B O N D P H O N E.
Words and pictures by Chris Lamb.

Rain smell kicks off pavement, mingles with smoke to produce something hard to place. Chemicals rush along the long, practiced drag to cook brains filled with spaceships and lies; head-swimminess guaranteed right on the pack and there really isn't anything like the first one of the day. Outside under skies that gnarl and flush like living things with a stack of comics bought with food money. This is a start.

The next week is going to move at a scramble, like those dance contests where the band keeps upping the tempo. Ignore the sweat filling eyes, the burning scream of leg muscles and keep moving with the beat. Tomorrow is new-job stuff, maybe, then driving to Jacksonville for Rachel's graduation and drinking and not showing teeth when I feaux-polite smile at her boy. Then Birmingham for more pretend enjoying myself, then home. Next week is - say it and mean it - JURY DUTY and finalizing new-job thing. Oh, and the long crush of family drama begins, like so much ship's hull scraping iceberg. Lots of pieces moving at odd angles and ludicrous speeds. Nothing going forward, persay, but lots of swinging to the sides. Which, as Patrick points out, isn't always a bad thing.

Summer happens now. May has always been good to me, and the first volley comes together in the next few days. Gimme gimme gimme chaos.

posted by chris  # 9:54 PM 0 comments

Mom died on her knees.

Hands over heart as if holding it from breaking while the red spread around her fingers. Looking up at the John, ignoring the gun, looking past the shaking hands and dead grin to stare him in the eyes. Taking care not to look at me for fear he'd notice. I stayed in the closet like I was told. She stared him down; fell over, coughed and died, still staring.

---
Kaeo stayed blank the longest, probably because I sortakinda doubt my ability to write women. She became Thai when Max suggested putting the unstoppable Noodle Jump into the story, and everything else fell into place. Or it didn't, and I'm just using "fell into place" to sum up a lot of boring grasping at straws.

Anyway.

I'm scared to death of falling into some helpless screamer cliche with her; the woman in trouble for the sake of giving the hero something to do schtick that reeks of two-dimensional. The last few days were spent taking stabs at finding her voice and using it to detail the experiences that shaped her. It's slow going, and there's nothing really substantial to show for it yet, but still. It's time that needs to be spent. Because on the other side of the spectrum is the just-as-bad tough girl cliche, and I rather not have people picturing Tia Carrere in leather playing her in the movie adaption. Oh yes, the delusions of grandeur set in months ago.

It's writing as surgery, as sabotage. Worry less about the the shape of the statue and more about making each hairline fracture exact and invisible until the whole thing falls apart. For best results, damage with care.

posted by chris  # 11:46 PM 0 comments

A few nights ago, several of us sitting around a table at Finnegan's. It's quiet, everyone drinking, making idle chat. I'm flipping through a site on on bondphone.

"It says here," I read aloud to the group, that if you drink a lot of whisky, then pee in a cup and leave it sitting out overnight, by the time you wake up all the whisky will have floated to the surface of the pee, and you can drink it off with a straw.

A moment, as everyone looks at one another in silence. Something like consideration flitters across the assembled faces.

In unison: "Nah."

posted by chris  # 1:58 PM 0 comments

Three pages of script - panel descriptions, no real words yet, but still - get copy-pasted to an email and shot from Huntsville, Alabama to San Francisco, California. Three hours later the reply comes back: Drew has the pages, he'll start scetching tonight. 2000 wasn't much of a future and the only promise delivered on was one we didn't expect: communication. The world isn't smaller, just portable. And now a guy I've never physically met is making pictures out of my words.

Dude, we're robbing the bank.

posted by chris  # 9:32 PM 0 comments

The Throughline.

"The boat needs to look like a boat. The bow does not." --David Mamet

Thinking in pieces today. Thinking around the stupid kid logic that's taken over my day job dance routine. Stupid kid logic is fine when it doesn't matter - it's just a job, just something that can be replaced. RAIN DOGS, though. Something with a chance at being more than just a Word file on my hard drive demands a whole different set of thought patterns. Or at least something mature enough to admit I really don't know what the hell I'm doing.

So lots of reading. Lots of writing that's more rehersal than progress. Lines and lines of work that might give up a usable line or two but is really just getting to know my characters, getting to know how they think and know and feel and bleed and cry and wake up in the morning. Lots of looking at page after page and telling myself I need this and it isn't just dicking around. Lots of muttering Not the first time, not the first time.

So stupid kid logic says burn through the thing and shoot it off to exhuasted Drew Gill to draw and to hell with the rest. Everything else says, try and you'll be stomped on, the story will rise up and beat you into the ground before fading back into ideaspeace like so much vapor trail. So I'm listening to the still small voice and taking my time. Focusing on all the little bits that make up the story instead of the story itself, drawing each tree instead of a green blob for a forest. And running out of metaphors in the meantime, but, y'know. Selah.

Trees, not forest. Bow, not boat.

GARRETT MAKES HIS MOVE.

RAIN DOGS opens with Garrett, our lead, standing under a lamp post and staring down to the end of the street. The scene comes from the end of the story, after a host of unplesantries have smashed most of the innocence and child out of him. He's a little drunk and a lot scared, trying to put off what now feels pretty inevitable. The last guy to wear his suit is dead and the pistol stuck in his belt came too cheap. He's almost out of cigarettes and the engine roar overhead is his last chance to walk away reaching flight altitude. So what's the point of the scene? Why does all this matter, what does it contribute to the story?

