Spanish ships

I had some more good news today on the foreign editions front. Uli Rushby-Smith at the rights department is obviously working overtime. There is to be a Spanish edition of Tales of Terror from the Black Ship, published by Ediciones SM (who also published Uncle Montague in Spain).

I should also have said that the Czech publisher for Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror is Argo.

Font

Leaving to one side the business of what the drawings are going to look like, the next thing I need to think about in my graphic novel sample is the text and what it will look like.

It is a surprisingly rigid tradition in comics, that the text is handwritten - and even if it is not actually handwritten, it has the appearance of handwriting. The advent of computers has meant that there is software (Fontlab for instance) that allows handwritten fonts to be designed and typed using a keyboard, saving time and increasing consistency. This consistency of course is what some people don't like about such fonts. But when either technique is used well, it is difficult to tell them apart.

Personally, I am all for anything that is going to make the process easier to control. I'm not a typographer or a calligrapher. I am hoping that my friend Lisa Kirkham is going to come to my assistance here, by taking me on a tour of the relevant programs. I may have to invest in Adobe Illustrator for example.

Of course I still - most importantly of all - have to produce a compelling story or stories.

He shoots, he scores

My son's team won 9-0 today and, more importantly, my son scored. I particularly liked the way he wrong-footed everyone by slicing the ball at the last minute and sending it over the goalie's head into the top corner.

Onkel Montagues schauer geschichten

I heard yesterday that there is to be a Czech edition of Uncle Montague, which is great news. I also discovered that this German edition is out next month, published by Bloomsbury in Germany.

3X3 or 2X3?

I had a long and very useful conversation with Paul Nash at Bloomsbury about the format of my graphic novel proposal for Bloomsbury. As I have already mentioned, we are all agreed that the book should be standard B format paperback or slightly larger, so that it can sit alongside my other books if and when it is published.

A black and white, paperback-sized graphic novel is hardly a new idea. The Japanese produce copious amounts of such books. Horror, to my mind, is what they do best with books like Kazuo Umezu's Drifting Classroom series and Junji Ito's bizarre and disturbing Uzumaki. Nobody does creepy schoolgirls like the Japanese.

But this is only part of the formatting issue with a graphic novel. The next thing is the layout of the panels on the page. There is no set rule to this and some graphic novels have a very loose structure in terms of the panels. In the best of these, the design of the pages plays a vital part in the pacing and atmosphere of the story.

Having said that, some of my favourite graphic novels of recent years have employed a rigid grid of panels which harks back to the old days of comics. What you lose in visual fireworks, you gain in readability and a kind of neutral film strip feel.

Alan Moore's classic Watchmen is one of these. Dave Gibbons' drawings are quite conventional (though very accomplished in their way) and this solid approach suits the complexity of Moore's story. There is a lot of story to get through.


Watchmen has a basic nine panel template - three across by three down. Sometimes panels are joined together to form wider, taller or just plain bigger, frames. But behind them all is that 3X3 grid.


This 3X3 grid is also employed to great effect in David Muzzucchelli's and Paul Karasik's brilliant adaptation of Paul Auster's City of Glass. The film strip idea is used more overtly here, with passages that do read as sequences of stills from a movie.


Frederik Peeters' Blue Pills is another beautifully drawn graphic novel, and, like City of Glass, is black and white. Peeters uses a six panel grid of two across and three down. This allows the individual panels to be larger on the page, which is useful not just for the drawings, but also for allowing vital room for the text.

I think I shall probably try a similar 2X3 panel grid myself.

Short and pithy

My new book proposal is off to the acquisition meeting at Bloomsbury today. As usual I have produced a synopsis and a couple of chapters. I've shared them with my agent, Philippa, who made a couple of excellent suggestions for changes. Philippa also supplied a lot of enthusiasm, which at this stage is vital.

I understand the need for a synopsis. And not just because editors need something tangible to take to acquisitions meetings. I've had a couple of ideas that have died at this stage as I realised that I could not actually make the story work, or if I could, that it was turning into a book I did not want to write. But I still don't like doing them.

I try to make them as short (and hopefully pithy) as I can: one side of A4 is my goal and it would never be more than two. I once listened to a radio programme about a museum of writers' manuscripts. There was an outline from Henry James for one of his novels that was in itself the length of a novella. And what's more it was rejected.

A synopsis is a wire framework. It gives an idea of the shape and the size and subject, but does not cut off avenues for development as the book progresses. You have to stay engaged as a writer. You need to surprise yourself from time to time. Or at least I do.

Having said that, a good synopsis will also act a little like the blurb on the back of a book (although it should never be just that). It needs to help the editor excite interest in the marketing and publicity people. Every good book has it's own USP, whether or not you chose to think in those commercial terms. The synopsis needs to nail it.

It also needs, ideally, to carry a flavour of the book with it. Tony Ross, who taught me illustration, told me once that you should always try and do roughs that give a clear idea of how you would do the finished piece. It is obvious that they need to show what you intend to draw, but less obvious perhaps that doing a feathery pencil rough, when you actually intend to deliver a stark lino cut is a bit confusing.

It was good advice for illustration, and it makes sense for writers too.

Give me some space

I went to the studio for the first time in ages yesterday. I have never really developed a satisfactory working routine since I moved to Cambridge. Everything was much more simple in our house in Norfolk. I walked my son to school and then I retired to my large well-lit studio which had an area for drawing and an area for writing.

Now I have a small office at home which also doubles as the house office when my son needs to do computer-based homework and the computer itself doubles as a family computer now. My unreliable laptop was bought with the idea of the studio becoming a writing base as well, but that too has its problems.

Whilst sharing a studio for art purposes is OK (though I have to say I'm not a person who needs people around to work well), trying to write with other people talking on the phone or to each other is near impossible. Writers do need a space of their own, wherever that may be. Sometimes that space has to be just a kind of personal, internalised space with an imaginary force field (or headphones) to block the world out.

In any case, I was on my own in the studio and concentration was not a problem - though the cold certainly was. Having said that I wasn't in the studio to write. I was trying to decide on the format for the comic book/graphic novel sample I intend to do.

I am starting from the base of the book being black and white and standard paperback-sized or a little larger. One of the problems with graphic novels in this country is that booksellers don't really know what to do with them and so it depends on the enthusiasms of individual managers or specialist bookshops. Either way it is hard to sell in big numbers.

I would love to do a full colour graphic novel, but I think a novel-sized, black and white, well-priced book will stand a better chance of finding its way onto the shelves in the main part of the bookshop (if we have any bookshops by then).

More about this later. . .