49. Selling Storyboards

Author's Note:
This posting is a bit of a two-for deal. I wrote the office dialog in an airport lounge two days ago, while the personal narrative came up today while I was writing my Writer's Journal entries and staring at snowdrifts this afternoon.

     "Look, I just don't know what to make of this," the agent said.
     "What can't you make of it? It's my memoirs," I replied.
     "It's just… this doesn't really fit into any category that I'm comfortable dealing with," the agent said, running his hand across his bald head.
     I looked around the office. After months of sending out my pseudo-manuscript, I'd finally been given an audience with a literary agent, only to have him tell me he was unsure of my work.
     What is this guy doing? If he doesn't think he can sell this, why the hell did he call me down here?
   

      I began to think that perhaps I should just call it quits. I'd been trying to get my story out there forever. I started my quest with a screenplay. It received a couple of interested nods from the movie making crowd, and I'd had some meetings to discuss it. As part of the process, I needed to develop my tale into storyboards: rough, cartoon-like sketches to represent different scenes. I spent quite a lot of time coming up with my storyboards, but I just couldn't close the deal.
     "Your work doesn't seem all that visual," was a theme that seemed to come up constantly when producers would turn my storyboards down. "It all seems like something that would be better represented in a book than a movie."
     Every time, in the end, I wound up at home, staring at my storyboards. I'd spent so much of my time over the past few years trying to relate my unique life story to be represented in film. Now I was being told that my representation was not visual enough for Hollywood. Soon, after a  healthy dose of marijuana and the movie 300, I got the notion that I would shop them around to literary agents, hoping that I could get them published as a "graphic novel".

    

     "Ever since that damned swords and sandals movie with all the man-ass and dudes running around looking like cut-up show cats, everyone's been thinking they can pass anything off as a 'graphic novel' and make millions of dollars publishing it," the agent started in.
     "Truth is, graphic novels are a niche item that tries to bridge two worlds and ends up as little more than a series of cartoon notes. It's like Kurt Vonnegut once said about semicolons, 'They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing'," the smartly-dressed agent said, his voice rising.
     "You might be wondering, why have I brought you here if I'm not interested your graphic novel? Well, because I think your story has promise. I think your sketches are worth something, but not the use you think they are worth," the agent was talking and walking across the room towards my large drawings set upon an easel in the corner.
     "I think you need to decide which way you are going to go with this. The way I see it, you've got three options. First, you can focus on your drawing skills, and learn to create works of visual are that stand on their own. Second, you can carry on making cartoons, like you're doing here, and find sub-moderate success working a niche market. Third, you can focus on developing your story from the boards and beyond the mere guttural sounds that the captions of this form afford you and really write something," the agent was looking at me with pure excitement in his face.
     "I like your story, I really do. I just think that this form of expression doesn't allow you to truly convey a message with any strong significance. You're limited in both the amount of visual and written expression you can convey in each cell. I think you would be better served to write your story, and perhaps, use an image here or there to show a more difficult to describe concept."
     I was starting to feel what the agent was telling me. I think I had been more excited about being able to put "graphic novelist" by my name than anything else. In reality, all I was trying to do was sell my old storyboards. If I came to see things his way, that the graphic novel tries to bridge a gap, but falls short, leaving the reading stuck in the middle wishing he was on either side, anywhere but the middle.

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"Graphic novels" make me feel like I am being cheated out of something. What is that something? It's the experience of soaking up pages of words that describe something. It is something I must visualize in my mind. It is the joy of reading

I can see why this form of expression has become popular. It's just a part of our overall culture of instant gratification. The journey is no longer what's appreciated, only the destination.

When I read line after line of prose, my mind imagines real people and real scenarios, vividly. When denied this beautiful process,  I will always imagine the two-dimensional world of the childish drawings that are presented to me.

Like text message shorthand and expressions limited to one-hundred and forty character "Tweets", graphic novels represent a laziness that is leading to a wholesale erosion of the written word.