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December 12, 2007
Looking Back, Ahead, and Around
So 'The Black Chamber' has wrapped and next week will see the first installment of 'Too Late'. If you don't mind, I'd like to take a look back at Black Chamber, give some thoughts on Too Late, and talk a little about my home town Kansas City to boot.
LOOKING BACK: THE BLACK CHAMBER
The ending was the first thing that popped into my head about this story. "I killed Osama bin Laden in 1998." Then I worked my way back from that, telling the kind of story which I like to tell. Stories about relationships between people and how they can go wrong. The most emotional pain that you can feel is when someone you're close to turns on you. A lover cheating on you, a parent who runs out on you, a long-time employer letting you go, and the list goes on.
My dad left my mom while she was pregnant with me. He and I have a strained relationship, and I'd wanted for a while to express those emotions in a story. The girl I was with at the time had a similar relationship with her mom, and a lot of the ways Jodie would talk to Dennis came from overhearing her.
The ending is one of those questions I've been asking for awhile. What if everything leading up to 9/11 and everything that's happened since was all planned? Playing with that question opens up even more questions and seemed like something that I could generate a lot of great stories from.
The ending and the relationship between Dennis and Jodie were the two things that drove the story for me. At the time I was obsessed with Koike and Kojima's 'Lone Wolf and Cub' and paced the book similarly. In hindsight that didn't work out as I'd intended it to. Probably the biggest gripe about the book I've heard is that you can read the whole thing in about twenty minutes. I can see that, and with hindsight being 20/20 I'd probably add another two hundred or so pages. Que sera, sera. I do think the ending is the type of reveal that sends the reader back to look through the book again, which I also intended.
'Black Chamber' was the first graphic novel I wrote and drew. It definitely has that 'first book' feel about it, but I'm still proud of what I accomplished here. In 2003 I decided to start drawing again after five years of not doing so, and Black Chamber is the first fruit of those labors. I learned A LOT from doing this book, and I hope that my next book will show some improvement.
LOOKING AHEAD: TOO LATE
With 'Too Late' I set out to do two things: Write a love letter to Raymond Chandler and another to Kansas City. The Chandler stuff is in my lead character Eddie Mann and how he interacts with those around him and how he views his surroundings.
But I didn't want to do just another PI story. Retreading old stereotypes wouldn't do anything for me or for you the readers. So while reading Chandler's 'The Long Goodbye' (my personal favorite) I came across the line (and I'm doing this from memory) "speak for the dead" and the whole story came together for me. A lost soul tasked with speaking for those who no longer could defend themselves. The title came from something I ran across in Chandler's journals, a list of unused titles. One of them was 'Too Late for Smiling', which I shortened down as a nod to the man.
So then I set out to work up the story. This book is way more heavy than Black Chamber was. More panels, more pages, more dialogue, more more more. I probably spent a couple of months on it. While writing I was also going around town and mapping out where everything would happen. One scene I even used Google Earth to plot out a chase scene.
I was stuck on the death scene of Eddie, though. And no, I'm not spoiling anything to you here. The lead character is dead and that's revealed in the first scene. It was that first scene I had to NAIL though. I ended up merging in a radio drama script I had written but was never used and did something I'd had good success with on a shorter story. See, there's no characters shown in the first seventeen pages. It's all disembodied voices floating through Kansas City's River Market area.
I was 'playing jazz' with putting the book together. Some scenes were tightly scripted out, others were given the room to do whatever they needed to do. Some ran longer, many shorter, but I think it gives the book a little more of an organic feel that I'm, well, jazzed about.
Jazz music plays a big part in the book. I'm a big fan of Miles and Bird and Coltrane and Dizzy and Ella and Mingus and Ladybird and just about everyone else. Researching into it was a blast, too. There's a place here called the Mutual Musicians Foundation that doesn't even open up until around midnight on the weekends. It's free for musicians who show up with their instruments and a small cover for everyone else.
It's the very soul of improvisational jazz, just a big jam session where folks who more than likely haven't ever played together get together in this tiny but hugely historical room and make something wonderful happen. You might get kids from UMKC's music department showing up, or maybe one of the local legends like Max Groove or Pat Metheny sitting in, or big-time touring musicians coming through town will go there after their shows. Eric Clapton's shown up and played 'til the sun came up. There's all kinds of legends around when Prince showed up and wouldn't let anyone leave until way into the morning.
These are the kinds of things I wanted to build my book around.
About halfway through writing the book I started getting all kinds of ideas to make a series out of the concepts I had laid out. Spirits speaking for the dead? That writes itself, man. So I'm already planning the follow-ups. Hopefully y'all like what I've got here well enough to allow me to share those stories with you as well. Plus it wasn't until last week when a commenter brought it up, but I've thought of how Black Chamber will tie into this larger mythos and is the first pebble that will start the avalanche towards where I want this series to go. I'm not about to tell you how it fits in, though!
LOOKING AROUND: KANSAS CITY
Kansas City was the setting for Black Chamber, but its history is a major part of Too Late. The town's got a lot going for it and I wanted to share that with the rest of the world. I hope those of you who read these stories and live elsewhere will maybe become just that much more interested in what the Paris of the Plains has to offer.
I'll see y'all next week with the first installment of Too Late. I'm excited to start sharing it with you, and I hope you'll enjoy reading it as much as I've enjoyed making it.
Posted by Schamberger at December 12, 2007 12:52 PM