Normally our Director’s Commentaries feature creators talking us through a new book or comic that is about to be released shortly, or just come out. This one is a little different in that Alex de Campi is telling us a bit about the project she and Jimmy (Knight & Squire) Broxton are working on right now: Ashes. It is a work in progress and currently they are running a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for it so Jimmy can keep drawing and still take care of pesky everyday things like paying the bills. I thought when we first mentioned it a couple of weeks ago that this sort-of sequel to Alex’s fascinating (and well-received) Smoke sounded intriguing, but after reading her thoughts on the tale I’m even more enticied – it sounds cracking and I’d love to read it in its entirety. I’m guessing a lot of you may too, so after reading this, if you can then please head over to Kickstarter and give Alex and Jimmy some support. Over to Alex:
Hi, I’m Alex. I wrote a book a while ago called Smoke and about two people read it but luckily they were both on the Eisner committee. Now. belatedly, among babies and music video directing, I’ve written a more or less stand alone sequel to it, with the fabulous Jimmy Broxton (Batman: Knight & Squire; the Unwritten; much more) on art. The sequel is called Ashes, and similar to its predecessor, it’s at heart a Western, albeit a British, absurdist, psychedelic thriller of a Western. We’re raising money on Kickstarter to allow Jimmy to survive while drawing Ashes, and to pay for the lovely limited-edition hardback version we’ll be printing for you. Please check us out. Folks who are way cooler than us (Bryan Talbot, Dave Gibbons, Colleen Doran, Gail Simone, Mark Waid, Kieron Gillen, Charlie Adlard, and more) say nice things about what we do, and it’s only 30 of those fast-depreciating Yanqui dollars to get both the serialised digital version of the book, and the nice hardback. On the Kickstarter project page is a nice 22 page preview, and in the project updates there’s lots of further art.
I’d like to tell you a little bit more about Ashes, by talking about the eight chapter names, and how they reflect the influences on the book and in general, things I love. There are indications below, but no spoilers (which is why the final chapter writeups are a bit slimmer than the rest — there is so little I can say without giving away surprises).
(all artwork in this article by Jimmy Broxton from Ashes, (c) Alex De Campi and Jimmy Broxton)
1. Ghost Town: I used to have a crappy night job doing press cutting, where I would bicycle to work from North London to Tower Hill every night at 10pm, then home again around 6am. My abiding memories of London are from those dawn bike rides home, spaced out, when not a thing stirred in the city. I think it’s striking how very unfamiliar your home can look, simply by seeing it at a time of day far out of your usual. That’s how I wanted to present the story, to immediately throw readers off base — an empty city, a desperate and doomed errand by Katie, one of our protagonists, a sudden rainstorm (well duh, it’s a Bank Holiday) and then a wrong turning, where suddenly Katie is lost and the city becomes unrecogniseable and possibly predatory. Do you ever get the feeling you are one wrong turning away from somewhere strange and unreal? I get it all the time. Gatwick makes me feel like that, like the gates just keep going and going, and soon you’ll step through into some strange new area where everything is sinister, backwards, half a note off. The chapter title refers to the Specials song, obviously. I always think of ska as something upbeat and happy, even when the song is about awful stuff like police brutality or poverty… except for Ghost Town, which has this odd, minor-key, sinister air to it. Parts of this chapter are also influenced by a Russian absurdist film called Chetyre (4) which I saw at the ICA and somewhat scarred me for life.
2. Small Craft Advisory: I’ve always been near oceans, and when I lived in Hong Kong I learned to sail — mostly racing. I carried on sailing in the UK, down in the Solent. I don’t any more, and I miss it, but there’s no time. Also, it’s flipping freezing where I live now, and I freely admit to being a fair-weather sailor. In any case, NOAA weather radio and both the UK and Hong Kong shipping forecasts have been constant features in my life. There’s something magical about any shipping forecast, but more so in the UK with those strange names (Finisterre, South Uitshire, and so forth) incanted with Beaufort scale numbers that mean nothing to most people but everything to those about to go to sea. I often started chapters in Smoke with radio continuity announcements, and in Ashes I start varying this pattern to include things like songs, the shipping forecasts, TV programmes. In this chapter, our other protagonist, Rupert, has basically gone to the ends of the UK in order to lose himself, is revealed to be working on a fishing boat, and then bad things start to happen.
