#jam 1

Triceratops

We think they are strange, this creature— face a fistful of  horns, built for love or battle. Was this body a weapon or a language?

In Hell Creek it is impossible to walk an hour without seeing the spectral skeletons melting out of the hillside.

Some places you walk will not let you forget The Earth is a planet-sized grave; a mother that always devours its children.

Maybe extinction is something we all carry in our bones, as much a part of us as number of digits and texture of skin.

Who are we to call it strange? A species that digs its own mass grave and pulls the earth in after. 

We are just like each other, two bags of skin full of blood and fireworks.

My love, where have you gone? On an eternal quest for cigarettes at the corner store

walking through a desert of your own devising, trailing behind you the tattered names of all your past lovers.

Write me the story of where you’ve been. Write it in fire with your thirsty footprints then open your umbrella and call for rain.

I am the deluge you’ve been searching for, Fluid right down to my shame.

Press me and I bend for you. Touch me and I come off on your hands.

I am not myself. I am a haunted house full of ghastly furniture. You gather me up in your arms--

I see you. I see you suffer. I feel very seen.

I am not myself. I am a collection of flaws in a black dress.  Finish your memoir; name me the villain.

One day you will finish mapping the topography of our sorrow and you will see there is only one road leading out.

On that day, do not blame me for what you do. Blame the collection of flaws in the mirror.

If time is a wishbone, then death must be a great big room where all you have lost is returned to you.

I want to be a pole vault. Not the vaulter but the pole, planted on earth, made to bend

not for the great cosmic sieve that keeps our dear departed souls from falling into the sky; but because this is what I was made for.

I have shouldered my earthly pain all the bleeding miles to Bethlehem; I have bent my back to the business of grief.

but because I can do nothing else. I want to be the woman standing on the edge of the cliff face,

joy unfolding in my heart like a child’s inflatable bouncy castle.

I am forgiven. I have forgiven myself.

Despite editing comics for five years, "Uniform" is in fact the second comics script I've ever written (the first being the one page comic I wrote for #24MAG issue 2). Things I learned this time:

The Scrivener comics template is a godsend. It intuitively understands that following the panel numbers, you write panel descriptions, and following character names you write dialogue, provides simple short cuts to switch between panel numbers, descriptions, and dialogue, and formats everything to make it easy to read.

I need to work on writing clear panel descriptions. I know that I'm only supposed to show one action per panel. I know that describe the scene in terms of characters, then actions, then backgrounds. I know that dialogue can't be too long per word balloon. And yet...

I don't know what "akimbo" means. I don't know how to describe a fighting stance as apposed to a fist in the air protest stance. I leave out important physical characteristics (like that the leads are Latina). 

Things I already knew:

Comics for the web are not comics for print. Which meant writing for "the page" wasn't going to work. I wrote as if each panel would follow then next in an infinite scroll. Still, it was useful for myself to include page numbers, so I could understand my pacing and how much work I'd actually created.

The writer writes MUCH faster than an artist can draw. If an artist can draw a page a day, they are lightning fast. But it takes me only about two or three hours to write five pages. Which meant I was giving Amanda WAY more work to do than she could get done in two days. Especially since she was doing so many other projects (including her own paying work.)

So I simply accepted that at best she'd be able to get out sketches, which look great, and maybe maybe a completed page. 

Which means the comic isn't done, and even my work on the comic isn't done. After Amanda finishes the drawings, I am going to over the dialogue again, shifting the words to match the actual facial expressions Amanda creates. 

So part of change is letting go of deadlines, and finishing the work when I can.