A.P. Carter and Spiderman (and Pizza)

Emerald City Comic Con has taken over the WA State Convention Center this weekend, and to mark the occasion, Seattle pizza chain Pagliacci has interviewed me about superheroes in their newsletter. (Yes, it's a pizza restaurant with its own newsletter!)  Writer Louis Whitford and I got pretty deep talking about superheroes as part of the culture... and of course we also talked about The Carter Family.  It may be the first time A.P. Carter has ever been compared with Spiderman!

Pagliacci's online newsletter

Single Girl, Married Girl

Today, as pages are posted from the Bristol Sessions chapter, we come across what is maybe my favorite page in the book: Sara and Maybelle recording "Single Girl, Married Girl."

Here's a larger version...

In a separate post, I will talk about the page and show the stages of its evolution.

On the road to Bristol...

Here's the next page from "The Storms Are on the Ocean"...

For a larger version, click here...

Diamonds in the Rough: Sara and A.P. audition for Brunswick Records

Before the Carter Family had their breakthrough moment at the Bristol Sessions, they (or at least, Sara and A.P.) auditioned for another record label: Brunswick Records. Frank and I are excited to present a full chapter from our graphic novel which tells the story of this earlier and less successful attempt to become recording artists.

Because there is little to no documentation of the event (no one can even seem to agree what city it was in), this is our vision of what may have happened at the Brunswick Session.  All we really know is that A.P. was asked to play the fiddle on record and he refused.

The year is 1925, the place is Poor Valley, Virginia, on the modest farm of Alvin Pleasant and Sara Carter...

We hope you enjoyed this chapter. Learn what happens next in the graphic novel Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song, from Abrams Comicarts this fall...

The Carter Family Live in Concert!

When Frank and I planned our graphic novel, we knew we definitely wanted to attempt to recreate the experience of seeing the original Carter Family play live.  Though there are some great live recordings (made on border radio), there is no film footage of Sara, Maybelle, and A.P. playing music together.  There is not even a photograph of one of their concerts!  So we devoted a whole chapter to showing one of their live gigs, from A.P. hanging promotional posters to Maybelle chatting with the local pickers afterwards.

Here we see some local men helping the group set up in a town's schoolhouse.  The stage is wood placed over barrel drums. The lighting will be provided by coal mining lamps!

On this page, the audience has arrived, the lamps are lit, and the concert begins. You can see the full chapter, of course, when the book comes out in early October...

The background art and hatching for this chapter was inked by Sean Michael Robinson. His background inking assistance was invaluable in helping Frank and I complete the book on time.  Thank you, SMR!

Two-page Spread

Frank and I wanted the story of the Carter Family to really feel like it was set in times when the Carters lived.  For us, the best way to do this was to evoke old newspaper comics of the time.  A favorite of ours is Frank King's "Gasoline Alley" which, besides being beautifully drawn, sometimes featured ingenius Sunday pages where the panels connect up to form a landscape.  These two pages are our homage to those strips; and provide a quiet moment between A.P. and his daughter. 

Sara Sings "Single Girl": Celebrating the 85th Birthday of The Big Bang Of Country Music!

To David and I, one of the great moments in Don't Forget This Song is when Sara and Maybelle record "Single Girl, Married Girl" on the second day of their very first recording session.

This took place at the epochal "Bristol Sessions," which is seen by many country music scholars as "the Big Bang" of country music. An entire chapter in our book is devoted to the Bristol Sessions, which also introduced the extraordinary Jimmie Rodgers to the musical world.

Above is Sara and Maybelle's exquisite 1927 original of "Single Girl, Married Girl." Take a few minutes and savor one of the finest performances in Sara Carter's career--she struck gold in her first recording session.

The Sampler Booklet is Out...

David and I each got a bundle of 68-page, full color sampler editions of CARTER FAMILY COMICS: DON'T FORGET THIS SONG from our publisher, Abrams Comicarts this week.

If you're at a comics convention this spring or summer, or if you attend any events at The Museum of Cartoon Art in New York, you'll be able to lay hands on a complementary copy of this uncorrected proof edition!

This book presents the first third of the graphic novel in full color, including an introduction I wrote, our bibliography and thank-you acknowledgments from David and myself to all the wonderful people who have cheered us on during the sometimes-rocky road of this book's creation!

The preview is printed on newsprint, and the effect is different than that of the final hardcover book. It's a blast to see these pages printed on comic-book paper, nonetheless.

Trainspotters will want to hang onto this preview edition--it has little bits of art and dialogue you won't see in the final hardcover version. This is mostly due to some information we got, late in the game, mostly pertaining to recording technology of the late 1920s.

David has made several small but important changes to the artwork since this preview went to press. I've also fine tuned some of the dialogue and color. So this booklet may be a future collector's item!

Here's a quick scan of a page from the sampler:

This page, from Chapter 10 of the book, stands alone. It shows the moment when the idea of recording truly gets into A.P. Carter's head. He also meets a future ally, record retailer Cecil McLister. The top panel is one of the many labor-of-love moments throughout the book. It took David considerable time to render all those distinct figures in the panel--on top of the many other elements therein. Ditto, it was time-consuming (but fun) for me to color them, the buildings, A.P.'s horse cart, etc.

Kim Deitch kindly offered a rave reaction to our book, when it was still in the production stage. Abrams excerpted his enthusiastic words on the back cover of the sampler:

This sampler brings us--and the book--one significant step closer to publication! As said, keep your eyes out for this free proof. We'll keep you updated on the book's progress, as the street date of October, 2012 approaches...

our opening page in color

Hi folks...

Long time, no post. We're working away on our book. We got our deadline extended. This graphic novel is requiring a lot of time and energy! We want it to be as good as possible. We hope it will prove worth the wait.

Here is a colored (but dialogue-less) version of the opening page of the book. (We're awaiting the arrival of a custom-made computer font based on David's lettering style. Once we get that, and have it installed, we can begin to type in the final dialogue.)

I hope the lack of dialogue isn't disconcerting. We tried to suggest some of the coloring techniques of the very early newspaper comics. It appears to us that they were colored using water color washes, which were interpreted by the engravers for the four-color printing process.

Comics were printed in flat colors from the start--especially in small-town newspapers, whose engravers could not equal the masterful work of those in the employ of the Chicago Tribune or the New York World or Herald-Tribune.

We have tried to evoke this delicate yet complex early color process here. Our goal is not to imitate the old ways--just to suggest them, and to incorporate aspects of them into our 21st-century efforts.

We hope you enjoy this sneak preview. We're going to do our best to post here at least once a week from now on with more preview pages, art samples, photos, etc. We hope to see you here again very soon!

Click on the thumbnail to enlarge it...

A Quartet of Full-Color Teasers!

David and I are working hard on the considerable task of creating the finished color artwork for DON'T FORGET THIS SONG.

We did some selected tiers at the request of the folks at Abrams. They'll be featured in an upcoming color catalog.

We'd like to share these pieces with you now...

This first one is from the second chapter of the book. You can compare this colored, inked version with the earlier pencilled "take" of this tier of two panels...



Next is a scene from the third chapter, right after A.P. has met the love of his life, Sara Dougherty, for the first time...




Now, from chapter eight, a teen-aged Maybelle wows 'em with her guitar heroics...




And, for our final sample today, an emotional moment from Chapter 14, in which all the Carters gather to see and hear their very first record release, "The Wandering Boy" c/w "The Poor Orphan Child." Shellac-ophiles will notice that we used an accurate 1927 Victor Records stock sleeve for the Carters' copy of this important record.



We'll post more sequences from the book in days to come. We hope you've enjoyed these sneak previews.