Jamie S. Rich: Love (Writer) Supreme

By Tim O'Shea

Jamie S. Rich describes himself as "writer of prose and comics alike". Many of us grew to know him (including myself) from his time as editor in chief of Oni Press (1998-2004). He also did a stint as a "lowly scrub" (his words) at Dark Horse (1994-1998). In 2004 he stoped his editorial gig to write full time. His literary novels include Cut My Hair, I Was Someone Dead, and The Everlasting. In terms of comic books, he has the ongoing quarterly series for Oni, Love the Way You Love with Marc Ellerby and the graphic novel, 12 Reasons Why I Love Her with Joelle Jones. This year, Jones and Rich will publish the crime graphic novel You Have Killed Me through Oni Press. Rich was recently kind enough to answer my questions and provide art to the upcoming Love the Way You Love 4, set to go on sale on March 14.

Tim O’Shea (TOS): Tristan Scott, who is one of the major characters in your ongoing quarterly series for Oni, Love the Way You Love, also appeared in your prose novels, 2006's The Everlasting, and your earlier work, Cut My Hair. When you first started working on Cut My Hair, did you have a comic book series like Love the Way You Love in mind for down the road? In other words, do you have a distinct vision of where you plan on taking these characters and in which stories (be it they are in a graphic or in a prose storytelling medium), or are the characters and their stories taking you places you never planned when you first created them?

Jamie S. Rich (JSR): Actually, it was my intention to write Cut My Hair and stop the characters dead cold at the end of that book. It wasn't until things were in the can that Judd Winick pushed me toward connecting my books in more than thematic ways and carrying characters from one story to another. As soon as I sorted out where they all fit, it totally clicked and was the right thing to do. It was only the three novels--Cut My Hair, The Everlasting, and this summer's Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?--that were part of that early plan, however. Love the Way You Love was, as you say, an unexpected place I ended up taking a detour to. It was when I was writing The Everlasting that I realized that Tristan always ended up being a supporting character, and there were brief mentions in that book about other aspects of his life that we weren't seeing, of romantic failures and successes, that I knew were out there and worthy of being expanded. It was just a matter of how I'd do it, because for me, that was stuff I was covering in prose and it would feel like a repeat to write another novel in that vein. I guess it was working on all the manga scripts I do for other publishers that gave me the final flash of inspiration--a comic book soap opera. That said, I'm not sure what the future holds for these folks beyond these books. With Horizon, I'm kind of hitting a plateau with them, and we'll see what the landscape looks like once that's all done.

TOS: While I'm probably asking you a question you've heard dozens of times before, I must ask: is the band Like My Dog supposed to be an homage to any particular band, or an amalgamation of several bands/musicians you've run across over the years?

JSR: Initially, in the novel, I began by thinking the Smiths, but then imagining if they were a band in the early '90s, they might also have a shoegazing element, as well. So, at least sonically, they were the Smiths crossed with Ride. In design, however, I ended up making the line-up a little more eclectic as far as personalities. I actually just sketched them all out in one of my notebooks, and then followed that drawing when I was writing. I started to see them as the band that had all these disparate members that looked like they were from five different bands, and yet somehow worked as a unit. I think for the time period, as far as indie music was concerned, that made a lot of sense, because these bands would come out and it would seem like they'd have a handful of different styles on their debut album and would be all over the place, only coalescing on the second record. Like A Dog's first album would very much be that way, and then they will get darker and more ambitious for their second album. I see Tristan as eventually turning into a Scott Walker-style character, making grand orchestral pop.

TOS: When selecting Marc Ellerby to collaborate on Love the Way You Love, what was it about his work and/or how he played off of your writing that made you want to work with him?

JSR: Part of it was I knew we were both passionate about music and comics in the same way. We don't agree on everything, but we have enough crossover that it keeps it interesting. Marc has a kind of classic indie comics feel to his work, and there is a real sense of rock 'n' roll to his approach, and I thought he was young and fresh enough that he could bring a healthy sense of life to the page. There is also some honest emotion in his work, which I don't think gets pointed out enough. Marc understands the heavy drama of this kind of story, and he knows how to bring it while also being very tender with it. Ultimately, I think his jagged, hook-laden linework makes him the Johnny Marr of our little group, and my cleaner scripting style is the Morrissey, and putting them in tandem creates an effect that you just wouldn't get separately.

TOS: Ideally, as Love the Way You Love has progressed (you're soon to release the issue 4 in March) you've grown stronger and more confident with the characters and the story mechanics unique to this tale. Where do you think you've improved the most in this collaboration--in terms of pacing, dialogue--or something else? And in what ways have you seen Ellerby grow as a storyteller?

