Thesis Work Update

Wow, did you remember I had a blog? I didn’t either! I’ve been so busy with Horror Writers Association chapter chairing, helping grow Gamut literary series, and, of course, elbow deep in my thesis for my MFA program, which is due in…5 months? Something like that. I’m sure I’ll remember before I miss the deadline.

Well, one of my ‘resolutions’ this year is to use this space more to keep connected with all of you. And since I’ve been so busy with my thesis, I thought that this would be a good topic to kick the year off! I’m also giving a short presentation on it in a couple weeks, so this allowed me to double dip. So if you’re interested in the work I’m doing, here’s a great way to learn about it.

Effectively, I am creating comics out of digital collage. “But Erik,” you say, “what the fuck does that mean?” Rude, but a fair question. Basically I am using a combination of free-use stock, archived, and personal images, and using different pieces to create a new image for the comic. The panels combine between 5-20 images together to create a new context. Sometimes it’s adding people (see the banner image), sometimes it’s combining different aspects of an image together (facial expressions, hairstyles, etc), and sometimes it’s compositing them into brand new images (for example I created a demon by combining a dog leg, hawk talons, a person in cosplay, a cruel smiling mouth, and alligator teeth).

But that’s still pretty abstract, so how about I show you an example and break down a page of my comic? This story is called “Stolen Words” and it takes the concept of dementia and Alzheimer’s told as if it was demons stealing the words and faces from people’s minds. It’s based on my experience with my Memere, who had dementia leading up to her death several years away. It’s framed by the protagonist writing a birthday card to her grandson, a reference to the birthday cards she used to write me. She used to fill the entire white space of a birthday card with handwritten letters to me, sometimes writing on the back. But as the disease took a hold the cards became shorter and shorter until eventually our birthday cards were blank with a very shaky signature. This was a way of me processing those emotions as I wrote this script. In fact, I use some images of her and my Pepere throughout the comic as homage to them both. The focus couple of the banner photo is a picture of my Memere and Pepere from my brother’s wedding back in…2016? 2017? I’m bad with dates, clearly.

Alright, with that context, here is a page taken from the story:

1. This talon was taken from a picture of a hawk. I moved each individual appendage so that it looked like it was grasping the scraps in its hands (see #3 to learn more about the scraps).
2. Each of the teeth in the demon’s mouth were individually placed, and taken from 3 different pictures of alligators in order to get the right angle for each tooth to fit into the mouth. The inconsistent tooth size was intentional, based on the teeth from alligators which wear at different speeds due to how their food is swallowed.
3. Each scrap with the words on them are pulled from three different images which had scraps of paper similar to fortune cookie slips falling through the air.
4. The mouth of the demon is not the mouth from the face. This image is the clearest indication of that. The mouth on the initial image was closed, so I took a picture of someone smiling, made some alterations, then added the teeth in the mouth. The whole thing was then placed on the existing face.
5. As the words got chewed up I used the same images as the scraps from before and cut them into smaller pieces. I also wanted to make sure that they didn’t all just end up behind teeth, since the way we mash our food ends up all over and between our teeth. As the mouth closes and opens, it’s the same image, but I lower the upper lip and teeth to create the idea of movement.
6. Here’s another view of the mouth not being the original mouth of the image. This is also a different image of the face than I used for the mouth close ups, since the nose kind of washed out of this image and I wanted to see a nose in close up. The face used in the close up is just a random straight on face I found in a free-use stock image repository.
7. This original image didn’t have the eyes looking straight out, so I added eyes to the picture to create the effect of the two looking at each other. I then changed the color of the iris to red and kept it in color instead of black in white in an homage to classic comics like Sin City which included splashes of color (often the red of blood or dresses). I have a few moments of color splash throughout, but keep it mostly limited to black and white for both collage consistency as well as to keep printing costs down. It’s also because a lot of older pulp comics I enjoy used a black and white sketch aesthetic (such as The Shadow or The Spirit).
8. None of these images exist in the same picture. The background, demon, and woman were all collaged from different locations. The woman’s mouth was also added on to give the open mouth effect.
9. This one is a pretty basic addition, but I wanted the single tear of someone trapped in their own mind. This story was heavily inspired by my Memere who had dementia, and periodically she would have tears running down her face for no reason and I wanted to capture that moment. A lot of the work done for this project is sorting through thousands of images to find the right pieces to include, and I spent a long time looking for an eye that captured that sadness, but it didn’t have a tear so I had to add it myself.
10. Both of these pillows are from different pictures. A fun quick tip for blending collage like this is that if you put the edges, or “seams” behind other images it makes it look more consistent.
11. Similar to #9, I wanted specific eyes for this picture. I wanted someone scared shoving their eyes closed like a child trying to make the boogeyman disappear. But I couldn’t find a picture that had the right eyes and the right face that fit the rest of the story, so I had to take eyes from a younger face and put them onto one I had previously used for the story.
12. The hardest thing I’ve come across is hairstyles in images. Why can people not tell Clark Kent is Superman? Because he takes off glasses and slightly changes his hair. I have the reverse issue here in that having inconsistent hair length and style breaks consistency of character and makes it hard to identify people. The woman whose face you see had long hair, while earlier in the comic she has short hair. So I had to remove the hair of the original image and put hair from a previous image to make it look consistent.
13. This one is a relatively basic composite, but I wanted to have the sky look like dawn. So I took an image of the kind of house I wanted and put a different sky behind it. This is more obvious in some of my other stories where we see cityscapes…this one mostly exists in one location.

So this is what I’m working on right now (among a couple of other smaller projects including a chapbook of poetry and a couple short plays). Basically I spend a lot of time looking at pictures and downloading them to a hard drive for me to cut up and put together. So far I have two completed* comics, one I am halfway through, one additional script written, and two more work-in-progress scripts. The stories are loosely connected as they all take place in the fictional city of Brackedge, Ohio (a reference to one of my film inspirations Stan Brakhage), and discussing the concept of communication and connection (this story is about handwritten notes, another about radio, another one uses the concept of campfire stories). They also all have heavy influences from mental health issues, as almost all of my work does…this story about dementia, Dead Air being about disassociation, Voices in the Flames about schizophrenia… and so on. In the next few months I’ll be working more on the cohesion and collecting the pieces into one document for publication. It’s gonna be good.

Well, with that, I will bid you all a happy New Year! Keep an eye out for more updates coming from me soon on some cool upcoming events, new publications, and more! In the meantime, enjoy one last excerpt from my story to show some of the weird imagery I’m using in my stories!