As most cave paintings will show you, sequential art narrative is pretty much the oldest artform. Probably the first, certainly not the ninth. Which is funny, because we tend to think of it as a hybrid art, comprised of and periodically recharged by elements brought in from other arts. It takes a particular concentration – which I was reminded of by the story of John Coltrane bringing ideas from other arts and disciplines into his music – to realise that all arts are charged by cross-pollination. Sometimes, just the smallest crumbs of nectar can get you somewhere new.
David Amram, the French-horn player, met him for the first time in early 1956 outside the Café Bohemia on Barrow Street in Manhattan’s West Village. Amram had just finished a set with Charles Mingus’s band, and Coltrane was sitting outside the club, eating a piece of pie. He said, “How are you?” I said, “Everything’s fine.” And then he said to me, “What do you think about Einstein’s theory of relativity?” I don’t think he was so interested in what I knew about it; I think he wanted to share what he knew about it. I drew a blank, and he went into this incredible discourse about the symmetry of the solar system, talking about black holes in space, and constellations, and the whole structure of the solar system, and how Einstein was able to reduce all of that complexity into something very simple. Then he explained to me that he was trying to do something like that in music, something that came from natural sources, the traditions of the blues and jazz. But that there was a whole different way of looking at what was natural in music.“
COLTRANE: THE STORY OF A SOUND
Here’s a small and stupid example. I’ve been doing this on and off for years, but I was first called out for it by editors when I was doing STORMWATCH at Wildstorm. I wasn’t “buttoning” stories with a grace note or aftermath or other obviously conclusive scene. I was just stopping when I got to the end of the story, with a hard cut.
Which I stole from Spike Milligan. And so did the Monty Python crew.
In the sketch series Q, Milligan just cut each scene when he ran out of jokes. No grace note, no flourish or wrap-up or button. The sketch would just stop dead when there was no more useful material. I love that. Utterly against all narrative conventions, and often peculiarly uncomfortable. This is what the Python writers took from Q. Look at their tv series again and see how so many of their bits just stop with a hard cut.
It gave me more real estate for the story – I was working in done-in-one single issue stories – and the hard cuts made grey-area action stories just that little bit more unsettling, I thought.
Point being – you can find useful ideas for your art anywhere, if you just look around and be open to them coming from the strangest places.
