I recently met up with Oscar Zarate for coffee. Oscar is the author of several graphic novels, most famously , his collaboration with Alan Moore on A Small Killing, back in the early nineties. He's also illustrated a lot of stuff. Back in October last year, I did a workshop with Oscar at the French Institute. There were about 10 of us, and we were supposed to produce a 4 page comic about London over the weekend. I had no problem producing a story - I find coming up with any number of stories quite easy - it's the bit about refining them and making them any good that takes time, I find. Many authors leave this last stage out, which makes the whole process very economical, I imagine. Whenever I watch Doctor Who, it always seems to me like the first draft of a story that has accidentally been filmed, whilst the real script, in which characters are acting under proper motivation, is gathering dust under a photocopier somewhere. I digress. I did some drafts for a story, and showed my drawings to Oscar. He made some helpful suggestions, like, stop moralising so much. My tendency to moralise probably comes from reading 1950s EC comics, which are like 'war is bad, man', 'human life is precious, man'... For their time, they were quite advanced, for comics anyway. Most comics at that time had the message, "Take that, Mr Hitler!!" or "Eat some of this, dirty Koreans!". So Harvey Kurtzman's comics which actually had a message that maybe, at best, the war was a dirty job but somebody had to do it, was quite different. But hold on. This is the 1950s - thirty years after Ulysses had been published. That means post Wasteland, post Faulkner, post Auden, post Steinbeck. In the context of fiction, or even movies, which were lagging behind fiction, EC comics look about as experimental as an Edwardian watercolour in a cubist exhibition. Comics in the 1950s were still mass produced articles for kids and servicemen, so they weren't going to push any real boundaries. The real advances for EC comics were in storytelling and cinematic use of pictures etc.
Back to my story, which was about a guy that trails around London picking up scraps of other people's lives because he doesn't have a life. In my first version of an ending, he breaks into a house, and encounters an older, sadder version of himself, and is so horrified by what he could become, that he throws out his collection, and attempts to reform himself. Oscar didn't like this, and suggested a much more elegant ending, where the protagonist breaks into an apartment, and realises, gradually, that it is his own apartment, which is so alien to him because he hardly ever goes there.
Back to my story, which was about a guy that trails around London picking up scraps of other people's lives because he doesn't have a life. In my first version of an ending, he breaks into a house, and encounters an older, sadder version of himself, and is so horrified by what he could become, that he throws out his collection, and attempts to reform himself. Oscar didn't like this, and suggested a much more elegant ending, where the protagonist breaks into an apartment, and realises, gradually, that it is his own apartment, which is so alien to him because he hardly ever goes there.
