Motel Art Improvement Service is the second book to feature Bee, my plucky red-haired girl character. In Motel Art she commences an ambitious cross-country solo bike trip, but is thwarted when her bike is crushed by a tractor-trailer in rural New Jersey. She holes up in a cheap motel where she finds herself attracted to Cyrus, an itinerant hotel-housekeeper and outsider artist. Cyrus paints new characters into the prints that hang on the motel room walls. Together they travel to a towering airport hotel outside of Newark, where they become entangled in an illicit drug deal. PFC Rick Johnson, on leave from the army, plans to rendezvous with some bumbling kids from Princeton (a spendthrift club-kid and a Korean lesbian) who will sell him a giant bag of homemade ecstasy.
While anticipating Doubleday’s publication of my first book Shutterbug Follies, I spent the summer of 2002 hammering out draft after draft of the plot, showing it to trusted confidants for review after each revision.
Just now, for fun, I dug out and reread the very first draft of the script. It is full of all sorts of ridiculous and wrongheaded material. My original vision for the story revolved around a conference of health insurance companies in a hotel in Atlantic City, so I could draw attention to how buying insurance is a form of gambling, and thereby critique the American health-care system and skewer the insurance companies. The plot involves a sweaty, burly drug-company salesman selling morphine in quantity directly to the well-spoken president of an HMO. The HMO finds that its drug rehab clinics are a drain on profits, so they plan to dose their heroin addicts with morphine in lieu of methadone, so as to hasten their decline. Bee and Cyrus interrupt conveniently and manage to thwart this deal.
Thank god my friends managed to talk me out of this direction for the story. At the time I felt compelled to do something relevant, or somehow political, something that would draw attention to corrupt institutions in the real world. It turns out that I have no head for this kind of story, and that to write something intrinsically political, one has to be deeply steeped in political thinking, which, unfortunately, I am not.
So instead I turned to personal experience, which for me is a much more immediate way to bring complexity and vividness to a story. I decided to exploit my memories and observations on young people’s recreational drug use and shape them into a story for Bee. And naturally where recreational drugs go, so too goes its partner in crime: sex—plenty of vivid memories there.
In the process of digging out the first draft of the plot, I also came across a bunch of sketches and process images from the beginning of the story. Here are a few of them.
This is my first sketch of Bee on her bike, before I began the layouts. I think I did this on the plane to Thailand in 2002.
Another sketch from the same trip. At the time I was thinking about a two-color treatment for the story.
Once the plot was polished to my satisfaction I began layouts. This is the first spread of the book (stacked here as a single vertical page), but it came last chronologically, as I went back and added an extra spread at the beginning to ease into the story. Here I worked out all the perspective at the layout stage.
Older layouts weren’t quite so fastidious, as in this panel.
For a while I was coloring my layouts, so as to “think in color” as early as possible. I stopped doing that pretty quickly, to consolidate steps in the process.
I use blue pencil. Jaime Hernandez once said, “blue pencil is for pussies”. I am a certified pussy.
Here Bee bikes past the Puck building which, incidentally, hosted the Mocca Art Fest for its first few years.
Pretty quickly I was able to draw a decent road bike without any photo reference.
At first I thought I’d do the second Bee story as a comic book series. I had a whole issue ready to go. Unfortunately Little, Brown & Co., to whom I was under contract, didn’t want me to do this, so I scrapped the idea.
I was going to do the guts with just two inks to save money. These kind of remind me of Condorito panels. It’s like the two-emulsion Cinecolor process used in animation by the Fleischer Brothers in the 1930s. I still want to use this process some day.