Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
["First of all I dismembered the corpse.
I cut off the head and the arms and the legs."]
I read those words when I was fifteen.
In school.
Like most people, I can thank a high school literature teacher
for introducing me
to the darkly thrilling world of Edgar Allan Poe.
Ninth grade, third period English.
We read "The Tell-Tale Heart."
Here was a story that was every bit as thrilling as the comics I was reading.
It was every bit as disturbing as the movies I was watching.
Here was a story sanctioned by my teachers,
that scared me,
and it was part of my homework.
Now, the trouble is
we're taught to read for the kinds of things
likely to turn up on a quiz,
and when you're reading for the quiz,
reading tends to become dispassionate.
The story starts to become something that you reflect on
rather than something that you're carried away by.
And let's face it,
you're never going to be scared
by anything that you can't get carried away by.
So my picture of Poe went from this
to something more like this.
(Laughter)
I would encounter Poe in other literature classes
throughout high school,
but I would never regard it as anything more than an assignment.
The thrill was gone,
and I went back to my comic books and my slasher flicks.
That is, until I was a senior in art school
looking for some lurid source material to adapt into a graphic novel.
Now, my interests
still lay in the same basic part of the pop-culture spectrum.
I'd become a little bit of a more discerning connoisseur.
But I decided to give Poe another look,
and I was shocked by what I discovered.
My teachers had been absolutely right:
this is literature of the first order,
full of elegant language and shrewd pacing and profound insight,
but it's also just as full
of thrilling action, disturbing violence and inspired mayhem.
If the best pop culture is equal parts highbrow and lowbrow,
then this is pop culture of the first order.
I decided to do an adaptation that would honor this.
I wanted to do a treatment that celebrated the highbrow aspects
while also reveling in the lowbrow aspects.
I got through four pages before it was time to graduate.
But I kept coming back to Poe every few years,
always surprised by how much I'd missed the last time I read him.
He's really among the first
to write about fear in uniquely modern terms.
He's writing during the 1830s,
which is right on the cusp
of the second phase of the Industrial Revolution.
This is a time in American culture
where there is great faith
in reason's ability to liberate us from superstition and fear.
Intellectual reflection - so the story goes -
will get you a picture of reality,
which you can then use as a tool to understand and predict your world.
Now, this works great,
except for when it doesn't,
which is what Poe writes about.
All of Poe's characters experience fear
when their fundamental beliefs
about their social, personal or practical situation
are somehow invalidated.
The world becomes uncertain
because the picture of reality
falls out of sync with the experience of reality.
He understands that at the root of fear,
it's uncertainty;
it's not the things we're uncertain about.
And this makes a kind of sense when you think about it.
It's one thing
to know there's an ax-murderer hiding in your closet,
but it's something else entirely
to wonder whether or not that sound you heard
is an ax-murderer hiding in the closet.
(Laughter)
All of Poe's characters try to deal with this kind of fear,
most of them by doing the same thing:
they attempt to maintain this picture of reality
by force fitting their circumstances to fit that picture.
Now, this usually has horrible consequences.
People wind up condemning themselves,
hurting other people;
they wind up digging up graves.
I mean, this is excellent material to illustrate.
So 15 years later,
I still hadn't made any progress on my collection.
I'd torn through a shelf full of books by and about Poe.
I had assembled a pile of sketches and composition studies.
I'd even studied the design styles of Poe's era,
but I still wasn't any closer to actually making my collection.
I was stuck in a pattern
that I think a lot of creative professionals will recognize.
Let's call it "the Vortex."
This is a vicious circle of research, rejection and refinement.
It is unrelenting, and it is self-perpetuating
because you feel like you're actually making something.
(Laughter)
You collect new information,
throw out old information,
rework your plan.
You are constantly busy working on the project.
Except doing isn't the same thing as making.
I realized that this had become an implicit form of excuse-making for me.
