A Quote by James Vance
I'm not sure I can name a kind of story that wouldn't work in comics form. It's words and images, and we've been telling all kinds of stories with that combination since theatre was invented thousands of years ago.
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I'm not the best person to analyze any kind of evolution in my work, but I do feel like it's been an ongoing struggle to basically teach myself how to tell the kinds of stories that interest me in comics form.
Thousands of years people have taken drugs, whether it's alcohol, which was invented about 5,000 years ago. People have been using that. And all kinds of marijuana and all these things, tobacco. So all these drugs have been - it seems to be the propensity of human beings to want to use them.
Because you're telling a story, and I'm sure people fifty years ago would tell the same story differently if they were telling it to you today. Because the time is different. The film is the work of today's audience.
Comics are a "young" art form, and there is much confusion as to how to treat them. Images have more immediate impact than words, and it is not every reader who can be convinced to relax into experiencing the work for what it is - not words and pictures, but a different form, where the narrative is propelled by the blending of image, word and sequence, and where no element can be extricated and have the same meaning by itself. When this art is shown in a gallery, its "thingness" is called to attention, it is no longer experienced as "story," but rather as an artifact of the artist's process.
Comics, which are really best described as an arrangement of images in a sequence that tell a story - an idea - is a very old form of graphic communication. It began with the hieroglyphics in Egypt, it first appeared in a recognizable form in the Medieval times as copper plates produced by the Catholic church to tell morality stories.
There's something exhilarating about telling stories that haven't been shared before and haven't been told publicly before. The last thing I want to be doing is telling stories other people have already told. That's not to say that there isn't important work out there about people in positions of power, but I know my strength. Even when I was at the Wall Street Journal 10 years ago, this is what I wrote about.
Storytelling is one of comics' esthetic hurdles at the moment, which was the novelist's problem 150 years ago: namely, to take comics from storytelling into that of "writing," the major distinction between the two to me being that the former gives one the facts, but the latter tries to recreate the sensation and complexities of life within the fluidity of consciousness and experience. As far as I'm concerned, that's really all I've been trying to do formally for the past decade or more with comics, and it's certainly time-consuming, since it has to be done with drawings, not words.
When an acting teacher tells a student 'that wasn't honest work' or 'that didn't seem real,' what does this mean? In life, we are rarely 'truthful' or 'honest' or 'real'. And characters in plays are almost never 'truthful' or 'honest' or 'real'. What exactly do teachers even mean by these words? A more useful question is: What is the story the actor was telling in their work? An actor is always telling a story. We all are telling stories, all the time. Story: that is what it is all about.
Comics deal with two fundamental communicating devices: words and images. Admittedly this is an arbitrary separation. But, since in the modern world of communication they are treated as independent disciplines, it seems valid. Actually, the are derivatives of a single origin and in the skillful employment of words and images lies the expressive potential of the medium.
I love telling stories. And even in single images, I tend to have stories inside them. I've always loved film, but I was making drawings and paintings and photographs. And you put art and narrative together, and that really is comics.
I must have been 3 years old or less, and I remember paging through these comics, trying to figure out the stories. I couldn't read the words, so I made up my own stories.
None of us has invented the house; that was done many thousands of years ago.
The sizes and shapes of the panels have never been important to my stories. It has always been the words and images that drew me in, kind of like watching a movie.
There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change.
I've loved comics since I was very young, and I've always liked telling stories.
Re-telling the Christian story is the essence of my vocation. That has been going on since the Evangelists in one form or another.
