Arkansas, the 1920s, bluesmen Lem Taylor and Ironwood Malcott are in
search of a hot meal and a place to play their music. One racially
charged encounter later, Lem is on the run, hunted for a murder he
didn’t commit.
Strictly structured in a twelve-bar blues rhythm (it’s explained below), Bluesman
comes from the imagination of Oklahoman writer Rob Vollmar and Spanish
artist Pablo G. Callejo. A moving piece of religious faith, racial
persecution and powerful roots music, the original three-book
serialization of Bluesman won notice from Entertainment Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe and more.
Writer Rob Vollmar took time out to talk to Newsarama about the brand-new hardcover collection from NBM.
Newsarama: Rob, where did your thinking about Bluesman originate?
Rob Vollmar: At its most basic, I think Bluesman grew out
of an impulse to tell an exciting story that would offer some
interesting layers of interpretation for the folks inclined to dig a
little deeper. Pablo and I had just finished working on Castaways,
which is also set during roughly the same time period, so I was
confident about our ability to expand on what felt was good work. I
wanted to create something more ambitious than our first work in both
scope and complexity. It was in thinking about how to fill that space
that I latched on to the idea of writing a story about a blues musician
and adapting the twelve bar blues structure for comics in order to tell
it.
NRAMA: Your protagonist, Lem, blends music, religion and racial
identity in the early 20th century. What made you decide to bring all
those elements to bear on his character in this book?
RV: Music was necessitated by the decision to do a story
featuring the blues. I've been a student of music for essentially my
entire life. The only thing I know more about than comics is music, not
that my grasp of either is particularly comprehensive. So writing about
music and musicians is a type of autobiographical writing for me in the
same way that writing about poor folks from southwestern Missouri (The Castaways) in any time period is autobiographical.
Taking that one step further, I elected to incorporate some of my own
experiences with Christianity and blend that into Lem's narrative as
well. The research I did on the blues suggested that considering blues
outside of the contrast to the church experience that it represented to
the people who played and consumed it would be an utter waste of time.
How better to capture that complementing relationship in the story than
to have it be embodied by one man struggling to make sense of the
violent and nonsensical world into which he has found himself born?
Once I started exploring those themes in the story, they began to shape
its content as profoundly as the 12 bar structure that had given it
birth.
Lastly, I don't know how one might go about writing an historical piece
on blues musicians without dealing directly with the issue of race in
America at the time. You can give ten intelligent, rational people
access to the same one hundred books on a given topic and every one of
them will develop a different picture of what that thing is. I took a
hard, long look at the lives of blues musicians and the audiences they
serviced from the period and this is what I saw. I make no claims to
its veracity. It's fiction.
NRAMA: Fiction it may be, but to properly capture the era, did you do much historical research?
RV: It's kind of misleading in a way to call it research. I
think of it more as immersion. I had already gone eyebrow deep into the
Great Depression and the years surrounding while I was writing Castaways.
I re-read all the landmark books on the blues and a few new ones that
had cropped up. I did a lot of listening too and tried to use the music
itself as an emotional counterbalance to the scads of information that
were piling up in my head. For me, there comes a critical point once
the scripting is underway where that anxiety about historical accuracy
has to melt away and you are just thinking in period. Some part of you
is there and, while it may not represent an authoritative voice on the
period in the way a well researched history book can, it is authentic
in its role as an interpretation. It says more about how I, situated at
this moment in time, feel about that moment in time than anything else.
NRAMA: As a white man, do you feel any hesitation to tackle race as a subject?
RV: As a human being, I wanted to tell a story about human
beings. If knowing that my skin is one color rather than another
somehow magically changes someone's interpretation or enjoyment of the
work, that will have to fall under the category of "Things I Can't Do
Much About." It doesn't tell them anything about the people and
experiences that have shaped my worldview, the voices and impressions
that guide my hands when I sit down to write. I can't get anywhere
acting on hesitations. I'd rather fail gloriously than shy away from
something out of fear of potentially offending someone who doesn't have
all the information.
NRAMA: When did the twelve-bar blues structure become part of the book's narrative?
RV: At the very beginning. In fact, just to be obtuse, I'd
originally planned it on the more obscure ten-bar structure. Then, I
figured out I had cheated myself of two chapters and immediately caved
in to orthodoxy. A bar, for those wondering what the hell we are
talking about, is another word for a measure of music. So a twelve-bar
blues is a very common type of blues song that repeats its chord
progression every twelve measures.
I got rather egg-headed in my desire to fully incorporate this form into Bluesman.