I was afraid to actually make the work
because I was afraid to risk getting the work wrong.
Because I've got a picture of reality too,
and my picture of reality includes a picture of myself
as the kind of person who doesn't get Poe wrong.
I was hiding out in the homework.
And when I fessed up about this,
I stopped doing and I got busy making.
I started making the drawings.
I started making the layouts.
The anxiety wasn't gone,
but it was no longer getting in the way of doing the work.
There was still no guarantee that I would get it right,
but I was making.
I looked back on this 15-year period of research,
being stuck in the Vortex,
and realized it had just been a protracted coping mechanism.
I was attempting to protect my picture of reality
by launching kind of a preemptive strike against uncertainty.
The thinking goes,
"If you never put your picture of reality to the test,
you never risk having it invalidated."
But as the slogan goes,
"You can't win if you don't play."
So, I still was faced with a practical problem.
How do I get the work out there?
[Commerce is Scary]
During the time I was stuck in the Vortex,
I had become attached to a certain picture
of what a grand edition it's supposed to be.
This book was supposed to have hard covers, leather bindings.
It was supposed to be printed on handmade paper.
Really, a beautiful edition for fine collectors
who were seeking an antidote to digital media.
I didn't have the kind of money to pay for that kind of production.
And I've got a day job,
so I don't even know if I have the time to coordinate that kind of a production.
So I was commiserating about this with a friend of mine
over coffee one day,
and we were reminiscing about collecting comic books,
and I remember the thrill I would get
every time the new issue of the Amazing Spider-Man
would show up unexpectedly in my mailbox.
And he said to me,
"Why does your Poe project have to be a grand edition?
Why not break it apart into individual stories
and sell subscriptions -
like a comic book or like a magazine?"
And it made a kind of sense.
I mean, why did a fine-press edition
have to be grand?
Why couldn't it be broken into collectible periodicals?
It made sense conceptually:
Poe didn't write grand editions.
Poe's work appeared in magazines.
And it made sense practically
because I could sell subscriptions
in order to raise the money I needed to launch the project.
So I built a simple website,
sort of an overview of the project.
It included a page that allowed people to buy subscriptions via PayPal.
I would do four stories,
design and illustrate each individually,
mail one out roughly every 12 weeks over the course of a year.
Subscribers wouldn't know exactly when the new edition was coming,
and I wouldn't tell them which four stories I was going to do.
Hopefully, they would be thrilled
when the new volume arrived unexpectedly in their mailbox.
Now, the project got blurped about
on Boing Boing,
which I'm told has a readership that rivals that of thenewyorktimes.com,
(Laughter)
and, uh, well, guess which month -
this is a chart of traffic to my website -
guess which month saw the Boing Boing post?
Lot of people came from Boing Boing,
shared it on Twitter, shared on Facebook,
blogged about it.
Word got out, and by the end of that first week,
I had raised enough money to produce my first volume.
So, great.
Now that there are people paying for it,
I'm accountable.
I had to produce.
Because if I didn't, it would be no more -
it wasn't just personally embarrassing;
it was fraud now.
(Laughter)
But none of this would have occurred to me if I'd clung to that rigid picture
of what a fine-press edition is supposed to be.
I would have totally missed out
on the possibilities of the internet and social networking,
and this edition would never have happened.
It's easy to run from fear when you're not accountable to anyone,
and other people will hold you accountable to the work.
Your friends, your family, clients, colleagues -
it's their involvement
that encourages you,
or causes you
to deal with the fear that would otherwise get in the way
of actually getting down to making the work.
But way before there's anyone to be accountable to,
you have a simple decision to make.
It's a choice between uncertainty and certainty.
You can either decide to give the work your best shot
and risk that it won't make you happy,
or you can decide not to give the work your best shot
and guarantee that it won't make you happy.
So here's a case where the uncertain path is actually the more attractive one,
and I think Poe would have loved that.
Thank you for listening.
(Applause)