Today’s Meditation for the Comic Creator. A good companion piece to the previous one:

The trick of complex comics–and this is something I learned from 80s publisher and comic activist Paul Gravett, later reinforced in a long conversation with Bryan Talbot while he was producing The Tale of One Bad Rat–is knowing that the hardest thing to do in comics is tell a story with absolute clarity. The point of experimentation is to find new ways of telling stories that people can understand. It doesn’t matter how cleverly you can jabber if, at the end of it, no-one’s understood a word you said. It’s not about dumbing down–it’s about speaking clearly. It’s one of the reasons why Alan Moore does his serious novels in the 9-pic grid (which One Bad Rat also riffs off of)–it imposes a cadence on the work. I tend to avoid anything other than 6-grid or 3-grid–I like a sound that’s a little more garage-y, a bit more clang and thump than Alan’s little symphonies.

–Warren Ellis, Bad Signal, April 22, 2002