…more here from the original blog. This wonderful cartoon is from german cartoonist Bernhd Pohlenz, just another of the gems you can find on thew web these days…
So from that first conversation in The Bards’ Irish Pub two years ago the idea grew into a series of layout sketches for how the novel could be presented visually in a form like comics. The idea of webcomics was still off of my artistic radar then, so the question, after doing some pages and concluding that such an adaptation might be possible, hell, even challenging and exciting to do was, of course, to what end?
Here’s some of the major strikes against such a project;
1)It is an impossibly over-sized graphic novel.
2)The skips and irregular page count of it’s narrative makes chapter-based monthly release impossible in print.
3)I had decided against funny animals, so syndicated newspapers were out of the question.
Discussing it with a friend, determining for myself that it might be indeed possible, and going through the time of trying to see how it could look on paper left me with no clear outlet for such a project. I couldn’t think of any way in which it could be something other than a series of drawings in my sketchbook.
Until Bloomsday (’07) last year.
I was looking at webcomics for the first time last year and the idea of alternative distribution methods through cellphones and other hand-held devices. Stuff that was completely new to me at the time, and I was just kind of dragging my toe in the end of the pool wondering if the water was warm enough to jump into. I took a couple of project ideas I had going on at the time and started to re-design them for the web and the cellphone.
Then the local alt-paper in town, Philadelphia’s CityPaper, had ads up for an “all comics issue” that my wife insisted I participate in. ULYSSES “SEEN” appeared there, almost as a joke, and received some good attention. Enough to make me try to figure out a way to make the project really happen.