Art Journal 010: Writing Part 2: Places

Last week I talked about writing and creating characters and the evolving process of turning a general idea into a flawed and multi-faceted human being with goals, ambitions, hangups and social connections.  This week I’d like to continue talking about the writing process and go into how I like to build worlds for those characters to live in.  Like writing characters this has been an evolving process for me, something I’ve learned by trying over the years, and as time goes on I’ve been able to write better and better worlds, so I’ll follow them in order and go through my process.

The initial idea of starting a post-apocalyptic comic involved having a good place to apocalypticize, someplace loaded with resources and different types of settings I could explore; something where you could conceivably find whatever neato place best suits the idea you would have for a story, and for me that place was a city.  I grew up just outside of New Haven, Connecticut so old brick buildings  and urban centers fanning out into lighter residentials ringed by forests and mountains.  The city I built for the comic was largely based on my perception of New Haven as someone who lived outside of it.

I didn’t want to use a literal actual city as my setting, though, because then I would be committing myself to a lot of locational research and a feeling like I had to “stay true” to the source, and I wanted to be free.  I also wanted to give the setting an “anywhere” sort of feel, like no matter where you lived you could feel like the city was somewhere in reach of you, so I decided to make the city’s location very ambiguous in the story.  The Sons of Surtr- the biker gang we met in the 400-block of pages- are 1%ers, meaning they have a three-piece patch on their vests, and the bottom rocker on a three-piece is traditionally the club’s location, so instead of naming a specific city I put “Northeast” on there.  That’s as close to actually naming the setting as I’ve gotten.

At first I just avoided having to name it but in recent years I’ve started referring to it as “the city with no name”, which has a Sergio Leone sort of spaghetti-western ring to it, so if anyone asks that’s my answer, it’s The City with No Name.  

The spaghetti western theme wasn’t an accident, though; from the outset I envisioned the story as being more of a modern western than a zombie story.  In my mind a zombie story is a fairly gruesome mirror into our own world which is often abused to justify writing gorenography and lots of screaming crying people, and I wanted a more fun comic than that.  A western is a setting where isolated pockets of civilization exist between vast expanses of inhospitable terrain, where the law is quick and dirty and everyone still living has a story to tell.  It’s a setting which demands its residents get tough or die, where you make the most of what you have; in a sense a western is a pre-civilization story and what I’m writing is sort of a post-civilization mirror of that, complete with practiced gunslingers and rolling chase scenes.  That’s the flavor the story is seasoned with and that’s the major thematic influence for the setting the characters live in.

The lifeless streets represent the dusty expanses of western desert, but the real action has always been in the pockets of life.  The first major civilization that wasn’t a hold-out house or makeshift shelter was Chantelle’s apartment building.  The first hundred-or-so pages established the world and thrust the characters out into the wastes and the apartment represented their first real moment to catch their breath and clean up (the character who introduced them to the apartment, Dan, is actually a pretty direct cameo for my younger brother and he’s very enthused about being in the comic).  The apartment was a place to let the characters rest, decompress and it was an initial attempt at giving them new clothes to wear; they all find clean clothes but by the time they hit the road again I felt like Alice’s hoodie, Lizzie’s workshirt and Monday’s suit were fairly iconic to their characters so they all had different reasons for putting them back on again, so that “new outfit” thing didn’t entirely pan out how I planned.  It’s like Clint Eastwood’s brown serape, even by the end of The Good The Bad & The Ugly he finds his way back into it.

The apartment represented a hodgepodge civilization, a mix of residents like Arlen & his kids and outsiders like Corporal Ross and served as a place where the tensions of “us vs. them” could boil over and result in the exile of the outsiders to the detriment of the residents.  Opposite of this within that same storyline was the Omnimart, a smaller civilization sitting on top of a vast stockpile of resources.  The Omnimart group represents a body of people who all have the same origin so there’s really no “them” within their group; instead of outsider drama they had a lot of old internal baggage of their own, primarily focusing around their relationship with Ron, the Assistant Manager.  A lot of the intra-office drama, character roles and relationships were loosely inspired by my time as a bowling alley mechanic working under my own over-reaching assistant manager.  The Omnimart, like the apartments before it, also served as a place to rest and restock supplies- I feel that in a story like mine the characters can’t be expected to plod on forever, they have to stop and recharge their batteries, and occasionally make new friends.

The city of Tombstone is a fairly recent discovery in the comic and it’s the first actual civilization that is larger than just one building full of people.  Tombstone was developed as a major turning point in the comic, the introduction of the story’s second act and a place where the hostility of zombies can be set fully aside to allow for the hostility of human drama to occur.  Where the previous civilizations had walls and property lines to clearly delineate where they begin and end Tombstone instead uses a ring of school buses parked end-to-end and ringed with sandbags- the idea here was that the city was built in an industrial part of the city, one with the newspaper printing facility, river-shipping import docks and one of the giant parking lots the city keeps its schoolbuses in.  I’ve actually spent a number of pages easing into the Tombstone setting because it’s something of a major shift from the theme of the comic before it, which was fighting through wasteland to find another holdout, so the concepts of infrastructure, economy and local government needed a bit of breathing room so it wasn’t all “oh by the way”.  Tombstone’s the first place in the story to have its own economy and infrastructure too- one of the ideas of how they have a steam power generator came from “what would people do with all the zombie bodies they have in a place like this?”  It turns out if you wrap a body in linen and burn it the fat burns long and hot, and the linen absorbs the fat in a sort of reverse-candle effect (I actually did research on how this would work so it’s probably one of the major points of research that put me on some sort of government watch list).  The city takes the zombies that try to eat them and turns them into fuel for the fire that generates the steam from the water they get from the river that feeds through the pipes and spins the turbines that generate electricity for a small handful of buildings and spotlights, so in a way they turn from a menace to a resource!  It’s a bit of the wild west resourcefulness making its way into the story.  As another little detail of character there are brass shells all over the city streets in Tombstone, both as a relic of the fight the locals put up to reclaim their civilization and a testament to the fact that nobody feels like sweeping any of it up.

Tombstone is a big place, and normally all I had to do was draw a little map of the building people occupied to keep my shots consistent- like the food court being to the right of the Omnimart office and the back door being in the far left corner, or Liz and Alice’s room in the apartment being on the fourth floor where Lou and Monday stayed on the third, social rooms were on the second and the ground floor was boarded up.  Tombstone is a much bigger place so I need to remember a lot more landmarks- like where the crane at the docks is in relation to the FISH building just outside the City Herald-Gazette which is next to the dirt lot the cars are parked in, which is on the other side of the newspaper from the place with the PIZZA sign which is roughly opposite the old barbershop the bluesman cameos sit and play at which is also opposite the corner with the big building with U-shaped architecture whose road leads to the candy shop Liz, Alice and Stacy live above which isn’t far from the docks which link back around to the street with the Jade Garden which isn’t far from the crane.  This is sort of how my brain remembers the locations but I actually drew the map- as a Patreon exclusive it’s the title image of this article.  There’s a lot that is going to happen inside and outside of the city so it’s important to keep my places consistent. 

I’ve always felt that an environment is a character unto itself and should be treated as such, rather than just being a blank backdrop behind the characters.  The settings I write tend to serve the purpose of the stories I want to tell, but I try to make them familiar and relatable, drawing from my own life experiences in a way similar to how I create my characters.  I can’t reveal too much more about Tombstone specifically because a major thing is going to happen there that I don’t want to spoil, but that’s the train of thought that led to the world being what it is.

Thanks for reading!