Secret Origin

Jul 27, 2011 by Brian    Comments Off    Posted under: Meta

Hey there.  This is the introductory post to Literary Sketches.  I’m Brian.  Adam is the one who draws awesome stuff.  Before we go any further, yes, Adam and I are both aware that a “literary sketch” is an actual literary genre, and what we’re doing here is generally not that.  We settled on this title because I write and he draws, and “Literary Sketches” vaguely melds our two disciplines and our general interest in story.  On the plus side, for you detail-obsessives, the literary sketch is a fairly dead genre and is generally plotless, so I’m sure we’ll manage to fit the basic criteria as often as not.

Adam and I met at the University of Southern California, where we both drew cartoons for the campus newspaper.  Adam had a couple of strips during his tenure, and even then, that guy had one slick line.  My strip aspired to sharp, satirical writing, but could only accompany it with fairly crude, pained rendering.  It is a good thing that my blue pencil is retired, while Adam has spent the years since college becoming increasingly successful as an animation storyboard artist.  If you like cartoons, you have probably seen his work.  If you do not like cartoons, this will probably not be your favorite site.  But stick around anyway.

Misadventures in Not-Publishing

This site is meant to fire up our collective creative juices, and deepen our collaboration.  We are secretly collaborating on an all-ages/kids’ graphic novel that briefly had a publisher until said publisher tossed out all the terms we’d negotiated, pretended we’d never had those hour-long phone conversations, and proposed a “deal” that’s little better than work-for-hire with silent profit participation.  So we walked away from that, but the experience really crystalized our desire to work together, and so we’re pursuing the project — and new publishers — doggedly.  Expect to learn more about it down the line.

We’ve worked on stuff together before.  A decade ago, we got as far as pitching a supernatural adventure series to one of the biggest comics imprints, and were well-received, though the editor passed because he happened to have announced and well into production that he felt was too similar.  (The difference between the two series was akin to the space between Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, but before something really takes off, that is too similar for most publishers’ strategies.)  The other series got published, didn’t have a lot of print success, but I believe it got optioned for TV.  Bastards.

Meanwhile, Adam and I never followed up on that very good professional contact to pitch newer, better, differenter material.  Which is mostly due to me being an absolute idiot.  A little further down the road now, we’re both smarter, more dedicated and more ambitious, so, um, look out, world.

What We’ll Do Here

• There will be art, from Adam, and it will be very pretty.
• There will be news/info relative to our creative endeavors.
• I will write about stories, reviewing books, comics and movies.
• Adam will discuss techniques of storyboarding for animation.
• I may post bits of fiction, to provide me a sense of small-scale terror and you something to do with that box of rotten tomatoes, there.
• We intend to create comics together and post them here, too, but as the most labor-intensive bullet on this list, expect it to be the most infrequent, as well.
• There will be as much conversation as you, our valued readers, are up for.  Please make liberal use of the comments button.

That’s about it.  Thanks for reading.  We hope you’ll stick around, and tell us about the stuff you’re making, and the stories that you’re excited about.