the visuals in this book were inextricable from the premise. When I’m editing other peoples’ comics work, the first thing I like to ask is why is this a comic? Either what about this story can only be told visually, or what about this story will a visual element enhance? Not everything needs pictures. A comic can communicate so much to a reader so quickly—people can read work that’s taken years to accomplish in mere hours—but a visual story, for me, is something more experiential. What I mean here is, comics present a very intimate experience between author and reader. It’s interactive—the pages are carefully constructed so I’m leading the viewer around where I’d like their eye to go. The page spreads are planned so the reader can choose—or not—to turn the page and keep reading at a tense moment to see if it’s diffused in ways either humorous or terrifying. Since I’m in charge of where that page ends and on which panel, I can direct the reader exactly where I want them to go. I was thinking a lot about Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed when writing this book—not a comic, I know—but something that always struck me about that novel was the feeling Le Guin extracted of […]
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