004: SITTING ON THE STAIRS WITH LIN CARTER

YOURS, IN ANTICIPATION

Good morning from Yeovil, Somerset. Paul Verhoeven based the art design and look of Total Recall’s Venusville on Yeovil. Did you know that? Here, the sky’s a strange, rich emerald colour and we all look like Michael Ironside.

Sometimes, the best thing about going on an adventure is the anticipation, the exciting feeling that, soon, we’re about to be somewhere else. Has anyone written about the neurology of travel? - ‘cos I think that maybe one of the most significant things about journeys might be how they rewire your head. We visit an imaginary version of a place prior to going there in person: an idyll or a horrorshow that then sets up our expectations.

“We have nothing to fear but Fear Itself,” as Roosevelt once said - a fact not lost on the cynical individuals and corporations who developed social media and then deliberately curated our ongoing addiction to their platforms. Anger, hatred, fear of difference or change, and other negative, monetisable clickbait-driven emotions have kept people tethered to their misery-sites and Silicon valley awash in dopamine advertising dollahs. But not for much longer…

‘Cos it turns out that anticipation is itself an extremely powerful tool: one we can learn to hack and harness to our own ends, not theirs. Anticipation is an adaptive defence strategy that allows us look into an imagined future and mitigate potential problems or harm; the mechanism through which daydreams and imagination are transformed into action and invention. Anticipation - the ability to look forward through an imaginative lens - is a core feature of our species: the rocket fuel that allows us to shift from looking at the horizon and wondering what might be on the other side to actually setting forth to explore new habitats and terrains. It enables us to get excited about new things instead of being scared of ‘em; it’s what brings people together into tribes and clans, why we fall in love.

Of course, not everyone is able to physically travel or can afford the luxury of downing tools and disappearing off. But there are other types of journeys we can take: books, music and non-visual media that can transport us in a near-infinite number of ways. As much as I loved comics as a kid, reading books - especially Science Fantasy - used to really send me off somewhere special. My brain would fill in the visual blanks in ways that few artists could come close to. To my pre-teen mind, the works of Clark Aston Smith and Michael Moorcock (especially his Swords trilogy) were full of rich, vibrant colours - a sort of verbal synaesthesia that sucked me into liminal landscapes that sat beneath the text waiting to come to life. Lin Carter has a lousy (undeserved, imho) rep as a writer - many critics dismiss him as a hack - but I can remember sitting on the stairs in our council house in St Patricks Road entranced by one of his books, unable to put it down. On the stairs - not a chair or a bed, but curled up on the bloody stairs! - oblivious to the draught from the front door or any physical discomfort. Hack or not, I’d say Carter earned his place in my book collection that day.

And it’s in the celebratory spirit of anticipation and excitement that I find myself increasingly drawn to the idea of writing books like the ones that transported me all those years ago. I want to unleash my Inner Lin Carter, as it were. These days, I get a similar sort of anticipatory buzz from watching fresh words appear in a notebook or on my computer screen as I once got from turning a paperback page: Where’s this going? What’s going to happen next? It might sound crazy, but writing is a form of adventure for me, an ongoing exploration. One where I don’t have to go anywhere. All the heavy lifting is done in my head. It’s free to participate in, and it’s also freeing. I enjoy it most when my own work surprises me, when it takes me somewhere new, unexpected and unfamiliar. It’s like coming home. Like sitting on those draughty stairs all over again. I just want to be transported, see?

Let yr mind wander.

Yer pal, Kek

I’m Kek-w. I write comics, films, TV and Odd Stuff. I also make music and art. If yr diggin’ this newsletterzine, please consider pointing a friend toward it: https://humane-debris-ed6dfb.beehiiv.com/subscribe . We need to build more safe oasis’s for ourselves.

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WRITING COMICS WITH KEK

This time round we’re going to switch things up a bit. A couple people recently asked me if I could talk about my own comic book writing process, so let’s get things rolling with a sequence of images posted by Colin Brown on the John M Burns Art Page on (ulp) Facebook.

It starts off with part of an old script of mine for an episode of THE ORDER (that I supplied to the group a few months back) and then runs into (some of) John’s process for illustrating that page of script. I thought it might be useful or interesting for anyone who’s not seen an example of Full Script before to see how I do it (I do get asked quite regularly in real life - though rarely online - what a comic-book script looks like. “Do you, like, describe stuff to the artist?”). Plus, it’s always a treat to see John’s phenomenal and masterly work.

Now, here’s John talking about his own process after receiving the script:

Okay, so that’s a quick run-through of how we get from a script for a comic-book page to a fully illustrated version of that page - though every artist has their own process, as does every writer. If I was writing a script page for a Commando comic, it would look very different to one for 2000AD. Commando have specific format guide-lines for scripts, Rebellion are less rigid on that front. Last year, I wrote a 12-page Fantasy strip for a European publisher and the process was a pretty rigorous one. I had a line-editor I principally dealt with, but each parse of my script - and there were several - also had his boss and a Lore Master sat in on the mail giving notes, plus producers from a film company adding their tuppence worth. So each job / script is different.

