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Fishhead #1
Published by ComicMix, October 2007
Terror lurks in the American South and bursts through the screen in Fishhead like a combination of All the King's Men and Saw. Adapted from the work of classic horror writer Irwin S. Cobb, Fishhead is the story of a man born with a surprising resemblance to a catfish who lives in the Big Splayfoot Swamp during the Great Depression. Men fear him and fish seem to defend him. Then, he's picked up by a traveling circus...
Credits: Larry Shell (Writer), Mark Evan Walker (Artist), Michael H. Price (Letterer), Michael H. Price (Writer), Mike Gold (Editor-In-Chief)
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Comments (3)
Bo Hampton (7:05 AM on Wed Oct 10, 2007)
The writing on this is really good. Great prose-compelling and ironic. Do you paraphrase
from the original story and then add your own stuff or are parts literally taken from the
text? Seamless. Congrats!
Michael H. Price (9:25 AM on Thu Oct 11, 2007)
Thanks, Bo. Most grateful for your remarks; pardon the tardy response -- been traveling on newspaper biznis.
The adaptation (Chapt. 1, now playing) is largely a matter of streamlining Irvin Cobb, imposing a sharper headlong momentum, while retaining Cobb's way with words and his acerbic wit. The 1911 yarn goes to a leisurely extent of stage-setting before it mentions Fishhead as a presence upon the land. I transplanted much of Cobb's long preamble to the art instructions, in the knowledge that Mark Evan Walker would capture that environment in pictorial terms.
The scripting process was largely a matter of my laying down finished lettering and arraying the panel/balloon placements directly onto the Strathmore in real time, occasionally pencil-scripting this page or that in preparation. The Cobb adaptation covers the first 15 pages, following Cobb's narrative arc until the final panel. There, a deus-ex-machina device kicks in (supplied by Larry Shell) to set up Chapt. 2 -- at which point, the yarn departs from Cobb. Not to give away too much, y'know.
The balance (Chapts. 2-4) springs from Larry Shell's prose scenario, utilizing Larry's situations and original new-character descriptions and dialogue while weaving in thoughts and words of my own. The direct-to-Strathmore scripting/lettering process continues throughout.
A key challenge in adapting Irvin Cobb's material lay in the question of how to retain his voice without absorbing or advancing the facile bigotries of Cobb's Deep Southern White Guy bearings. No censorship allowed, here, and no Gratuitous Political Correctification. The solution proved a matter of concentrating such attitudes in two troublemakers who trigger the inaugural crisis.
Accompanying text pieces (my biographical notes on Cobb, plus additional thoughts from Joe R. Lansdale and Guillermo del Toro) will come to light sooner or later. And more about all that as things develop.
Anonymous (2:56 PM on Tue Oct 9, 2007)
Dumb question, but this does stop on page seven, right?