Becoming Barely Tolerable
Figuring out my next steps in comics post-Spectrum
With issue #6 now on the shelves—entitled “Lost Children,” perhaps inspired by the text on a famous album cover—my comic series Spectrum (co-created with Dave Chisholm) has come to an end.1
So what’s next?
This last year or so, as preparations for Spectrum’s release were in motion and I was continuing to make progress on revising my prose novel, I also had in the back of my mind that it would probably be smart to begin developing new comic pitches. The problem was… I was bored by all my old WIPs. I needed fresh ideas.
I recently played Alan Wake II on PS5—and it was one of the most thrilling narrative experiences I’ve ever had. The story, to wildly oversimplify it, is about a horror novelist stuck in his own unfinished writings. The game alternates between moody, atmospheric graphics and filmed sequences with real-life actors. The aesthetics are a legitimately terrifying mix of Twin Peaks, Mark Z. Danielewski’s cult novel House of Leaves, and Stephen King, which is another way of saying: it is incredibly dark and incredibly meta.
Inspired by the game’s formal inventiveness, I started assembling an idea of my own. It involved a comic writer, perhaps getting lost in their own unfinished project. There was a comic book within the comic book, Tales of the Black Freighter-style. There was an ambiguous blending of fact and fiction—real-life history and a made-up “true crime” murder mystery. It was incredibly dark. It was incredibly meta.
But then I stopped. Something didn’t feel right. Despite it being in a new genre, it was a little too close in approach to what I had already done with Spectrum.
To promote each issue of Spectrum, Dave and I were guests for six episodes of the Comic Book Couples Counseling podcast. And in those (wonderful, fun, revelatory) discussions, some themes emerged as we spoke: how we “trusted readers,” how our approach was “dense” and “layered,” how you had to read the whole series more than once to appreciate the full impact of everything. This echoed many of the kind words I’d seen from readers on social media, which highlighted Spectrum’s ambitious complexity as one of their favorite things about the book.
And that’s great. It was Dave and I’s purposeful intention for Spectrum to be a loud, maximalist opus.
This will shock those who know me closely, but I have a slight contrarian streak in me. The need to go left when everyone else is going right exerts a strong gravitational pull on my personality (thankfully, it does not extend to the lengths of edgelordism2).
Which is why, as people have lauded Spectrum for being challenging, complex, blah blah blah I have been simultaneously pleased but also… it’s made me want to run in the exact opposite direction on whatever I do next.
I want the opposite of existential metatextual terror.
Two months ago, I went to a 20th anniversary screening of the 2005 adaptation of Pride & Prejudice, which I had never seen before. I was struck by the compositional beauty of its cinematography—the camera moved with an assured, confident grace. Key emotional moments, now immortalized by a thousand gifs and memes, happened in stillness and silence. The tone, despite the English climate, was warm, lush, and romantic.
As I left the theatre, I felt that same flash of inspiration that Alan Wake II had given me: I wanted to try something similar. To write a comic book that sparkled with elegant clarity, that was more classical than meta, more reserved than phantasmagoric, more emotional than cerebral.
And so that’s what I’m developing now.
In the coming weeks, I want to use this space to document the evolution of this new project: from initial concept to final pitch document. I have very little figured out so far. Don’t worry. I’ve already added a nesting doll-like structure to the plot though. I can’t quit my clever tricks overnight.
More details to come next week…
Except when I’m ranking Mission: Impossible films.