This guy asked me the other day one of those questions that I get asked most frequently when interviewers ask me questions: “How do you write songs?” And the answer is that I have no idea how to write songs. If only people would instead ask me how I draw comic books I could give a real answer!
I can tell you how I draw a comic book. I jot down some story notes in a sloppy brainstorming manner. Then I type all of this up on a computer so that it’s easy to edit and move the text around. I try to visualize how much information I’d like contained in each panel of the comic – I don’t want to overstuff each panel with too much information or text, so I try to break up the story into small chunks that match the amount of info I think each panel should eventually hold. On some scrap paper I do some very rough and semi-unintelligible doodles to loosely figure out how to show what each panel needs to show, then I’m ready to move on to drawing the actual eleven by seventeen-inch large comic page.
Starting out with a 4H pencil, which is very hard and creates a very light line, I rather sloppily (but lightly) sketch in everything. Then, with a ruler and pencil and a good old $2.99 Aimes Lettering Guide, I lay down clusters of horizontal lines in the various panels where I think the text bits ought to go – usually I’ll try to put the text on top of whatever parts of the art will be hardest to draw! With a darker, softer pencil, like a 3B or 4B, I refine the sketchy light-pencil artwork till everything looks about right, and then with a pen, usually a Micron, I ink in the words as legibly as I can. With the words inked in and the penciled art pretty much knocked into shape it’s time for inking the artwork; usually I’ll first go through with a pen and a ruler inking all the straight lines, then it’s time for my favorite part, which is the free-hand brushwork inking that I prefer to use for all the characters and shadows, etc., using a high quality watercolor brush and a bottle of waterproof black india ink. Then I erase all the remaining pencil lines, and if there’s any small mistakes in the art or lettering I can hit ’em with some white-out.
That’s it! All it takes is the time to go through all the steps. It’s like doing the dishes. Maybe some songwriters can punch out songs like that, but I sure can’t… is that the difference between an art and a craft? Maybe a craft is something you can reliably do just by going through the process, while an art is the more nebulous result of grasping around in mental fog, like a blind lunatic in a burning house, desperate to grasp onto anything that might be useable. That’s how it feels to me…
My new album ‘A Turn In The Dream-Songs’ comes out on Rough Trade Records on October 10 – I can tell you how I drew all of the packaging design but I can’t tell you how I wrote the songs; luckily I’m quite proud of all of it. In the meantime I’m back to more desperate grasping, metaphorically speaking, as well as doing some dishes, metaphorically speaking (literally too).”
