(Several weeks ago I recommended to you the webcomic The Secret Knots by Juan Santapau. He was kind enough to do a guest blog about his strip, and the process he uses to develop the stories. The more I read –and re-read– The Secret Knots, the more I like it. It does more than entertain me,  it inspires me. Not to imitation, mind you, but to challenging myself as a storyteller. I can’t write like Juan anymore than I can write like Lovecraft, nor do I want to, but their singular, personal visions serve as beacons; maybe they haven’t reached the shore themselves, but they are marking the way. And getting there is not so important as going As an old professor used to tell me, one’s reach  should always exceed one’s grasp. But never stop reaching. -LL)

The title of the series comes from what Athanasius Kircher (a man from 17h century, brilliant or mad enough to try to establish the exact shape and measures of Noah’s ark and the Babel tower ) wrote about magnetism: the world is bound with secret knots. Our people world is also kept together by invisible links, things like ambiguous emotions and dubious facts. I don’t think I have a clear premise that binds together the comics in The Secret Knots, but I think is an attempt to compose stories about that underlying stuff. There is also the presence of impossible things, absurd explanations made real only by the fact that they are being told by someone. I think I’d like to tell the kind of stories the Baron Munchaussen could tell where there is no sense in trying to discern lies from facts.

Most of these comics are short tales, often there’s a very participative storyteller, a voice that wants to speak directly to the listener. I see The Secret Knots as a book of short tales, a book that grows some new pages every once in a while. The lack of recurring characters and the slow updating schedule seems to be going in an opposite direction from the majority of webcomics, but it has also given me time and freedom to try specific things, to experiment and change direction. It’s an exercise to become better at storytelling and I don’t know where it will lead ultimately, maybe it will feed a graphic novel or a future steady strip, although lately I’ve been surer that Secret Knots is its own thing in spite of the disparity of the comics, and the feedback from readers has been great in that sense too, it has helped me to see the series as a proper webcomic.

Drawing

I’ve got small notebooks to record text and images where I also draw tiny storyboards of the comics. But the stories always come first. Sometimes I feel that I have a starting point, a line or an image and I improvise from there, try to see where it leads. Sometimes it’s the general idea (a man that spends time making up names for different things, a girl whose jealous lover is the city itself) or a particular tone (a retro sci-fi comic, a night of fever hallucinations). I look for references and start a cleaner sketch of the comic. From this point everything is digital, I draw, ink and color mixing Painter, Photohop and Manga Studio. Gradually the color process has been taking up more and more time while the inking recedes to a minimum. Many things and backgrounds are shown through contrast of light and colored shadows. I like to draw faces lit by sunlight, or contrasting figures under monochrome electric lights. I care about the color of lights and shadows, not so much about the color of things themselves. I’d like this to work as a reflection of the scripts, this lack of objectivity.

Unspeakable

Some time ago I was told about an event called “An exhibition of unspeakable things”, an art call based on Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book, this collection of phrases, story hooks and plots. I chose a rather simple one “117- Something kept and fed in an old house”. By then I was interested in making some coming of age tale, maybe about a first love, so I thought that mixing that topic with Lovecraftian premises was weird and challenging enough and I wrote a script for eight pages that changed and grew along the way, as I discovered where it really was meant to go. (And it wasn’t finished in time for the exhibition but I’m thankful anyway to the person who suggested me to be part of the project)
I remember quite well the first time I read a Lovecraft story. It was in the gardens of a public library, a quiet place surrounded by tall trees and eroded Greek-style statues and it was summer. The story was “The Temple”. It was in an old, wide book with the text placed in two columns, and yes, I remember it wasn’t like anything I had read by then, but also it left me a cozy sensation of immersion; the place was perfect for reading, and I guess I’ve always kept part of that pleasant experience when I’m reading Lovecraft even when he’s describing exhaustively his looming horrors. So, my comic “Unspeakable” turned out to be a story about kids in the summer, in spite of the threat of the sea and the closed rooms, the hidden things, the mysterious characters.

Many stories of children or preadolescent that dive into the marvelous imply the idea of growing up from the singular experience, of leaving fantasy behind to become adults. I think that Lovecraft’s stories are in a certain way a reversal of that situation. Characters (adults) start to investigate and wonder about the cults and forbidden books, the “mythos”, and later they find themselves trying to run away from the ominous, but they end up absorbed by it one way or another. They are unable to come back to sanity, and sometimes, like in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” they don’t even want to. I loved “Innsmouth” the first time I read it. I think this idea of irreversible escape stayed with me up until I wrote this comic, and merged with the idea of freeing the main character of his traditional outcome, his adulthood where he will forget about Narnia, about Wonderland under the ground, about the unknown Kadath. In a way, Lovecraft himself accomplished this permanent evasion, his own story appears interwoven with his fiction, and maybe that’s why the stories that involve him in his fictional worlds seem natural.

I think these are times where the idea of adulthood as a departure point from fantasy is questioned by many, and that’s interesting to me. This is what the end of “Unspeakable” tries to refer to, and I will probably cover this subject again in other tales. It’s not that I think that real life isn’t marvelous; it is only that the limits are perhaps blurrier than what we’ve been told and I’m sure there’s so much fun and astonishment in those interstices.

//Tags: Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft, juan santapau, Larry Latham, Lovecraft comic, Lovecraft is Missing, lovecraft webcomic, occult, the secret knots

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Noxious Fragments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.