Core Dump 2.0

I’ve mentioned my friend Derek McCulloch here a few times – he’s a comics and graphics novel author, whose third graphic novel, Gone to Amerikay will be published in April. Taste Like Comics has just published a long interview with Derek in which he talks about Gone to Amerikay, his other books (Stagger Lee, Pug, the yet unpublished Displaced Persons, and various anothologies) and future projects (a musical version of Stagger Lee being one).

One of the things that struck me about Derek’s work is his control of his medium. He has a real understanding of how the visual elements of a graphic novel can enhance the story and a real feel for how to use structure to add depth and dimension to his work. It was interesting to read in the interview of just how much work he puts into this part of his books.

I’ll certainly have a review of Gone to Amerikay here as soon as I can get a copy.

Do you consider yourself a structuralist, or is this attention to structure just a part of the craft of writing for you? Is it something you’ve brought with you from prose or theatre?

DM: I suppose I am a structuralist, though it’s not a way I consciously defined myself.  I mean, it’s not like I joined a club and got a membership card or something, it’s just the way I naturally want to put stories together.  The term I usually apply to it is “organising principles.”  I’m not comfortable writing a book until I have a set of rules put together for it.  Once I know what they are, then the story has a framework to inhabit and much of its nature follows from that.

For instance, I had a bunch of different plot and character and thematic elements gathered together for Pug over the course of many years, but I didn’t know what to do with them until I hit on the structure of 15 three-page “rounds” and 14 1-page “rest periods.”  From that structure, the pace, tone, and rhythm of the piece followed naturally.  I’ve done that sort of thing with stories for years without being particularly conscious of it as a defining element of my style.  Another example that springs to mind is a prose short story I wrote years and years ago.  It was called “The Gambler.”  I’ve self-published it twice, once as a stand-alone chapbook with illustrations by Ben Catmull and once in a short-story collection called Stories of a Callow Youth.  “The Gambler” is a first-person meditation on sonhood.  I wasn’t yet a father so I couldn’t be expected to write about fatherhood, but I knew the other end of the equation.  In the story, the narrator starts off thinking about himself and then about his father, which leads to a reverie about his grandfather, then one about his great-grandfather.  Then he goes back to his grandfather, then his father, and finally back to himself.  It telescopes back through the generations and then returns.  It might not even be something you’d notice when reading the story, but that’s  a pretty good example of my use of “organising principles.”  Arranged differently, the story is just a mishmash of unconnected anecdotes.  Put into the order of generations it takes on a unified meaning.

The structure of Gone to Amerikay might also be a bit elusive on first read, but it’s very deliberate and kind of baroque.  I did very carefully regulated stuff with the numbers of pages in scenes and how the scenes alternated from thread to thread and where the double-page spreads went and what was in them and so on.  I outlined it very precisely and when I showed it to our editor Joan Hilty and tried to explain the pattern I saw in it to her, she said something like, “Okay, don’t really know what you’re doing, but if it works for you, great.”  It was nice she had that much trust in me.

Pug, the new graphic novel by my friend, Derek McCulloch, will be published in June, but an advance review has already come out and it’s pretty favourable.

Pug is a seemingly simple and straightforward story, made thoroughly compelling by wonderful writing by Derek McCulloch and dexterous artwork by Greg Espinoza that obliterates any clichés that seem to exist in the story.

The plot of Pug seems like something we’ve seen many times before. On the surface Pug is the familiar story of a boxer on his way up in the ranks who is paid to throw a fight by a gangster. But familiar stories sometimes are the most interesting because they allow the creators to make old ideas seem fresh. Familiarity allows creators to breathe life into characters who seem on the surface like clichés. In fact, the familiarity of a plot can often help a skillful writer to find the space to tell more interesting stories. There’s less need for scene-setting, so more attention can be paid to character beats and to the kinds of small twists and turns that help to make a story memorable.

I’m looking forward to reading it. And if you haven’t read his first book, Stagger Lee, do yourself a favour and get it now. You won’t regret it.

A few years ago, my friend Derek McCulloch published a graphic novel, Stagger Lee, which went on to win several awards. In another couple of months he’ll have another graphic novel coming called PUG. You can read a brief write-up on it here.