Pretty Deadly and the Art of Listening/Hearing
“I talk a lot about how hard it is to do press on a book while you’re working on it. It’s like you’re making a painting, and every five minutes you have to stop and turn around to explain what the painting is about, but you don’t really know because you haven’t finished the painting yet. But because of this extended Image schedule we had we didn’t really have to do that. I talked about it at the announcement panel when the book was something very different from what it became, but we’ve had the luxury of really developing it and really discovering what it was about.”
I thought that was kind of interesting. Because of social media, and the way comic press works, it really is kind of a weird process in this way. It makes the creative process almost like live painting I suppose.
I also dug the parts here about listening to the work, rather than telling the work, if that makes sense. It makes sense to me. I like that approach rather than, in a lot of interviews it’s about what the writer wanted to bring to this project–or they want to change this, or revamp that. It’s all very dictatorial. And probably speaks to the level by which say…something like Uncanny X-men feels very crafted, rather than something that arises organically from listening to the world and the characters and letting them speak through the things that reasonate within you. I think a lot of writers feel like they need their hand on the wheel, otherwise they’ll end up off the road(for a variety of reasons)–but if you’re really writing, it’s impossible to end up off the road. Like Keroac said, “you can’t fall off the mountain”. All is mountain, all is road. Go places, make mistakes, otherwise what’s the point? Are you a professional or an artist?
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