Blues music is most often played in 12/8 time which means that there
are twelve beats in each measure with each beat being measured in
eighth notes. Every chapter of Bluesman is twelve pages long,
except for the fourth in each section, which doubles in length as some
blues musicians will do with the final measure of each stanza to break
up the pattern a little. Also, 12/8 time is thought of the imposition
of a triple meter over a double one, leading to its distinctive "One two three Four five six…" rhythm. To emulate this, I broke all the scenes in every chapter up into increments of three pages.
I know to some folks that this all might seem a little…well,
unnecessary. What I discovered after having invented all of these
ridiculous rules was, like the blues, it made the work itself
incredibly easier to write. I always knew how long a scene was going to
be. I always knew when the chapter was going to end. All the writing,
at that point, became almost reductive, chipping away at everything
that didn't fit into the structure until we got to the book itself.
NRAMA: It’s a successful format, I thought. Are you a blues fan?
RV: I'm a music fanatic. Blues has been an important part of
that mix since I was about fifteen but I was exposed to music deeply
indebted to the blues as long as I have been an active listener.
NRAMA: Bluesman was originally published as three
paperback books. Is this new single-edition hardcover book how you
always wanted it to be seen?
RV: The three volume serialization was an important part of my
vision for this book so to say that this version is how I always
envisioned it would be a little misleading. I do think of this edition
as one that essentially replaces those. It features the best printing
job, the least amount of typographical errors, and minor tweaks to the
art and story that improve upon the first editions of the book. I don't
think that reading it in one form or the other will necessary change
someone's appreciation of it. The story is designed to be consumed
either way.
NRAMA: What is the working process between yourself and Pablo?
RV: It's pretty conventional by today's standards. I write a
script and e-mail it to him. We discuss any specifics in that section
that might not be completely obvious from the script. Once the art is
prepared, we look at it together and see if we were taking the some
things away from what was written. Sometimes I would suggest things for
the art and sometimes he would make suggestions as the story evolved.
There was actually a first ending I wrote the book that we agreed,
after looking at the script, was just too bleak. He made a brilliant
suggestion for the ending and I took it. Every original work I create
is a financial and creative collaboration with my artistic partners and
I choose those partners by filtering for people who have storytelling
chops of their own to bring to the table.
NRAMA: Has your collaboration evolved since your first book, The Castaways?
RV: Yes, but in ways that are hard to quantify to an outside
observer. I've been playing music with essentially the same group of
guys for going on twenty years now. After that many hours together in
rehearsal and on stage, we communicate now in glances and half-grunts.
Anything else is superfluous. The same could be said with working for
one artist over the course of six years. With The Castaways, I
was still developing my craft as a scripter, not to mention as a
storyteller so I had to learn how to listen to my instincts and then
how to funnel that down to a page of scripted comics. I have some
specificities that have developed over the years that have been shaped
in a big way by my comfort in telling stories with Pablo. I don't do
much in the way of framing the images verbally in the script as I
learned that the artist is nearly always more qualified to make that
decision than I am. I try to focus my attention to structure, pacing,
thematic development, and dialogue and leave the visual sculpting to
people with gifts in that particular arena.
NRAMA: What's next for Pablo and yourself?
RV: Well, we've got a solid year of promotion to do on Bluesman
before I'm going to be satisfied that we've done what we could to get
it out there in front of folks. I'm launching a fairly substantial
regional bookstore tour starting in August. I'll be performing some
old-school blues and gospel tunes and showing off artwork from the
book. I'm planning one more scheduled convention appearance in APE 2008 in November.
Presently, I've got a number of comics in various stages of development. Inanna's Tears,
another historical piece but set in ancient Sumer that I did last year
with artist mpMann, is presently on hiatus until our publisher, Archaia
Studios Press, gets their rudder righted. The last thing I heard was
that we might still get a hardcover edition of the whole thing out by
the end of 2008. It was a real disappointment to me that they weren't
able to finish the serialization because Marvin and I put a lot of
ourselves into it. Inanna's Tears deals with some of the same issues of faith and power inequities as Bluesman but using an entire different, and somewhat alien, value system.
I know Pablo is working right now on a book with Ted Rall called the Year of Loving Dangerously. Ted showed me a good chunk of the book at MoCCA this year and I was just amazed. It looks incredible. As good as he was when we started Castaways, Pablo hit this new level about mid-way through Bluesman
and shows no signs of dialing it back now. I think people who have read
our work together and think they have a pretty good handle on where
Pablo is an artist will be really surprised by the shift in style that
he makes for Ted's book.
Bluesman is now available. For more information and a preview, visit www.nbmpub.com
