Starting Small

This is PART ONE of a series of posts about preparing for DELILAH DIRK BOOK FOUR, a new graphic novel.

I’m ready to start work on Delilah Dirk Four (DD4). I have a story outline I like, a number of scenes worth trying, some places I’d like to go, and a good mix of character ingredients. I know how to make a graphic novel, too—I’ve done it several times before.

The only problem is, I can’t make this book the way I made the previous books, due to changes in my personal life. But then, even if I could do it all the same way, I don’t want to.

When I made the first Delilah Dirk comic, all I wanted was to make a short comic to play around in a specific location and time period, and with a spirit that I wanted to recreate. I’d been reading Napoleonic War fiction, I’d grown up with Indiana Jones movies, and I was walking down an path exploring art history, begun by the Elgin marbles. A few more influences and whims led to making Delilah Dirk and the Treasure of Constantinople, a thirty-page comic about the quasi-magical, unbelievable mythology of Delilah Dirk and two people bound together by one’s insistence on fulfilling a life-debt. I worked on it in my evenings and on weekends, outside of my day job as an animator. I printed a few copies and took it to San Diego Comic Con, where I hoped for nothing more than to share it with my Flight Comics friends and to sell my own little self-published comic at a convention.

A year or two later, I made a second DD comic. Delilah Dirk and The Aqueduct picked up sometime after the events of The Treasure of Constantinople. Like the Hornblower and Sharpe series of novels that inspired DD, I imagined that I would be able to tell self-contained stories about my characters from different points in the chronology of their imagined lives. It was another thirty-page story, this time published in Volume Five of the Flight Anthology. Again, I made the comic in my spare time, after my day job, driven by the tireless spirit of a twenty-something. Again, the goal was only to participate in the making of comics and to amuse my peers.

In 2010, I upped my ambitions. My Flight Comics friends were writing and drawing graphic novels and seeing those books published onto bookstore shelves. Having written Constantinople and Aqueduct to be loosely chronological, I decided I would create my own 180-page graphic novel by connecting the two 30-page stories with new material. The combined volume would tell the story about Delilah and Selim becoming travelling companions. I would do it all myself, because that’s what my Flight friends were doing, and because my favourite comics were made in that fashion. I always wanted it to be a traditionally-published graphic novel, because I hate the advertisements and business model of floppy comics, and I’ve always preferred reading on paper to reading on a screen. Plus, of course, there’s the prestige of seeing your name on the spine of a book in a real, honest-to-goodness bookstore.

When my day-job contract ended, I took roughly a year off from “real work” to make Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant. (In a future instalment, I will explain how I could afford to do this). When the book was finished, per traditional advice, I sent the pitch to publishers who might read it. I never heard back from them. I sent query letters to literary agents, hoping one might represent the book to big publishers. None were interested. After a year, The Turkish Lieutenant had found neither a publisher nor an agent. I already had story ideas sketched out for a second book, but considering the work involved and the time investment required, I wasn’t about to start on it if there was no audience for the first book. In 2011, I worried that might be the case.

Feeling like I had exhausted my traditional options, I put The Turkish Lieutenant online, for free. I updated it webcomic-style, posting four “new” pages every Saturday. All the pages were finished, so I could have dumped the entire thing online at once. If I had, though, it might have drawn some attention, but it would have faded quickly. By “drip-feed” updating the webcomic every week, four pages each Saturday like the colour weekend comics I loved growing up, the book would have an online life for an entire year.

The comic began attracting attention and I received offers from publishers. That made it a lot easier to engage an agent and find the book a home with First Second books. Meanwhile, I went back to work in animation.

The Turkish Lieutenant would be published in August of 2013, and First Second asked for a pitch for a follow-up. I supplied one, and they liked it, so for the very first time in my life, someone had agreed to publish work of mine that I had not yet completed. I received an advance, and it was larger than the one I had received for The Turkish Lieutenant. I started applying for provincial and federal arts grants, too, to help keep the lights on during the time it would take to make another full-colour graphic novel from scratch, thinking it might take two years.

Now I was tasked with writing and illustrating a 200-page book from scratch. The prospect was daunting. Everything I had done up until that point had been completed in small steps. Constantinople was its own small thing, Aqueduct was its own small thing, and joining them was like making two more small interstitial comics. (I’m happy with what I learned by making the books this way, which is why I generally recommend new authors to “start small.”) I needed a way to make this huge new project manageable, so that I’d hit my deadline and stay sane in the process. I’ll outline that method in Part Two.