Set in a dystopian 2011, when the Iraq war still rages, the new graphic novel Shooting War follows the trials and travails of a cocky young video blogger, Jimmy Burns, who finds himself reporting on the front lines. Originally published as a Web comic for the online magazine Smith, the strip garnered an Eisner nomination; and the hardcover Shooting War hits shelves as a hardcover book on November 19, featuring completely remastered art and 110 pages of new content never published on the Web.
The creative team consists of writer Anthony Lappe, a journalist who produced an award-winning Showtime documentary on Iraq, and artist Dan Goldman, a founding member of the Web comics collective Act-i-vate. Goldman and Lappe, who begin a monthlong book tour in early November that runs from London to L.A., have plenty to say about the process of taking sequential art from print to the Web—and then bringing it back again.
PW Comics Week: How did you two meet each other originally?
Dan Goldman: [Anthony] had a posting...—he was looking for an artist for this mysterious Iraq graphic novel on Craig's List...—I saw the listing and I was looking for some work, so I wrote Anthony. I didn't think anything of it—the post was two weeks old. I just said, hey, I know you've probably already filled this position, but just send me an e-mail and tell me what it's about, because it sounds cool. And then my phone rang 20 minutes later.
PWCW: Aside from the new content that continues the Web comic story, how is the hardcover edition different from the online version?
Anthony Lappe: It's so much better. We went back and changed a central plot point. Dan remastered all the art.
DG: Every single panel. It basically reads as a novel instead of reading as installments as it did online. We had to make it crazier and more beautiful—and it is, it's awesome. I'm really proud of it. In addition to tweaking the line art, making everything tighter, I actually wound up desaturating or oversaturating the entire book, and getting either this industrial grit or desert dust or hellfire—getting those feelings to come across in the book. There's a lot of fire in the technology, there's a lot of coldness in the machines; there's a lot of dust and things getting obscured in the desert. Between all of that, you really get what Shooting War's all about.
PWCW : How did you decide to reformat the horizontal panels of the Web comic to the printed page?
DG : [Our publisher] Grand Central was really cool. Early on, I think in our first meeting, I came with a couple of books. One of them was the 300 hardcover and the other was Jason Little's Shutterbug Follies, which both have that kind of landscape shape. They weren't crazy about that because they thought it would be expensive, but they were open to doing a weird trim size. So the book is actually going to be two of those landscape panels, one on top of each other, and it's actually a square.
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Editor Jaime Levine (l.), Lappe and Goldman |
AL: When we came up with the idea of doing a 16x9 [for the Web comic], the panel size and ratio were purposely done to mimic flat-screen 16x9 movie images. The idea was, when we did the book, there would be two or possibly three of them stacked.
PWCW : Did you ever consider publishing with a comic book company?
DG : No. They're looking for one kind of thing, and we're looking to do another. The big two comic book publishers would be interested in Anthony if he'd had a TV show, and they'd be interested in me if I'd done superheroes. But I'm not that kind of guy, and I don't want to do those kind of comics.... That's not to say that there aren't good comics [there], because there are. But do you want to be a hit in the comics industry, or do you want everybody in the world to read your book? And I say the latter, please and thank you. So it was a no-brainer.
I'm already doing this, I'm already doing another [book project] and then another one after that. All I've ever wanted to do was tell stories, whether I write them or draw them... or both. And now I get that chance, so I'm happy. I don't care if someone in a comics store is bitching that they have to go through Ingram [Book Group] because Diamond [Comics Distributors] doesn't have it.
PWCW: Diamond's not carrying it?
DG : No, they are carrying it. But it wasn't listed “certified cool,” and I don't care. I used to do self-publishing; I had a comic with my brother and everything we put out was “certified cool” [by Diamond]. And then they hey changed order requirements, so no one could [order our books through Diamond.] I attribute my jump to Web comics to Diamond, because they pushed me out of self-publishing. And here we are.
PWCW : Are you looking primarily at bookstores for distribution, then?
DG : No, we'll be in comic shops, too.... Every city we're in for our book tour, we're going to a book shop and a comic shop, on purpose. We're not looking to alienate any readers—those are my people, you know? At the same time, I don't want to cater to Diamond.
PWCW : So how does the business model work, with Web comics?
DG : It's easy. You do the comic online, you [generate] buzz buzz buzz; you get everybody into it, and you build your audience. Then you go to print, and in print you do something deluxe, like a director's cut. You give them something that [they] can't get online for free. There's an incentive there to actually buy the book. It's worked with Shooting War, and it'll work with other things, too.
AL : And you get to talk to your audience and interact with them. We held a 2011 headline contest where you had to write in headline ideas that we then incorporated into the book for the news ticker. When Jimmy's blog comes up [in the book], you see little slices of the world in 2011, and some of that is user-generated content.
The biggest influence from one of our readers was actually from an Iraq veteran. He was really pissed off at the way we showed the reaction by the lieutenant colonel to the death of one of his soldiers—[the death] didn't really register with him. I went back and said, that's a really good point, and I actually rewrote it. That was one of the scenes that was majorly reworked.
PWCW : So you have a much better ability to change and adapt to input than, say, print comics?
DG : You can edit infinitely and update it to your server. It's not for real; it's not permanent till it hits paper. And I think that's really cool. It gives you a lot of leeway to experiment and correct. By the time the book comes out, it should be creator-edited, user-edited and then editor-edited. You get a better product in the end, instead of just pushing s— out the door to get ready for the next month.
AL : One of the cool things about having it online, again, was things that were going over [readers'] heads or things that weren't translating—I was able to see that, because people were writing in. It was like having 1,000 group readers.