Up Close And Personalised Episode 6

These things can evolve right up until I press the red button. The "tamborine" quip came out as I was putting the frame together. Just seemed more natural than what I'd put there originally. Also seemed to fit with the "preacher man" look of our chap. Also he looked so humourless. It's like he's right and SO much of the world is wrong. So it just ain't funny. Is it?

You can find the comic in THE STORIES tab, under the heading, Up Close and Personalised.

How it all began. Part 5

Around Christmas 2007 I showed the script to my wife.  She thought it was weird, but liked some of the jokes.  The kind of impact I was after, I guess.  The challenge now was to get the thing drawn.

I was still thinking about producing a “real”, physical comic.  On paper.  So I tried pencils and inks.  Very traditional.  Very slow.  Even if you’re aiming at something quite rough and ready, it just eats your time.  But I ended up with a few rough pencil drawings of the main characters, so I’d got a good idea of what I wanted them to look like.

I then had a go at some computer drawing packages, and a digitising tablet.  Again slow.  If I was going to do this, I felt it needed the momentum of regular episodes, and it needed to fit round a full time job and a life.

I picked up one of Frank Miller’s Sin City books in my local library.  I thought all the black kind of absolves you of adding a lot of detail.  And it would fit with that Hammett/Chandler feel to some of my dialogue.  So, with my head full of old black-and-white movies, I started messing around with photographic images in Paint.

Paint is not the most user-friendly of packages, but it’s like having a go at fixing your house with a hammer, a saw and a big screwdriver.  You can get results.  Quick.

And presentation software.  You know what I mean.  It’s everywhere.  With easy page turning.

Autumn 2008 and I was on a roll.

How it all began. Part 4

I began scribbling down snippets of dialogue.  These were imagined discussions around a couple of particular “crimes” that had happened in the Organisation.  I was trying to push them further, but being just “a step away” as Oshii I think said.

At this stage I was just using letters to represent the individual characters – X, Y, and Z.  These three eventually became Faren, the Director of Compliance and Zee (sign of laziness in naming there).  But they had no flesh on their bones, other than X/Faren being a kind of imagined “me”.  The dialogue had that wise-cracking, film-noir feel to it even then. I guess it’s the kind of thing we all wish we could do, rather than stand, tongue-tied and mute in the face of the day-to-day nonsense we all face at work.

It still wasn’t forming into anything, though.   So I trawled the web in search of inspiration and advice.  Which I found in the multi-talented Alex di Campi.  Alex described using “story boards” in writing her comic books.  She is also a film/video maker, so this makes sense – and it certainly chimed with me.  I began using a two-column table.  In the first column I put a description of the scene, in the second I put the dialogue.  Suddenly all became clear, and I could “see” where I was going.

The story then took on a momentum of its own, and I’d pretty much got the whole thing into tabular form within a couple of months.  I was scribbling bits of dialogue into notebooks, and then stitching them together into longer pieces in the tables.

So, sometime around the end of 2007 I’d got a story called “Reaching the LEARNER” told in 7 tables.

Up Close And Personalised Episode 5

A little while back I was watching the anime TV series, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (2nd Gig).  I realised that if you're telling a story over a long run, you have space for the occasional fugue.  You can take some time out to explore character, or some aspect of your world.

So, in this episode we get to see a bit of the Kid's history.  As much as she'll allow anyway.
 

You can find the comic in THE STORIES tab, under the heading, Up Close and Personalised.

How it all began. Part 3

So. I’d gotten the beginnings of an idea to do something cartoonish or comic-bookish, and I’d got a world that I wanted to represent. What I guess was needed was a catalyst.

Late in 2006 I applied for a more senior job within the Organisation. During the interview, the HR bod said something like, “If you get this job, you will have to be more corporate. Could you give me examples…” My brain exploded. And I answered, “Well, I’ve got a suit…” Needless to say, I didn’t get the job.

It’s a bit like the moment in the war film when the Kommandant of the POW camp says, “For you, ze varr iss over.” You realise that from now on the rules of the game have changed, but that you don’t have to play by them. It’s strangely liberating.

At about this time my wife was working on a (proper) book and asked me if I’d do some drawings for it. At the end of the day, all I ended up doing was an acorn and an oak tree, but that’s another story. As part of my scribbling I drew various versions of a demented-looking kid tapping at a laptop.

Again about the same time some buffoon from the Defence Ministry or somewhere lost a laptop full of sensitive information (like they do from time-to-time). And I thought that somebody like the kid I’d drawn would probably have nicked it and deleted all the government secrets while looking for porno.

This was how the first story (Reaching the LEARNER) began to form in my mind…

How it all began. Part 2

Back in the day, the Organisation used to do stuff. A lot of it was small-scale, but it made a real difference to the people involved.

But then the Organisation got poisoned by Policy. The only change that mattered was large-scale, national-level, “step” change. And we cuddled up to Power and imagined we were on the inside of this exclusive club.

Our role was reinterpreted as influencing “policy makers” and devising strategies for others to implement.

But the truth is that the central government officials that the Organisation deals with do not really make policy. Politicians do. And they are driven by a brute public opinion interpreted by the press and other commentators. The best officials can do is offer a readymade solution that vaguely fits the vaguely-worded policy pronouncement from on high.

So we spend our time creating solutions in search of a problem. This makes the Organisation an ecosystem where bureaucrats, technocrats and power-players can thrive, because there is no clear object to our work, and anything at all could turn out to be our saviour.

This is my world. A world not that far from comic-book, really.

How it all began. Part 1

Without going back into the mists of time, probably the first time I thought about a comic strip poking fun at the politics of the Organisation must’ve been in early 2006. It was one of those doomed initiatives that Internal Comms dream up from time to time. You know the sort of thing. “We need to have a staff newsletter so that people know what’s going on, but it needs to be, like, edgy.”

So they assemble a group of people who have a rep for being … off message, I suppose. But then they lay down so many rules about what you can’t say and do, the whole thing dies at conception.

Anyway. At this one and only meeting I said, “Well, if you can’t say it directly, why not use allegory.” Blank looks all round.

Well, I thought it was a good idea. So I just went away and listened to the Organisation and did some thinking…