Blue Justice

It is with a sore and cramping hand that I type this blog post because I have been drawing for (I kid thee not) the past six hours. I've been making the cover for my previously-mentioned poetry chapbook, and I was so excited about it that I inadvertently spent all day doing it. It's kind of sad, because the artwork really doesn't have to be that good and I've got other things I could be doing, but... Man, I'm just so excited about this.

FEAST YOUR EYES!!!

Beautiful, isn't it? *sniffle*

Tomorrow I'll print out the pages of poetry and bind them together with this as the cover. I researched comic book covers when I was making the layout for this and also referred to my copy of Stan Lee's how-to book. Needless to say, I have not yet mastered the comic book method of drawing people, but I incorporated a few elements of the Marvel style into the design for this character.

This poem is sort of what I think a comic book would look like if it was translated into poetry. It's told from the point of view of the police officer on the cover. She's only called by her name once in the poem; most of the time all the characters are referred to as "he" or "she" except when it gets too difficult to discern who is who. All of the dialogue is in italics and without quotation marks.

That's something new for me, really. As a general rule, I'm very adamant about having quotation marks and I usually roll my eyes at people who feel they are too artistic to use them (to be fair, I usually write prose), although after trying it, I can understand better why people elect not to use them. In this case, I feel like it helps the poem flow better. If it were a comic, you'd be able to tell who was saying what without clunky tags like "Officer Coulson said." I feel that if I were to put names in this poem, the characters would be tripping over their own names. It's too fast-paced for that kind of business. 

Not calling characters by their names is different for me, too. Usually if I've given a character a name, the narrator calls him or her by that name. I was afraid all the "he" and "she" business would get confusing, but I think it actually worked out pretty well. For the record, Officer Coulson's first name is Renee, and she is named after Agent Phil Coulson of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. She is a badass.