Comix, blogs, writing

03/24/2010 21:15
In writing class today we talked about comics, graphic novels, story-boarding and blogging. Scott McCloud’s books, Understanding Comics and Making Comics were the basis of the discussion, and of course I brought in my complete From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell (did you know Eddie Campbell has a blog? Click the picture)(Gaiman is a little more active, but then, he's a writer). We talked about mood and inanimate characterization. I thought London was a character in From Hell, in the sense that it seems to loom actively over the characters. You can’t really imagine the story happening anywhere else. Another guy in the class said that might be an extreme case of mood. His example was the heat in Do the Right Thing. It doesn’t achieve agency, but it’s certainly causal. Either way, we’re looking at how people build stories around inanimate stuff -- which is basically what our historical arguments are when all’s said and done. HCR uses the LoTR movie as her example: the central character is an inanimate object, the Ring.

One of the things I really like about this class is that we’re not limiting ourselves to academically oriented tools, to learn about writing. We’ve talked about the LoTR DVD directors’ commentary, and read Stephen King’s book, Rabiner’s Thinking Like Your Editor, Strunk & White, and now McCloud. I think this has been really helpful. Proof will be in the pudding, of course...

I had some thoughts about my rural history project on my drives to and from school today. An hour in the car with no music can be a good thing. The people I was researching last week had a lot of difficulty obtaining money in the country. It got me thinking about credit and the velocity of money in urban and rural settings. Some notes about it on my rural blog.

We also talked more about how much it’s smart to divulge in blogs. I’ve started being a little more careful about how much I tell about my research. There’ll be time enough once I’ve written (and sold) the book, to talk about the details and all the cool stuff that gets left on the cutting room floor. In the meantime, though, there are a lot of books to read and a couple of conference papers to write. So that should keep me flush with content.

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