A couple quick takeaways from my script. Some of this may seem fairly obvious, but I’ll say it anyway, ‘cos not everyone reading this will have necessarily ever seen a comic-book script or know how they work. When I got my first pro script to write in 1994 there was no internet and no guides existed telling you how to do this stuff. But I remembered that an issue of Steve Holland’s Comic World magazine had had a blurry repro of part of an Alan Grant script, so I pored over that and used it to retro-engineer what I thought I should do. Luckily, at that time I had a very patient and helpful editor, Alan McKenzie, who gently steered me in the right direction when I went off-road.

(1) The script breaks down each page into panels and each panel comes with instructions or (in my case) suggestions for the illustrator, as well as any dialogue or captions to be added by the letterer. Sometimes, if there are special lettering requirements my script will also directly address the letterer as well as the artist.

(2) My panel descriptions are often quite long and detailed compared with some writers, though not as loquacious as, say, Alan Moore’s. There’s probably far more detail in there than was required by an artist as experienced as John was, but I like to create a sort of conversation with the illustrator, where possible, to pull them into the work, let them know what the characters are thinking - their motives and inner life - as well as what I’m thinking. It’s also a good way for me to think out loud as I go along - it helps me solve narrative problems, map out story and character direction, etc ahead of future pages or episodes. Some artists might find this a distraction - it’s too much detail, just tell me what I need to know! Thankfully, most of my recent collaborators are inspired by the richness of the scripts, not distracted, and are able to cherry-pick what they need. I also tend to write for my artistic collaborators - I know the sort of things they enjoy illustrating, what they’re capable of, etc. And if I put too many horses in a panel, they’ll soon tell me! Still, I think that when I return to corporate work it’s quite possible that I’ll shift to a leaner, more stripped down scripting style. I think it’s time for me to try a different approach and see how it works out.

Okay. I’ve chewed up a fair bit of real estate and verbiage here, so this is a good point to pause. Next time round, we’ll talk about the process that took me from the initial idea through to the completed script above.

“MY NAME IS KURT SCHWITTERS… I AM AN ARTIST AND I NAIL MY PICTURES TOGETHER.” - Kurt Schwitters.

KID SHIRT’S CRATE DIGS

Sunburned Hand of the Man are one of my favourite groups - I even supported them live a couple times in the 00s - so it’s been really great to see them back in action again in recent years with releases like ‘Pick a Day to Die’ and ‘Nimbus’. The world needs ‘em! Here’s a recent new-old release, a re-up of some old jams from their Boston Loft daze. This one, in particular, hit a spot:

Also, it’s Ron Schneiderman’s birthday. Happy Belated Birthday, Ron!

I saw Farmers Manual 20 years ago (!!), back in an era where (hard to believe it now, but) making electronic music using a laptop was still a relatively new / novel thing and people were calling it, er, ‘laptop music’. FM were on a bill with other laptop noise guerillas like Pita and Hecker, but here was a group of people, all on laptops, casually sat around as if they were temps hot-desking upstairs in Accounts, jamming on their ‘tops, blending sound-file mulch and streaming visuals, barely acknowledging the audience, drinking coffee and cartons of fruit juice, eating snacks, occasionally glancing at the video backdrop. Sometimes they’d get up and wander over to chat to a ‘band’ member. It was Next Level Insouciance. There was a story that during a European gig round that time, the Manual ordered pizza and had it delivered onstage while they were playing. On their post-gig merch table they had a DVD for sale called ‘RLA’ (Mego, 2003) that contained, I think, over 3 days worth of live mp3s. There was only one copy and while I hummed and hawed about whether to get it or not, someone swooped in and bought it out from under me. I have few regrets in life, but.

The FM collective, I’m pleased to say, still make and release music at a frantic, almost unimaginable pace - one it’s near-impossible to keep up with. This is a recent release and, like the Sunburned album, dates back to that early 00’s era, albeit with some contempo rmxs:

MERCH ALERT!

Just a gentle reminder that you can pick up some of my own schwizzle-schwazzle over on my Bandcamp. My most recent book is OTHER TIMES, a love letter to Old Skool Sword n Sorcery / Science Fantasy.

There’s also a bunch o’comics and music over there too - somethin’ for pretty much every kinda twisted palette. Sorry fer the hard sell hustle-hype, but I got a wardrobe that needs to get cleared out so that I kin quit goin’ round nekkid. (tmi, I know, but the apple barrel is fallin’ to bits and no longer fits - hey, that rhymes!).

CHILL WITH KIKI

Und finally, The Pusser sez: thanks so much for visiting - it was lovely to see you all. But now I needs a nap. Bye! Zzzzz xx