Still buzzing from yesterday. My first proper comic convention. ExCeL was packed with people who get it. People who understand that sequential art isn’t some lesser form of storytelling.
Met actual comic artists at the indie tables. Not the Marvel/DC crowd, but the ones making weird, beautiful things in their bedrooms. Showed my old 2020 comic to an artist from Latvia who does horror stories entirely in black ink washes. She didn’t laugh. She said the panel transitions were brave. Brave. My stupid little alien comic from when I was seventeen.
Sat through a graphic novel panel where they discussed narrative compression. How you can tell a lifetime in the gutter between two panels. How silence works differently when it’s visual. Been thinking about this for my new manuscript. What if prose could borrow that economy? Those breathing spaces?
My brain keeps returning to comics structure. The way time moves in panels. How a single image can hold past, present, future simultaneously. White Holes has this bit where memory literally bleeds through panel borders. That’s what I want my detective novel to do. Let memory leak into the present, stain the edges of now.
Foundation Programme continues tomorrow at Abbey. Business modules feel miles away from all this, but maybe that distance helps. Comic artists understand something novelists forget: every page is real estate. Every word costs you space. Every scene needs to earn its panels.
Already planning the next con. Already sketching.