One of my favorite things about this project is the opportunity it provides for growth in both artistic and writing directions. For writing, I have chosen Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, while Making Comics by Scott McCloud is my guide to comics as a visual medium. Here I should mention that one of McCloud’s other books, Understanding Comics, a book I have already read, is much more in tune with my essential question. Making, which addresses the medium from a predominantly technical perspective, mainly acts as my guide to paneling and layout, and while these are skills I am certainly learning and looking to streamline and master, I think my writing guide offers a more interesting look into my project.

Catch-22 isn’t really an Inglourious Basterds-esque war drama/comedy that I thought it would be. In fact, I’m well past halfway through the book, and so far there has barely been any fighting (really only two scenes where characters are bomber pilots inside their cockpits, so not exactly the visceral combat of Sergeant Rock comics). Nay, what makes Heller’s book so fitting for me is that it is set in war’s downtime. It’s not really about the fighting as much as it is about the soldiers living day to day lives, surrounded by eccentric fellowmen and incompetent commanders. I think a big part of making a comic, and by extension my essential question, that I often overlooked is where comic artists get their inspirations from, and how they try to convey the specific mood through their work. This is something that directly affects everything from the writing, to the lighting and the coloring to even the formatting of the comic. Some stories rely on bleak minimalism and very little text to convey an uncertain and oppressive environment. Some are extremely dialogue-heavy, and complement what’s told with heavy, often exaggerated emotion. Some go for an upbeat, hopeful, bright style that mainstream superhero comics are known. Style and atmosphere are something I’m desperately trying to capture, and Catch-22 conveys this matter perfectly, with its balance of gallows humor and outright absurdity, as well as blatant yet well-implemented underlying social critique. Additionally, it is a good lesson in writing, as Heller manages to convey a lot, in terms of interesting characters, themes and implications, without much really happening in the book itself. Given that a good chunk of my work as it currently is is ultimately very conversation-heavy, and is set in a similar atmosphere of late-WW2 neurotic absurdity, Catch-22 provides an important and often overlooked service to my project as a written piece.