Scientific Romance

Hey Mom,

A new year is upon us and with it comes everyone’s resolutions. The New Year is a time for new beginnings, an opportunity to restart one’s life and be reborn, in a way, as the person you’ve always wanted to become. Some may want to loose weight or quit smoking, others may want to volunteer more or spend more time with their families. We all have something that we personally aspire to everyday; there is someone buried deep within us all that we desperately want to be, a better version of ourselves. For most, this is what a new year symbolizes.

This year I’ll be going back to school. Not necessarily as a resolution. I never planned it that way, but the fact I start school next week for the spring semester only a few weeks after the New Year is very symbolic. I’ve gone to school before, feeling aimless, but I really feel like this is going to be the start of something fresh and new.

When I went to school several years ago I was pursuing degrees in political science and history. I love history in particular. Although I do enjoy politics to some extent, the political science degree was simply a necessity to joining the military. I wanted to answer the call of duty I felt within me. I felt it very strongly. I lost fifty pounds and immersed myself in everything militaria. I really thought life had brought me to that point, but after a couple of years I was simply burnt out. I had no long-term passion for joining the military. In the end, it’s just not who I am. If I had to, I believe I could do it, but I had a choice.

Back then, I really wanted to write. I struggled with this idea for a long time. Do I go to school to write? That seemed silly to me. I had been writing for seven or eight years at that point. Although I had things to learn, I picked up most of the foundational skills I was lacking by going through my college English classes, I didn’t really feel I was going to learn much about crafting stories at a state university, so I simply stopped going and dedicated myself to writing.

Years have gone by and I’ve desperately tried to “get something going” with screenwriting. I write all day most of the time, but all these scripts I have just go into a large box in my office. I have no further outlets. I’ve tried to pursue getting an agent, but this is simply a pipe dream living in Illinois. I’m to far away to meet people and network. I’ve tried running my own Kickstarter campaign, but I couldn’t make the goal. I’ve tried putting my screenplays on this website but stopped when I realized I simply don’t get enough traffic. Out of six thousand views in the last handful of months only two people looked at my portfolio. So screenwriting isn’t going to pay the bills for me at this juncture.

I tried to think about what would be the best medium to pursue. I’m a creative guy and a storyteller. I tried my hand at writing a novel, and although that isn’t terrible I would like to see the action rather than simply describe it. I’m a filmmaker at heart, so the medium must be visual. After weighing all the options I found myself going back to my roots, back to comic books and conceptual art in video games.

This simply isn’t about me writing a comic book, that is the easy part. Screenplays can easily be transformed into comic books with little effort. I need a way for me to not only write the books, but also produce them by myself. Self-publish if need be. I don’t have a lot of interaction with people being a jobless, stay-at-home father as my day job, so I have to be able to produce a finished project without help from an outside artist. I need to get back to what I wanted to do when I was a kid: drawing comics.

I haven’t drawn on a regular basis since high school. After I discovered film, to me, there was no reason to even need comics anymore. But, that was my ignorance. With comics you are completely unhindered in your storytelling ability. Without budget constraints your character can go anywhere and do anything. The story is only limited by your imagination, that is only if you can get yourself an artist or you, yourself, are an artist. There are really no barriers anymore, not even genre.

I believe I’m a good writer, but in comics story is a distant second to the art. Even thought the book can’t exist without a story, art is the deciding factor for most comic books. Obviously, comics are a visual medium like film, so without the art the story is simply words in a script, the lazy mans novel. The comic industry knows this and, like the entire film industry, is built up around what’s “in front of the camera.”

So, to facilitate my foray into the comic book medium as both scribe and illustrator I need to get my long neglected drawing skills back up to par, hence going back to school. I don’t expect school will turn me into a master artist; this is a community college not the Rhode Island School of Design or anything remotely similar. I’m just hoping to get the foundation skills I lost and gain some sort of mastery of the principles of design and drawing. I plan to exhaust my class options in the art department. Design, drawing, figure drawing, studios, if they have it, I’m taking it.

Furthermore, I’m hoping after my drawing skills are up to a professional level I can get into conceptual design with a video game studio, or a television or film production company. I don’t expect comics to be a full-time job and I would really like to have one of those for my own personal sense of fulfillment. I’m a dedicated worker and I want to build a career I can be proud of. Maybe with my writing background I can work my way from the bottom of the art department into writing or development.

I have a lot of ideas, and I’m desperate to work with others. I want to be part of a team that creates works that make people feel something. Until I do that, I can’t rest.