Hey, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, I wish Dave would share some kind of mystical insight into where those brilliant comics came from. Well that’s very kind of you to show an interest. And I just so happen to have prepared a few notes on the development of Punctuation Birds right here!
And if I got that totally wrong, and you were thinking about girls again, or the stock market, or how to repair a 1992 Daihatsu Charade, I do apologise.
In the meantime, let’s just focus on the comics…
Have you ever wondered where your ideas come from? Surely all the ideas are out there somewhere, but where do you find the impetus to make that first mark on the page?
When I was at school, we would sometimes be given creative assignments in class. Perhaps it was a challenge to write a story, or paint a picture or something along those lines. I was never particularly worried by them, and always relished the chance to create new worlds drawn from the depths of my imagination, peppered with plots, devices and ideas borrowed from whichever author is was reading at the time.
I would take each task as it came, ideas sparking from the rules laid down. How would I talk about ‘my family’? Where would I go in my ‘time travel adventure’? Who would be the hero of a story involving a cat?
But the most difficult were those rare times when the teacher would say ‘Do you whatever you like.’ Do whatever you like? Oh, the terror of those words. The blank page staring like some great abyss; a universe in wait, offering nothing and demanding everything.
I understood at an early age that boundaries define creative freedom. Rules given by others are obviously the easiest to follow. But what happens when we impose rules on ourselves? What happens when the universe of the blank canvas is made so small it seems impossible to find a way in?
In recent centuries practitioners the creative arts have increasingly experimented with the idea of constraint. The use self-imposed restrictions has been seen as a way to force new ideas to emerge, challenge the artist to see his work methods in a new light and break old habits. A literary example is La Dispiration by Georges Perec (1969), a novel that doesn’t use the letter ‘e’, or Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham (1960), which famously makes use of only a fifty-word vocabulary.
I’d like to point out that while I had an appreciation for such restrictions even as a child, I had never fully understood them, or even articulated them as a legitimate concept until quite recently. It was more a natural instinct than anything. But this instinct laid the seeds for Punctuation Birds inception and development.
My first introduction to constraint in comics was in my second year at university. I had the joyous fortune to participate in a semester of comics making as part of my visual arts studies. In the first couple of lessons our lecturer brought in what he considered to be important graphic novels and comics. It wasn’t much to speak of, but in amongst the class notes was a photocopied page from Alan Moore’s Watchmen. I was only vaguely aware of Watchmen at the time. I knew it was a famous not-quite-superhero comic from the 1980′s, but that was all.
Our teacher Dr. Rob pointed out that one of the distinguishing characteristics of Moore and Gibbons’ book was that the framing of each page was regulated. Each page had three rows, and each row had three equal sized panels (more or less). He never used the word ‘constraint’, and it was more an observation than anything, but Dr. Rob had drawn my attention to something I’d never really thought about.
Some years later, I picked up the dense and glorious From Hell. Again, Moore and Eddie Campbell had followed this pattern of regulated panel sizes, and standardised framing. It was a stylistic choice, and I was beginning to see the benefits. Not only that, I noticed that in both works, the author and artist had deliberately omitted the onomatopoeic ‘sound effects’ so common in other comics. In leaving out the BOOMs and the KRA-KOWs, Moore had created a more realistic, subtler world for us to enter.
From Hell was an inspiration. I still hadn’t heard of constraint, but I was beginning to be aware of the creative freedoms possible in its use. After reading that book a fire was lit, by the writing and especially by Campbell’s beautiful imperfect line work. I spent the rest of that year (2005) working on my first book, a full length telling of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, Hansel & Gretel. I took these constraints (panel size and a lack of sound effects) as my own, and ran.
In 1995, the Danish auteur Lars von Trier founded a cinematic movement called Dogme 95. His manifesto led a loose association of filmmakers to impose strict rules upon their creative process, in the hopes of producing innovative new works. These rules included such things as the use of hand-held cameras, diegetic sound and the omission of the director’s credit. The films created out of the Dogme 95 project drew considerable attention not only to von Trier and his compatriots, but also to the use of constraint as a legitimate exercise in filmmaking. Of course I had no awareness of this at the time. I was thirteen, and blind to any film that didn’t involve something blowing up.
In 2003 Lars von Trier made a film called The Five Obstructions. In it he challenged the Danish New Wave director Jorgen Leth to remake his experimental short film The Perfect Human five times, each time with increasingly difficult constraints imposed upon the creative process. The results were honestly exciting.
This was it. This was the moment when it all clicked. All I had needed was an intense Dane to explain to me what I’d felt bubbling away at the back of my brain for most of my life.
The blank canvas is an abyss. Constraint is the thin rope back from the edge.
I saw The Five Obstructions only two years ago. It also happened to be around the same time I started reading webcomics. I was reading (and still am) all manner of comics; comics wider in style, genre and concept than I had ever even imagined as a teenager. One strip I kept coming back to was Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics.
Dinosaur Comics is a constrained comic, with the constraint being the artwork. It never changes. North rewrites the story every day using the same artwork and characters time and time again. This constraint is so successful that the first time I read it, I’d been through two dozen strips before I even noticed the artwork hadn’t altered. The words changed the context of the pictures. It was, for me, yet another revelation. Context was mutable, even if an element of the comic (or writing or film) was not.
Following a link on Wikipedia I discovered that Dinosaur Comics was one of a relatively short line in the history of constrained comics. I was surprised to learn that the first proponent of the style had been the American filmmaker David Lynch, with his newspaper strip The Angriest Dog In The World.
The idea of a constrained comic was then lodged firmly in my mind. And when I decided to write a new webcomic in 2008, this was a direction I was already heading. Punctuation Birds was born out of love and necessity. The love was a love for books, comedy and human nature. The necessity was one of time. Punctuation Birds is decidedly quick and easy to create. I only have to write it.
My constraints are fairly basic; the unchanging artwork, and a refusal to admit that my characters are actually birds. I’ve come close a couple of times, and have in fact broken the second rule once (although that comic was written in a cipher). Anything else goes. I have no restrictions on style, genre or subject matter.
Knowing that those three panels are all I have is unbelievably freeing. They give me just enough rope to look down, and keep me from falling.
