Working on new comic shorts for the upcoming Filthy Cake 2 and The Pit And The Compendium 2. The format is going to be the same as the 1st volume: 4 page horror shorts. And therein lays the problem. Some stories I have demanding to be told need far more than 4 pages in order to do so. I can write short stories, but with the weekly comic and the alliterations and the short stories I wrote for FC1 and TPATC1 I am hungry for something substantial to sink my teeth into.
I was discussing this with Nik the other night, that the stories I have in mind need to be a least 12 pages to be told without sacrificing content. Unfortunately this won’t work with the format of the anthologies, as they contain 10-12 4 page stories written by and illustrated by a number of writers and artists. If I turned in 2 12 page (at least) scripts it would eat up a ¼ of each book. However, Nik got excited and proposed a series of comics written by me. And yeah, we are going to do it. With his connections and 3 artists already expressing interest, it’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of when. We are going to call it “Rabbit Holes of Horror,” and do 1 to 3 stories per. I haven’t decided yet on how many pages I need, considering I’ve just been given free reign as far a length goes, but we want to keep it around 40 pages per comic.
And “Alice Through The Windshield Glass” is going to be part of the first one, if not the entire first one.
I never would have guessed 3 years ago that I would be writing comics, but here I am. And I’m laughing, because I still have no real sense of storyboarding. I’ve been reading a few books on it, but in my head I always just think about movies. As if I was directing a movie and what angles I would want to see…but that comes after. I am probably doing it the hard way, but I write the entire story out in, well, story format first. Then I pick and pull it apart into scenes, and then add, subtract or edit dialog according to how I see it happening in my head. It’s time consuming, but I think I would miss something if I tried to just write it in script format first.
A sneak peek at the beginning of Alice Through The Windshield Glass:
She had seen the beginning, the black cat that now made her way through the trees. Slinking through the twist of roots like a labyrinth, she solves every one as the giants above her head refuse to acknowledge the ill winds that now blew through their leaves. A bitter sweet melody played with creaking limbs that fell on knowing ears as she slipped to the edge of the forest that lined the interstate.
And the ending, she had seen that too.
She turns her head away from the blur of metal that was in a rush to nowhere. She turns her ears from the swish of rubber against the road and the occasional murmur of laughter or cacophony of music that rose above it. She twists her head back in the direction of the woods she had emerged from, wistful, as if looking back through time; and she was.
She remembers that first scratch. His face leaning down into hers as he was talking to her on the day that they had first met. The pink welts that were raised around the edges of those cuts. The clarity of the blood as it welled up on his cheek. The sound of his laughter as she licked his blood off of her claws and the spell was cast. Destinies defined and fates sealed.
“Yeah,” he said, “this cat is perfect.”
She remembers the other, the woman hair that matched her own fur. Watching the two of them, cloaking themselves in shadow but unhidden to her eyes. The flames, the sweat, the whispers that swept into her ears like divinations shouted in a Pentecostal fervor. Their glossolalia echoing between four walls and swirling around her head. She kept track of teeth offered like claws, and the threat that was carried out as the raven-haired woman bit his mouth without apology. She split his lip and licked his blood off her own. She went back for more and was not met with resistance, but more threats spoken with skin. The cat turned her attention away from the shapes and gave it to the shadows playing across the wall behind them, the candlelight unconcerned with the past, nor the present, as it acted out the future in sweeping waves of black and white.
It told of what was to be, and the cat listened.