A Story About A Story

I have a lot of stories that pop into my head. Mostly, these stories are generated through random and singular thoughts or from the many small illustrations that reside in my sketch book. I have several repeating thoughts that seem to naturally beg for a story to accompany them. Some can involve a bit of violence. This may be my action-hero/Y-chromosome coming out. Generally, however, they are quite pointless and silly. “Where’s My Pickle” comes immediately to mind. I find several movies out there failing in the promise of a -good- story. They mostly concern themselves with special effects and the like to grab our hard earned cash. Don’t even get me started on the flop that was the final installment of The Matrix.

My life, for the most part, is rather trivial and uneventful — to me. I have moments, but they rarely are the stuff of novels. This is why I generate most of these stories. To give life to something, an exciting life, that it would not normally possess. I have already developed a series of illustrations for W-M-P, all linking one to the next with a ridiculous back story. Before I scripted the first page of SPeCks, I developed each character's history and the reason for each issue to exist. Granted, the main story line has deviated a bit, but the heart of the life of SPeCks is being realized page by page. I find that I am giving purpose and history to every character I ever think of and in most cases, it turns out better than the story meant to place them in.

Example: I have a story about some future version of humanity living on a remarkably large, continuously developed/growing space station. I have the basic idea of the plot but I have spent countless hours on the reason for the space station's existence. From the back story, I have this one rather interesting event, that for all intents and purposes, was meant as a side note — a precursor. Well, there is an incredibly imaginative story in that side note just waiting to come out. I also spent more time developing the history of one character in the space station story then I did on the plot line.

I’d like to do a story about an assassin. By itself, this subject matter is tired, over done and, often times, poorly executed. I have found that with my (what I consider unique) perception of the main character, however, the story takes on an interesting twist and pulls it away from the same dribble lining our bookstore shelves these days. The real problem is the fact that I feel I lack the true prose abilities required to captivate a reader into actually reading this (or any) fiction I come up with. Not to mention, one version of this story has a close friend worry for my sanity and lives in a, now constant, state of paranoia in my presence.

I guess what I am saying is, that sometime in the future, I would eventually like to see one of these stories fledged out into a graphic novel for public consumption. With any luck, James Kersey will illustrate said book.

In other news: Page 6 of Issue02 is finally scripted and ready for production. I will work on it tonight for posting and then begin work in earnest on Issue03. I am thinking about creating the next panel in the W-M-P story, so expect a piccy for your desktop, perhaps by the end of the weekend. Remember, W-M-P is not necessarily a true story line as much as a set of pictures representing a story that has yet to be recorded.