October/November 2023 Edition of Devin's Chicago Comics Book Club Digest

Harrow County, Volume 1: Countless Haints by Cullen Bunn and Tyler Crook

Hello, everyone! I’m sorry this is arriving so long after our last meeting and so soon before our next one. We’ve passed 500 subscribers, which feels like something to celebrate but I wasn’t around to mark the occasion. Thank you to everyone who liked and commented on a somewhat self-indulgent excuse to share vacation photos a couple of weeks ago. XD Time to get back to writing about comics!

I was at last month’s meeting in spirit, as I read this year’s Halloween selection surrounded by decorations for spooky season. Harrow County used similar tropes as some of the books we’ve previously read—I was reminded of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Wytches, and Something Is Killing the Children—while being its own scary story with what I thought was a perfectly realized sense of place. Those who gathered in Chicago also discussed Elvira and horror movies, but I would’ve been surprised if horror movies hadn’t come up. Lol We discuss that topic almost as much as comics! Our next meeting will be next Wednesday, November 15 to discuss Ironheart, Volume 1: Those With Courage.

What We're Reading

November 15 - Ironheart, Volume 1: Those With Courage by Eve L. Ewing, Luciano Vecchio, and Kevin Libranda

December 20 - The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack by Nicholas Gurewitch

January 17 - Always Never by Jordi Lafebre

February 21 - Scott Pilgrim, Volume 1: Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life by Bryan Lee O’Malley

March 20 - Come Home, Indio by Jim Terry (tentative)

November’s selection is the first six issues of Eve Ewing’s Ironheart series, not to be confused with any other books with that same title. There are plenty of physical copies available at the Chicago Public Library. I’ve also marked a tentative March 2024 selection after one of our members shared this WBEZ story about artist Jim Terry.

Shameless Self-Promotion

The CyberSync anthology in which I have a story reached its funding goal in only 12 hours! And it’s more than 200% funded as of this writing! Woohoo!! There’s a little less than two weeks left on the campaign for this book, so please make sure to support it and reserve yourself a copy. There are dozens of very talented people involved in the creation of this book. My contribution is only one page, which makes my enthusiasm feel disproportionate, but it’s been my lifelong dream to write comics and that dream is finally coming true. I couldn’t be happier with this whole experience!

I was on the Joe Talks Comics podcast to promote it hosted by Joe Loves Comics. We recorded this episode before I left on vacation and it was released while I was away, but you can listen to it here. I’ve also embedded it below. It was a really fun conversation and Joe is a cool guy. You may recognize him from the comments section. XD Please consider subscribing to his show!

I’m also going to be a guest on Keeping It Geekly this Sunday, November 12 at 10:00 am EST/9:00 am CST! It’ll be live streamed, so join us if you can make it. I’ll have to make sure to wake up early enough to be coherent and not repeat the same points I made on Joe’s show. Lol I’m very excited to talk more about CyberSync! I’m planning to post here about my story’s development in the future.

NEWS

Harrow County was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best New Series in 2016 and Countless Haints was nominated in the Graphic Novel category at the 2015 Bram Stoker Awards. Writer

Cullen Bunn

is active here on Substack with his Vicious Shivers newsletter and artist Tyler Crook has a YouTube channel that includes process videos of his Harrow County work. Crook also wrote and performed soundtrack albums for the first two volumes. If you liked the artwork in Harrow County, you can purchase some of it here. Bunn has a Discord server (full disclosure: I’m a member). I’ve made a few friends there, and it’s a really welcoming environment!

In addition to the music of Harrow County, there’s also an audio drama adaptation and a board game! Cullen Bunn spoke with Paste magazine about adapting a different story of his to comics, Death Follows. Here is a link to an interview he did with Nerdist when Harrow County began. Nerdist would go on to call Harrow County “the perfect horror comic” in 2020.

Another independent comics publishing imprint has launched! Ghost Machine will be a subdivision of Image, so feel free to debate the use of “independent” in the comments, but it has a lot of notable names attached. Francis Manapul discussed it on his YouTube channel, which I’ve recommended here before.

I mentioned Glaze, a tool for artists to combat their work being scraped to “teach” generative AI, back when it came out. The developers have created something new called Nightshade, which could be just as disruptive if not more to thieves who want to masquerade as creative types.

Speaking of AI, this story from Otaku USA Magazine shows that concerns about it infringing on the work of creative people are far from overblown. MANGA Plus decided to use AI instead of humans to letter a chapter of Rugby Rumble, and the results were as terrible as expected. Hopefully that and the ensuing outrage will make any other publishers rethink making the same mistake.

As always, there was some sad news this month. Writer and artist Keith Giffen has died. Known for a distinctive art style more reliant on inks than pencils, his death was announced via a pre-written social media message that reflected his sense of humor and referenced one of his best-known comics work.

Some Thoughts on Descriptive Language in Comics and Prose

I greatly enjoyed the back matter of Harrow County, Volume 1: Countless Haints and found the nine chapters of the original serialized novel that were included fascinating. While this story could have made for an excellent novel, it clearly grew into something that required a visual element. There are several differences between the prose and comics versions of Harrow County, including the presence of Bernice, the backstory of the Skinless Boy, and the shuffling of certain events and bits of dialogue.

