What's the real beginning?

So the big underlying question here with an established text released in serialized form is, "where to start?"

There are really huge debates to be had here in regard to the definitive text but, according to my assessment it's the 1922 edition of Joyce's work that is most clearly now a part f the public domain and so that was the place to go for my sources.

I'm treading lightly on subjects like this, for obvious reasons, but it seems clear to me that one of the points of current public domain and fair usage laws has something to do with allowing artists to respond to earlier works of art that have, through history and reader involvement, wormed their way into the public consciousness. Joyce's work is iconic. Hans Gabler's is wonderfully, richly-researched and academically exhaustive, a great boon to the readers wishing to understand a text that has had many disturbing permutations, some of them cased by the author himself. But Gabler did not reinvent the novel and it has lived as an iconic piece of fiction for many, many decades before he took up the task of "correcting" it. I'm happy for the things his research has taught me about the novel, but, looking at his contribution as a uniquely new work of art, and therefore re-packaging the existing public domain laws so that the copyright starts over again in 1984 with this "corrected" text completely ignores the life this book has already enjoyed as an individual artistic statement.

There are numerous problems with the 1922 text. That's clear. But this is how the work came into the world, "warts and all," and this seems the best text to represent it's effects on us all as readers.     

To what end?

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 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 package the project.

"The Mockery of It..."

On the surface it seems a fairly frivolous idea, I suppose. Make a comics version of a novel instantly recognizable but, to most people, completely oblique and difficult to read.

Hell, maybe even use funny animals to make the character types more distinctive. People love funny animals, right?

But I take Joyce, and comics, pretty seriously and it became clear that any respectable adaptation of that one thing I love into that other form which I love equally was, in fact, serious business.

So Bloom would not be a bunny.

On a Dare...

The first time I tried to read ULYSSES I was struck by how comical the dialogue was and how very distinct, yet still very hidden the narrative voice could be from chapter to chapter. This is years ago mind you, well before I had any thoughts of making something like this into a comic and well before comics as an art form could ever accommodate such a peculiar thing. Joyce's text, for Joyce lovers at least, can not be abridged nor turned into some two hour block-buster movie (some have tried this, of course, and some of them might well disagree with me on this point, but it seems, or seemed to me then, that people read Joyce for the language and are immediately and justifiably insulted by anyone, no matter how well-intending, who might come off as making a Reader's Digest version of the novel).

So for a while there we played with the idea of film. Hell, nobody want to actually do all that drawing and neither my friend nor I were filmmakers, so this was relatively safe territory. i started to wonder what the novel might look like if one took the time to separate the spoken dialogues from the internal ones and used this to construct a screenplay. Certainly that's a big enough task on it's own, but the charming and engaging quality of Joyce's character's sparkles in the dialogue. The idea was that, "yes, this is just the tip of the iceberg, but if the director, actors and cinematographer of such a film were fans of the novel, could they find ways to evidence some of the subtleties of the work into the nuances of film through lighting expression, camera angle and emotional expression?"

I played with this idea for a least another beer or two (it was a good one, frankly. Imagine making a film that doesn't so much interpret the novel as use "real time" to support it's factual nature and allow the actors to search for and eventually decided subtext through small action) and, eventually, said no. I brought it back to the table for my cartoonist friend and I by claiming, "comics are the only medium capable of rendering the plasticity of time and weight of visual symbol that would make the novel work in ant other form."

We do actually talk like that in bars. I know, it's kinda pathetic, but we're each married these days, so acting like a geek in front of people isn't such a dilemma, and somehow talking this way over beers is much less geeky than over coffee at a Starbucks'.

So we ordered a couple more beers and he dared me to make it work in comics.

Shit.

Getting Started...

While I've kept many working journals over the years, this is the first one I've ever thought about doing in an on-line environment. Blogs, like typing, are relatively new to my working method, so I hope people will bare with me as try keeping track of what could very well be the next ten years of studio production.
The idea for doing a webcomic of James Joyce's ULYSSES, like many other ideas in personal and professional life, was born in a bar. Two years ago I and another cartoonist attended the Rosenbach Museum's Bloomsday reading here in Philadelphia and, just around the corner, was my own neighborhood bar of the time, The Bards' Irish Pub. I'd been a fan of the novel for years and, like most people I know, tried reading it five or six ties before finally making it through. It is, without exception, the most difficult novel to read the first time that you'll ever want to read again and again. My friend, a fan of the book who had sheepishly admitted to not having made through his first time reading yet, started talking about how difficult, how intentionally oblique, Joyce was in the text and claimed that he got a much more pleasurable, and easier, experience of the novel from hearing it read aloud than he did by doing it on his own.
I had to agree. ULYSSES is, quite intentionally, a monster.
If hearing the inflection of other voices in this text does in fact make the reading any easier than, I started to wonder with my cartoonist friend, what would it be like to see the events of the novel acted out?
So, deciding that the day was too hot to go back and listen reading as elliptical or difficult as those from "Circe" or "Oxen of the Sun," we decided to order a couple of more beers and sit in a nice dark, air-conditioned bar and talk about how ULYSSES might look as a comicbook.