Think in pieces. Each scene is a story in itself, the final product just a collection of moments in a certain order. Tell the story that needs to be told now, worry how it fits later. Have a throughline that contributes to the overall picture but can be adjusted if need be. The scenes cut from films are those too static to bend with plot evolution. Everything else files under Alternate Take. So what's our Througline? The point? To show tension. To imply anxiety and secondthoughts and inner turmoil and all those good things. Now isn't the time to worry about the dialog running beside the pictures, now is the time to decide what the pictures are saying so I'm not repeating myself later. So there we go. The point of GARRETT MAKES HIS MOVE is to establish something is about to happen that our boy doesn't want to do but feels he has to. All scenes subject to change, all throughlines at risk of complete abandonment.

PANEL ONE
Establishing setting is job one. I want to play with decompression some, sort of stretch things out and give more room for establishing mood, scope, and all the other things happening in the reader's head. We'll start on a shot on the lamp post's light as scene from the ground up. Orange glow diffusing into the fog/pollution blend that is nighttime in a city on the West Coast. I don't know enough about big cities or the west coast to write a specific city well enough, so I'm not. Drew and I settled on a mash of LA and San Francisco - he's lived in both, so - with a little of Gotham or Frank Miller's SIN CITY thrown in for good measure. Something big and menacing, wearing its tourist magnets like a mask over the shit nobody wants to see.

PANEL TWO
Drop down to just behind and to the left of Garrett, focusing away from us. Draw attention to the fresh scar on his cheek. The advantage of comics over film is how much of the story happens in the reader's head. We don't have to do a slow pan down from the light to Garrett, the reader does it for us.

Two shots right now. The bright light is a curiousity, then we move down to show the light is a lamp post, and our character's standing under it. So we have an established setting (a city, somewhere urban) and an established character. Yay for us.

PANEL THREE
Pull back, we're directly behind him now, enough to get him from the belt line up. His suit is rumpled, frayed, maybe a size two big. the but of a revolver sticks out of the back of his pants. Still building tension, giving the impression that many, many things aren't right here.

PANEL FOUR
Pull back all the way. We're down the street, behind Garrett. We can see a little down the street through the haze. This isn't a nice neighborhood.

New page here. Just so you know.

PANEL ONE
Close in on Garrett's face this time. He's lighting a cigarette, eyes closed. He needs to shave, needs to brush his hair, needs to get some sleep.

PANEL TWO
From behind again, he turns, leans back into the lamp post. Exhales. He's having second thoughts. Little black spots dot the pool of light he's standing in.

PANEL THREE
Close in on Garrett's hands, shaking, the cigarette falling from his fingers.

PANEL FOUR
From Garrett's POV, watching the cigarette fall away. Cigarette buts litter the ground. He's been here for a while.

New page.

PANEL ONE
Pull back again, Garrett diggin through his pockets, lost in his own clothes.

PANEL TWO
Holding a cigarette pack up to the light, squinting at it.

PANEL THREE
From Garrett's POV, looking into the packet. There's only two left.

PANEL FOUR
Dropping the pack into his jacket pocket. Looking like it's one more thing when he doesn't need one more thing.

PANEL FIVE
Looking off down the street. It's time to go.

So that's that. Three pages, thirteen panels. Nothing carved in stone yet, but I have a skeleton to hang words on and an idea of what I'm doing out the gate. A scene that tells a story all on its own. That's good enough for tonight.

posted by chris  # 10:16 PM 0 comments

David Mamet's ON DIRECTING ruins everything. All at once brilliant and glaringly obvious, Mamet's lectures at Columbia University render the pages of plot points and desperate stabs at a proper beginning obsolete and wrong. The oh-so-cute twists, the dialog/visual contrasts that would make me the most-cleverest ever are rendered sloppy and amatuer, an insult to me and and the audience moreso. The nattery beginning gets trimmed to the bare bones, finally finding the quiet despair it just missed before. It's more than a little humbling how fast brillance turns to so much masturbation when you resolve to tell the story.

Pouring rain and ten year old scotch, Portishead and low lights. Back to it.

posted by chris  # 9:02 AM 0 comments

Blink and it's mid-April, spring, sunny with the birds out and humidity rising. Push the keyboard up against the blank flat-screen monitor, slide the fancy mouse with its red eye of a roll ball out of the way to make room for bondphone v.2.0 and it's fold out keyboard. A commentary on progress I don't have the caffiene levels to make. Jeff Buckley bounces around the new apartment - a vertical move to the space downstairs gives us twice the space and a methed out redneck harpo for a neighbor - like the friend you don't see a lot of anymore; always tipsy, rambling, spilling out the wrecked poetry inside to keep from bursting. Quiet, just-warm afternoons with mozerrela bread for lunch and a cigarettes for desert. Life jerks forward in weird moves. Vodka chilling in the freezer and definitions for "cascade" - waterfalls, lace, components, processes; from the Italian cacata - on the wall. No money, no tomorrow, just moments in broken order and old-fashioned brutality. Just running.

Talk about comics forthcoming, once the full time fuck-over of work and money woes stable enough for me to get something on paper worth mentioning. David Mamet and logic over interesting. Thinking in three dimensions and the long sit down with my characters. Later though, now that Blogrouter and the new phone are playing nice.

posted by chris  # 1:38 AM 0 comments