Take It In a Little Here, Let It Out a Bit There: Tweaking Tweaking Tweaking

Now begins my struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder. The manuscript for the graphic novel needs a little sprucing up. I ran into a friend today and she advised me to put a time limit on how long I would torture the thing before I sent it to a publisher or agent. So I'll give myself a week. But where to begin? I know! The beginning. After living with the opening page for awhile, I began to find it lacked drama. Just to refresh your memory, here it is

See what I mean? It seems a bit abrupt and dull at the same time. So I split it in two, like so...

...which I think works much better. More motion, more drama. Now to redo every other page in the book.

Parkinson's Comic Manuscript Completed. Now For the Hard Part

I put on a burst of unparkinson's-like speed yesterday and finished the manuscript of "A Mixed Cursing" That was fun. Now begins the task of finding a way to get it published. There are a number of avenues as the publishing industry writhes and convulses with the changes wrought by that unbottled genie the World Wide Web. "Come into my parlor", said the spider to the fly... I will post news of the progress of the book-to-be as it develops.

In the meantime, this blog will return to its old self, albeit with (I hope) occasional excited notes about the progress of the manuscript to finished form and publication. Below are the three pages of the post-script for your feedback. Critical comments welcome! Bonus points to those who identify the references to Albert Einstein and Douglas Adams (click on images to enlarge.)

Comicization of a (Relatively) Recent Post

I now have about 50 of these pages done. Sort of getting the idea. I plan to start on a major new part of the story, the brain surgery I underwent about year and a half ago. Still trying to figure out the angle I will take. I'm thinking something along the lines of "Super-intelligent beings come back from the future to patch me up".

Another Panel From a Book Struggling To Be Born: The Tortoise

This sums up how I often feel about having Parkinson's Disease. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is aboard an ancient incarnation of slow.

Yikes! A scary New Page

Parkinson's, to paraphrase a well-known quip, is not for sissies. It's not for dummies either. Here is the most recent page in my attempt to adapt this blog into a brawling, sprawling blockbuster graphic novelesque look at Parkinson's Disease. We are up to page 36, I'm guessing the final length will be about 100. Your feedback welcome!

"I pulled on a thread...

... and where has it led? Where has it led?" So while I was mucking around with the new font I made a discovery concerning the page architecture, the underlying structure I had set up that is the skeleton that the images hang from. There was something bothering me with the lack of flow that was occurring, a knocking under the hood, a certain cog-wheeling in the joints between the panels. As an experiment I broke a couple edges off the boxes containing the narration. The effect was much less claustrophobic. The page went from this:

To this

(Click pages to enlarge) Much better! The muses are pleased. But they have one little request, just a small thing... now go back and retrofit all the pages that you thought were finished with the new look. Muses. Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.

Book report: One page at a time

It's always good to take a break from a big project. Breaks refresh your spirit and your eye. Recharged you return to the work at hand and you see you've made a Big Mistake. Good thing you're so refreshed because now you won't be happy until you uproot the Big Mistake (BM) and dispose of it.

In this case, I decided that the narration text should be a different font. The elegant Roman face I had chosen seemed too tight, too dense. Below is the old font.

And here is the new font

Unfortunately I already have 16 or so pages that all had to have the type reset. That meant redrawing many of the type boxes to fit the new type in. Just to make more work, I decided that since I had hand lettered the dialog in some frames, I should hand letter ALL the dialog to be consistent.

So I did. It could have been worse. I could have changed my mind about the text font on page 50 instead of 16. Good thing I left when I did. Of course I could still change my mind at page 50 and redo all 50 pages. Stay tuned.

Below is one of the pages you haven't seen yet. You can click the image to enlarge.

Sneak Peek: Progress on the PD comic "A Mixed Cursing"

Drawings ©2011, Peter Dunlap-Shohl, Click to enlarge

For years people have been prodding me with the question "Why not turn the blog into a book?" I usually counter-prod with the question "Do we really need another book on Parkinson's Disease?" Then several months ago I ran into two friends, Scott and Julia. Scott is a great fan of graphic novels, which is a highfalutin' term for fancy comic books. We were chatting about "LOGICOMIX" which is,among other things, a comics biography of Bertrand Russell we both read and enjoyed. "You have enough in your blog to turn it into a graphic novel", Julia suggested. I told her I didn't think so. The blog doesn't really amount to a narrative, the drawings aren't connected enough. The whole thing seems like a fragmented, episodic series of observations. Not enough graphic or novel. Or maybe I'm just lazy.

Later I was talking to my friend Steve. Again the dreaded book subject came up. I raised the usual objections. But he may have given me a way to focus that will work. "You treat Parkinson's Disease like an adventure", He said. Hmmmmm. With a massive, Herculean effort, a guy might be able to make that work. I've got about eleven pages so far. They appear above. above, in case anyone is curious.

One reason I have been reluctant to start a project like this is a fear it will interfere with blogging. Then it occurred to me I could post pages here from time to time, neatly killing two flies with one swatter. Page twelve calls, must run...