Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Elsa Charretier, kickstarter, matt fraction, november

Matt Fraction "How-To-Write" Guide For Elsa Charretier's Kickstarter

Elsa Charretier, of The Unstoppable Wasp, Infinite Loop, Star Wars, Power Rangers and the current artist on the November graphic novels published by Image Comics, has launched a Kickstarter for a second artbook, nearing completion. For her first Kickstarter, she included a November Volume 1 Commentary Edition, a Kickstarter-exclusive black-and-white reproduction of Volume 1 with page-by-page commentary from on her process — how and why she made the choices she made, what she thought worked, or didn't.

Charretier's second artbook includes another November Commentary Edition, this time by November writer Matt Fraction, at the $75 backer mark. He initially stated on the Milkfed e-mail newsletter that it will be

as close to a How-I-Write-Comics guide as there'll ever be, with script excerpts, and a series of essays and examinations of the book's origins and my process in writing it, an exploration of the formal choices we made and how they were executed, warm-up and writing exercises I do and teach whenever I give lectures, analyses and explorations of comics theory, and, somehow, more."

Most terrifying for me is that I'm gonna allow for reproductions from my NOVEMBER notebook, which is something between Prof. Henry Jones' Grail journal and John Doe's notebooks from SE7EN, the blueprint, genome, laboratory and workshop where the whole book was born and my collaborative adventure began.

To that end, there'll even be emails between the entire creative team giving you exclusive insights into the development of each section's unique color scheme, Matt Hollingsworth's design and use of each character's unique timeframes, and how I drove poor Kurt Ankeny nuts again and again, all in the name of NOVEMBER.

The closest equivalent I've done was the "How to Write HAWKEYE #6" chapter of Brian Michael Bendis's WORDS FOR PICTURES, but this makes that look like it was only a warm-up. Which it was.

This weekend, as the Kickstarter gets closer to completion, he added a followup.

OH GOD

So this NOVEMBER V2 Commentary Edition I'm doing for Elsa is becoming quite A Thing.

So as my collaborator on NOVEMBER, Elsa Charretier, nears the finish line on her new Kickstarter, I've gotten to work on what my contribution is going to be — namely, a Commentary Edition that will pair with Elsa's own from V1.

And what I'm doing is, at this point, nearing 12,000 words. It's as close to a text book as I'm ever going to write, and as much of a class in How I Do What I Do as can be put into a book.

To that end, to encourage, entice, or otherwise cajole you into backing the project, I wanted to share some of excerpts from the opening.

You can read the excerpts here, and back the Kickstarter here.

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