Direct to the guts

An edition about how you connect emotionally with your readers and keep them wanting for blood

Apr 08, 2024

HELLO AND WELCOME TO A NEW EDITION OF MY NEWSLETTER!

It seems that I’m keeping a monthly regularity with the newsletter. I would love to write more but right now my presence in social media is really limited because I'm working on different projects that will keep me busy until the end of the summer. I'm drawing and coloring some issues of a series a fellow artist began. And I'm drawing a creator-owned project with a writer I really admire with all these classic noir elements I love. And I'm also writing a script for a French publisher. And doing my own graphic novel as a complete author when these three assignments let me. This is quite exhausting and the free time I get in my daily routine I try to dedicate to doing some exercise and interacting with other human beings. And honestly, right now I feel social media is a really dark place and I'm not sure I want to make the effort to spend more time there.

But I always try to get time to write a little here and share things with you guys, who spend some of your valuable time reading my nonsense.

TORI IS OUR TORI

I’m sure I will not add anything new about the unexpected passing of Akira Toriyama, but doing a quick reflection about his legacy, I cannot help but confirm how his way of telling stories left a mark on an entire generation of creators. You can be less or more of a fan of Dragon Ball, Cowa or Dr. Slump but for a lot of us, he was the opening door to a completely different way to approach the stories. For a lot of us, Dragon Ball was the first manga we read and we learned to plan visually a scene using it as a template. I’m sure that if I analyze my own work I will find compositions, rhythms, postures, visual contrasts, etc… that came directly from Toriyama’s pages.
For this and for all the hours of pure joy and happiness, thank you sensei.

ABOUT THE EMOTIONAL ENGAGEMENT

Like I said, I have been working on a GN as a complete author, which is based on the TV miniseries I created and developed for Irish producer Prelude Content, titled Left Hand of the Devil. I have a publisher (in Spain at the moment) and a deadline. News about it soon.

The story is a classic martial arts revenge story about a woman whose husband and son are murdered, her right arm mutilated, and she makes a deal with dark forces to accomplish her revenge.. A female twist to the classic “one-armed fighter” trope from the martial arts cinema. I'm also trying to subvert some of the plot twists you could expect for these typical revenge stories but I will not enter in spoiler territory.

One of the crudest scenes of this story is the assassination of the little kid. When I was drawing it at some point I was enjoying, simply anticipating the reader’s reaction. “Oh boy, they are going to suffer here”. Then I wondered if there was something broken or rotten inside me. Later I noticed I enjoyed it because I love how this kind of cathartic story is structured. I really have fun building the emotional skeleton.

But I tell you something: This awful murder scene is not the seed I'm planting for the emotional response I need for the reader. The real cruelty is all the previous stuff, showing this sweet mother-son relationship. There are only two scenes, but they are full of tenderness. The final death is the culmination of this emotional manipulation I am building. Well, maybe I'm a little twisted. Every writer is.

In the previous edition I have written about how I love samurai films. And of course chambara has been a huge influence to this project.
Recently I watched (for the third or fourth time) Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri. It's incredible how a movie made in 1962, more than 60 years ago, can make my blood boil so much. The story begins with a young poor samurai that due to different circumstances is forced to commit seppuku (harakiri) in a truly horrible scene by three samurais from a wealthy clan… Oh, how I hate these three scumbags… The subsequent story is built around this despicable act and how his father-in-law avenges him.

The key is the emotional connection with the young samurai and the circumstances who drove him to that final situation. It's not only that you present these characters and say “this is a bad guy and this is a good guy”.
You need to show acts and consequences.

Let's jump 60 years to the present with this Jason Statham’s unexpected success titled The beekeeper. This is a basic (and often a little dumb) action story with obviously extremely different artistic aspirations of Harakiri. But the intelligence of Kurt Wimmer's script is to present such an outrageous opening scene so clearly and quickly.

The story goes directly to a spectrum of of 40-50 years old viewers. People like me l, who have old parents who need to deal with an ultra technified world and are vulnerable to scams of all kinds. The movie tells us clearly: “The bad guys of this story are trying to ruin your parents”. Then it show us an adorable old lady (Phylicia Rashād, Clair Huxtable in person!!) and when we see what happens to her in barely the first ten minutes of the movie… The only thing we want for the rest of the runtime is Jason giving us the deaths and blood we demand. We want these bastards to pay. And the movie gives us violence with a cathartic pacing. It's not an intellectual reward. It's feed for our guts.

Right now I'm finishing the novel Razorblade Tears by S. A. Cosby and even if it’s an enjoyable reading, maybe the hype (enthusiastic reviews in press and recommended by Barack Obama himself) put my expectations too high. It's the story of the assassination of a gay couple and how their two fathers (one white, one black) join forces to seek revenge even though they really disliked their sons’ “style of life”.

The premise is interesting because it adds themes like racial and sexual discrimination to a Death Wish vigilante subgenre… But at the end is a very conventional action-packed thriller that could be one of these VOD productions to fill the Amazon Prime catalog (which is not necessarily a complaint). I can see Mickey Rourke and Dennis Haysbert playing the mourning dads.
And I think the story fails in one point because we don't really know the two victims. Of course, I'm not agree with the killing of innocent people, but as a reader I need to care a little more about these fictional victims. The only things we know about them is through the memories of these two dads, who aren't very likable characters (they evolve during the story but sometimes you feel they didn’t actually learn about how their prejudices ruined their sons’ lives).
Of course, this is my opinion and I think the book is very entertaining, but I couldn't get this cathartic emotional link I demand in a revenge story.

And this is one of the problems of some of modern fiction, only because you present a main character, this doesn't mean the audience is going to care about him/her.
It’s crucial to build emotional links with the reader/viewer and present the grievance and prepare the way to the cathartic rewards (or more punishment) of the story development.
When I write and draw, my biggest goal is connecting on an emotional level. If you finally read my graphic novel and feel nothing, then I didn't do my work properly. I’ll try to work harder next time. And sometimes the connection is different in every person. You must understand that no matter how good you think you are, simply part of the audience will not connect (maybe this was my case with Razorblade Tears).

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