Oklahoma writer Rob Vollmar brings Twin Cities comic script to Twitter
Graphic-novel author Rob Vollmar, as illustrated by his Bluesman collaborator, Pablo Callejo.
Norman writer Rob Vollmar is involved in what may be a Twitter first – he’s tweeting the script to his planned comic book “The Twin Cities,” 140 or fewer characters at a time.
Twitter is a micro-blogging site on which users share their thoughts in 140-character bursts, called “tweets,” with users who have chosen to follow them on the site. Twitter also can be used via cell phone and a variety of other applications.
Vollmar wrote the Eisner Award-nominated “The Castaways” and “Bluesman,” which has been optioned for film. Vollmar said his Twitter breakthrough came about as he tried to figure out how to use Twitter in a way that would be of interest to readers.
Art from Vollmar's Bluesman, by Pablo Callejo.
“I didn’t have the faintest idea what to do with Twitter,” Vollmar said in a phone interview. “I had the account. I kept staring at it. I would occasionally poke it with a stick to see what happened. I was really having trouble getting my brain around the technology to use it in a meaningful way.”
Vollmar decided that a comic script, broken up as it is into discrete units, might make for a better experience on Twitter than a novel or something in longer form.
Vollmar is tweeting a page per day from the “Twin Cities” script at twitter.com/robvollmar. He’s organized the tweets so readers can read each page in order, rather than posting it chronologically from first to last. (However, the overall pages are in reverse order, as he posts a new page each day.)
“I’m creating a picture, if you will, of the script page. I thought this project was uniquely suited for this kind of experiment, because I’m writing it in micro-installments of about five pages. So people, if they pay
Art by MPMann, by Rob Vollmar's Inanna's Tears.
attention for a week, are essentially going to get an entire episode of the series.”
“The Twin Cities” is a speculation on the afterlife, Vollmar said. He described it as “a dark comedy in the spirit of ‘Brazil.’”
“(The afterlife) might be filled with giant bureaucracies, where you’re constantly negotiating different bureaucracies and processes,” Vollmar said.
The lead character of “The Twin Cities” is Michael Thomas, who was shot to death when he wandered into a convenience store robbery. Michael finds, to his chagrin, that he must spend the afterlife in the clothes he was wearing when he died, so he is wearing cargo pants, combat boots and a “post-ironic … old-school Wham! T-shirt that says ‘Choose Life’ in big letters. But he’s dead, so that joke’s going to keep selling itself over and over.”
Readers also will meet Michael’s guardian angel Becky, who died at age 17 in the mid-1980s.
“She’s very enthusiastic, but she’s also got a bit of darkness,” Vollmar said. “She’s got this profound responsibility, but she’s also a 17-year-old Valley Girl.”
“The Twin Cities” eventually may be serialized as a drawn project in print or on the Web, but Vollmar’s main goal is calling attention to the literary value of the comic-book script format.
“I would love to get an artist attached to the project, but that’s not really my motivation in putting the scripts up online,” Vollmar said. “I think of comic scripts as a literature of their own.”
- By Matthew Price
From Friday’s The Oklahoman
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[...] media | Matt Price interviews Rob Vollmar about tweeting the script from his most recent work, The Twin [...]