I’d like to take a closer look at two of the descriptive passages that made it from the prose version into the comic and one that did not, because they demonstrate part of what makes comics such a unique art form. (Note: The main character was originally named Madrigal in the prose version, but renamed Emmy for the comic. I’ll be referring to her as Emmy throughout for consistency and clarity’s sake.)

1.

The quiet rushed in to flood the house. The quiet. [Emmy] sometimes thought of it as a living, breathing thing. And while the girl usually enjoyed being alone with her thoughts, tonight she felt as if the silence might smother her. The room, the house, the entire farm seemed too small.

From page 20 of issue 1 of Harrow County

In prose, pace can be controlled through sentence structure and paragraph breaks. The comic adds ellipses to impose a slower pace, but it also employs multiple captions arranged in different areas of the panel to help draw the eye. If the prose version had a paragraph break every two or three words, it would have been maddening. At the same time, if this passage had been placed as one massive caption that covered up more of the artwork, it wouldn’t have been as effective.

There’s only so much room on a comics page, so the judicious removal of the line about how Emmy “enjoyed being alone with her thoughts” makes sense. I’ll touch on this more later, but the artwork helps convey Emmy’s state of mind as much as these words would have.

2.

Shrouded in runaway scuppernong vines, the tall, gray oak cast its bent shadow across the valley and scratched with spindly branches at the sky. Years ago, or so [Emmy] had been told, the oak had been struck by lightning during one of the summer squalls that blew in from the east. The tree had not grown an inch since, and a rotting hollow now yawned in the trunk. The cavity had been filled to keep the blight from spreading, but the effort had proven futile, the decaying wood pulling away from the concrete filling like gums receding from old, blunted teeth.

From page 7 of issue 1 of Harrow County

We see this even more in this second passage, where “the summer squalls that blew in from the east” is no longer given as the source of the lightning that struck the tree. This is arguably the main advantage of prose over comics; one can write as much as one wants without worrying about running out of room. So much of the content of these captions, though, may seem unnecessary to casual readers. We can see the scuppernong vines and the rotting hollow, after all. Why also describe them?

Aside from the literary quality of the metaphors involved (the tree growing into the night; the personification of the tree’s hollow), these captions serve a story function in providing Emmy’s perspective. The reader knows from the book’s prologue what this tree represents and what happened there, but Emmy doesn’t. Her unease and reliance on what she’s “been told” help endear us to her. I’ll discuss this more in the next section.

The words and pictures can work together in comics while prose only has words. This is not to say, for example, that the description of the Skinless Boy in the novel is less evocative than seeing him on the comics page; both are simply evocative in different ways. What matters is that both elicit the intended reactions of revulsion and horror.

3.

She watched [Pa] from across the dimly lit room. His face was lean and weathered, with deep creases in his flesh that seemed to snare the shadows and hold them prisoner. His eyes were deep set and weary. His lips trembled as he quietly read his scriptures, just as he did every night before bed. Sometimes, when [Emmy] looked at him, she barely recognized him, as if she couldn’t believe she was his own flesh and blood.

From page 15 of issue 1 of Harrow County

Finally, I wanted to look at this paragraph describing Pa. It’s no less figurative and descriptive than the others; the part about the creases in his flesh “holding [shadows] prisoner” is thematically appropriate, and it ends on a nice bit of foreshadowing about Emmy and Pa’s relationship. Why does it appear nowhere in the captions of Harrow County’s first four issues, then? I think the answer is more complex than simply “Cullen Bunn trusts Tyler Crook.” That would imply Bunn trusts Crook less when using captions and we’ve seen that’s not the case.

What differentiates this example from the first two, in my opinion, is the narrative purpose of the captions. To return to the previous example, we see the tree, but we also get Emmy’s perspective in the captions. This deepens our relationship to her as the protagonist and helps us understand her relationship to the tree and those who have told her about it.

Conversely, the description about Pa wouldn’t broaden or deepen our understanding of his character or his relationship with Emmy in the context of the comic. Reading her experience of observing Pa would be unnecessary, whereas it provides context for that relationship in the prose version. If these two characters share a scene in the comic, it’s more effective to have them interact. When Emmy and Pa are separate, Emmy talks about Pa to Bernice. This provides us more information than descriptive text about Pa’s face.

“Show, don’t tell” is one of the first rules of writing, but it’s easier said than done, even in comics, which is a visual medium. Literally spelling out a character’s motivation or a plot development with dialogue or captions can become a crutch, especially if a writer has crafted a poignant metaphor that they’d rather not leave in the script for only the artist and maybe the letterer to read. Harrow County provides excellent examples of when descriptive language in prose can be adapted into comics and when it’s unnecessary.

I hope this didn’t read as too presumptuous or pretentious. Feel free to share any thoughts or comments below! What do you think of the use of captions in comics? Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Thanks for reading. See you in a couple of weeks to discuss Ironheart, Volume 1: Those With Courage by Eve L. Ewing, Luciano Vecchio, and Kevin Libranda!