3. Captain Yesterday vs The Weapon of Tomorrow: This chapter opens with Katie watching TV, and it’s a bit of a meditation on the role of female characters in popular entertainment — fair maidens in peril and needing rescue by the male lead. It’s a trope that I’m guilty of using myself in this very series, but it’s fun to show Katie’s reaction to it happening on pretty much every TV station in every programme format. Oh, there’s also a women-in-refrigerators joke in this chapter. The Captain Yesterday title has to do with me grappling with whether the whole “lone gunman” idea is obsolete. Of course it’s charming (may I mention how wholeheartedly I love Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai at this point?), and it’s been a staple of genre fiction for years, but as actual warmaking is mechanised and made remote-control, will all this seem terribly quaint to our children? Rupert, the lone gunman in Ashes (our Captain Yesterday), feels his age, and his obsolescence, keenly. He knows how little he can solve, and how tall the odds are against him.
4. The Machine Stops: Hey, you know EM Forster? Dead white dude who wrote lots of dull books about middle-aged people repressing emotions? He also wrote a cracking sci-fi short in the opening years of the 1900s called The Machine Stops. It predicts the internet, and more. Go look it up; it’s public domain. I always wanted to direct a film of this but never found a writer who could make a good job of adapting the story to screenplay (and when I’m directing, I prefer, much as Hitchcock did, not to adapt the story myself). Spoiler: the machine stops. For my sins, I spent five months of last winter in the ass-end of upstate New York, in a failed industrial town on a freeway that went nowhere, and where no jobs existed. I was standing outside a Wal-Mart when sirens started wailing — like air-raid sirens. The few others in the parking lot stopped, and looked around, confused. This was still soon enough after the BP oil spill in the Gulf that I remembered the conspriacy theories swirling around at the time, where some people said that the oil platforms’ systems had been remotely hacked and deliberately sabotaged. I imagined, as I often do, some great calamity happening as the machine is forcibly stopped by aggressive intent, and those sirens (a local fire department, it turns out) being our first warning.
5. The Glass Hive: OK, I admit, I have a thing for poncey French films. Not quite Guardian Film Podcast levels of thing, but two of my touchstone films are French. I already mentioned Le Samourai (see also his Cercle Rouge). But I also love the incredibly mannerist Orphée, by Cocteau. This chapter branches out the narrative to focus more on some secondary characters, and as my homage to DC Thompson’s Warlord dresses himself for an annual dinner with his cronies I quote the limo driver, Heurtebise (who, like Rupert’s old school friend Stinky Flynn in Ashes, seems to have an unfair number of Really Good Lines) as he discusses ageing: “I will tell you the secret of secrets. The mirror is the portal through which Death comes and goes. Watch your whole life in a mirror, and you will see Death at work, like bees in a glass hive.” A lot of Ashes is about people trying to stay relevant, or realising they no longer are… people who were once heroes; veterans of obsolete, forgotten wars whose medals have long ago been hawked on eBay. This is the most formally innovative chapter as well, where the art style undergoes some significant story-driven alterations.
6. “–Calamity Mesa!”: A significant part of Ashes takes place at a military installation in Colorado, in the USA. I first became aware of this part of Colorado (the Uncompaghre) from what is possibly my favourite book, Thomas Pynchon’s Against The Day. Then a few years ago randomly picked up an already-old copy of National Geographic with a story on the area. It had such wonderful names: Starvation Point, Paradox Valley, Disappointment Creek… Calamity Mesa. The climactic scene which opens this chapter, and which has several cliffhangers and twists, is the most obviously Western-influenced in the book, although hopefully I’ve managed to reinterpret the classic Western town-wide showdown in a more modern way. There are some fairly interesting choices of weapon.
7. Joyland: is an abandoned theme park in Kansas. You can see a little film about it here. I’m mildly obsessed with abandoned theme parks, and “ghost malls” — abandoned shopping centres. I find them profoundly sad, and not a little sinister. It’s an appropriate locale for a scene without joy, in a book about how our loves and habits are already obsolete. The chapter opens with two quotes from John Ashbery poems: “In The Haunted House No Quarter Is Given” and “You are the Harvest And Not The Reaper” – rather appropriate, I thought, for a scene in the middle of a cornfield.
No Joy from Mike Petty on Vimeo.
8. “I Go To Sleep…”: The finale of the book, scored to a Kinks demo (later given to Ray Davies’ gf to record, but do dig out the original Kinks demo version, it’s so spare and lovely).
If this all sounds interesting to you, please consider pledging to buy a book. We literally cannot make the book without you, and right now, there are no plans for an edition to be for sale outside what will be available on Kickstarter.
Tue, Nov 22, 2011
Comics and cartoons