Like I said before, I was looking forward to my class today, A Life In Art: The Brothers Grimm , and the teacher did not disappoint. Oddly, she reminds me of Edie McClurg with blonde hair. I'll try to get her to call me a "righteous dude" by the end of the semester.

It looks like it's going to be a very interesting class. As the teacher said, the subject of the Grimm Fairy Tales encompasses a huge breadth of specializations, and before too long, we'll have to choose in what area of knowledge to specialize. Will it be the Hero's Journey? Freudian and Jungian analysis? Reinterpretations, Subjugations, or Fractured retellings? Medieval culture, French salons, or Germanic Victorian society? We received a chart detailing all of the different arenas this subject could venture into, and it's pretty big. It even included illustrators such as Maurice Sendak and *gasp* Will Eisner, the King of Comic Books.

So I'm pretty pleased. In our first session, after going over this and our syllabus, we discussed our first assignment. We were treated to a projection showing of Edward Gorey's rather morbid alphabet chapbook The Gashlycrumb Tinies (how many alphabet books can you find that include a girl with a bloody hatchet buried in her chest? I ask you!), and then instructed to each choose a letter, for which we will write a sentence ("A is for Andrew who...") and draw an illustration. One of my favorite questions from the students was, "Does it have to be about a child being killed?" A fair question, but still funny. I mean, where else could you expect to hear that?

Okay, now that I've praised murderous brutality toward a child (even if only in fictional context), let me mention that it occurred to me that Mr. Gorey's artwork would be valuable to study for my horror comic. I've been giving a lot of thought to how I'm going to create a horror story in a comic book format and still make it scary. It's one thing to make a horror movie; I'd say it's the easiest way, because one can rely upon suspenseful moments, weirdly-angled shots, sound effects, and music to inspire mounting dread, and of course, sudden jolts of action to inspire shock. In written form, I think it's a bit more difficult, but the advantage is that one's mind is capable of conjuring up far more disturbing and frightening images than any movie can produce. My problem is that I have to straddle both mediums, while enjoying neither of the benefits of either. I've looked at a few other comics that might fall under the horror genre (early Sandman issues, From Hell ), but I obviously need to find more to examine how they do what they do. I'm also thinking of the more disturbing aspects of Watchmen, trying to figure out why those parts were disturbing. A lot of it comes down to how panels are used - the shapes given to them, how much of them fill the page, etc.

Now, granted - much of the tension and horror in these books is due to the skills of the writers - Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore - but I've noticed a few other traits unique to the medium. In From Hell , Eddie Campbell (the artist) has a very uniform appearance to his panels - generally six panels of equal size and then a single 3-panel long panel on either the top of the page or the bottom. The uniform appearance gives the overall comic a sort of calm repetition that, combined with Campbells' scratchy, sketchy style, gives me a kind of claustrophobic, nervous feeling. Kind of like the same sense of low-key yet nerve racking atmosphere one gets from a Night Shyamalan film. In Sandman , there are various different artists contributing, so the look of the book varies from chapter to chapter (thankfully, they got the artists to commit to the entire chapter, rather than divvying up the work issue by issue as DC and Marvel usually do). The horror was generally conveyed in the subject matter itself - highly unexpected turns of the plot, characters doing hideous things to themselves or others... While there were some fairly horrific moments, I would sooner attribute them to Gaiman's writing than the artwork that depicted them.

I've got a couple of books to help me toward my goals. I've got Kenneth Hite's excellent Nightmares of Mine , which dissects the horror genre quite nicely. I've got plenty of articles on plot and such, of course, but Stephen King's advice always looms in my mind: forget plot; create the characters, come up with the "What If...?" and then let the darn story write itself.

Oh, speaking of books...I wrote up a quick little review of Blink on Amazon.com. It should show up in about 24 hours, I think. Apparently Publisher's Weekly thought far less of it than I did. Personally, I didn't agree with most of their criticism, and some of it (such as their claim that it's cynically trying to profit from the public's recent interest in Islam) just isn't valid. Oh, well. You can't please everyone.

I think I have my fair share of trepidation regarding the publishing of any of my work because it means it may be read by professional critics. I'm only just starting to consider this aspect.

Having said that, didn't Dante reserve a circle for critics in Hell?