JSR: I'm not really sure where I've improved, or if that's even my place to judge as of yet. If I had to say, I think maybe just bending to to the will of the story, seeing where things needed to be sped up when the original outline was more leisurely. As collaborators, Marc and I get more and more in sync, and the communication is simpler. We understand how the other thinks now, so it doesn't require as much explanation, we just roll with it. Marc's the one who is really shining more and more with each issue. Every batch of pages, really, impresses me more than the last. There is no greater way to improve as an artist than just working, and he's done a lot of pages in a short amount of time. Each issue is 60 pages, so he did 180 pages last year, published in 9 months. That's like a monthly comic book schedule, really, it's about 8 issues of a traditional comic book--and he's pencilling, lettering, and inking. He's a stronger draftsmen, better at page layout, just more confident and facile with the medium.

TOS: How hard is it to execute character development in a comic book, versus when you work with some of the same characters in your prose novel (where you have more "budget/space" for character development)?

JSR: I think the difference just comes down to the differences in how you can communicate the interior process of a character, how in comics the writing ends up being more exterior. In a prose novel, you can drift away in a character's head and spend a couple of pages with his thoughts and get to know him that way. In comics, it's more outward action, what is said and done, and so you pick what puts your character's best foot forward. I'm working on the sixth issue right now, and there are definitely parts in it where I have had to consider what I am showing about Tristan's motivations in a particular scenario. The simple act of putting a flower in his hand when he arrives somewhere tells my reader that he's got something in mind in a very economical way.

TOS: John Irving developed the novel, Son of the Circus, after hitting a wall in trying to write a screenplay of a different story, but the same name, Son of the Circus. Has that ever happened to you--you started writing a prose novel that you realize needed to be a graphic novel, or vice versa?

JSR: Not prose, no. I've always conceived of my prose as prose and my comics as comics. The closest I've come to that is 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, which I conceived as a screenplay, as a romantic movie. That lasted all of five minutes, though, because I knew the nature of filmmaking meant that script would never make it to the screen as written, and that it would not only be an awesome comic, but a graphic novel would allow me the freedom to do it exactly as I wanted. But most ideas come fairly full formed and suggest their own format.

TOS: In the write-up promoting The Everlasting, it is said: "Fans of Rich's other works will find a piece of a larger puzzle in The Everlasting as characters and themes connect to Rich's first novel and his ongoing comic series, Love the Way You Love." What themes have you aimed to carry through all of these works?

JSR: Well, the three novels I am doing through Oni have always been called the Romance Trilogy. I wanted to explore the stages of love as they related to age and different people. Like, Cut My Hair is the innocent love, the coming of age story with the first real test of the depths of a person's emotion. In my own notes, I called it "The Fairy Tale," whereas The Everlasting was "Love Fails" and Have You Seen the Horizon Lately? is "Love Triumphs." It's a bit of a loose connection, however, and I found the other, unplanned themes that developed were more organic. I like the accidents that happen in writing. For instance, I had no idea that in all of my fiction, my male characters try to run away. I Was Someone Dead, my novella that Andi Watson did illustrations for, that's exactly what that book is about, so it kind of was the catalyst for making me realize that. If you read The Everlasting actually, there are even side anecdotes about some man trying to escape, like when Ashley tells Lance about how her father left the family. I'm not sure where that stuff came from, it just happened. Love the Way You Love, being a broader canvas, I think will allow me to study more practical applications of romantic ideas by following various relationships over the long-term. One-offs are like a flash of romance, like a crush almost, whereas this will get more into the work it takes to make something last.

TOS: The narrative of 12 Reasons Why I Love Her does not follow in a chronological order, what made you decide to approach the story that way? When you're telling your tale in such a manner does it require a greater deal of revision and back/forth between you and artist Joëlle Jones?

JSR: 12 Reasons is that rare and beautiful occurrence that every creator hopes they get at least once in their life. I remember it was a Saturday night, and I came up with Gwen and Evan, the couple in the story, and decided to co-op the title from the My Life Story song. Once I had done that, I got the idea for doing it in 12 parts and immediately knew it was right to have them out of order. I even quickly envisioned how some of it would be structured, knew some chapters would be more abstract and others would be narrative driven, knew how it would end, everything. I even wrote the prologue that night. From there, it was a fairly straight sprint to the end. When I did the actual writing, I worked in chronological order. I had the chapters essentially detailed in my outline, and so I wrote them in the sequence they'd happen if structured normally, so there was no confusion or problems with continuity. In fact, it really worked out when I wrote reason 11, because as I wrote it I got the idea to start flashing back to other moments in the story, and since I had those written already, it was easy peasy. Joëlle and I never actually discussed that element of the story, we mainly discussed other motivations, why I made certain choices within a particular chapter, and actual character points. The timeline never buckled.

TOS: What can you tell us about your upcoming collaboration with Jones, You Have Killed Me?

JSR: Like I said, 12 Reasons started as a brief movie idea, of me just imagining my ideal romantic movie. Romances and film noir are my favorite film genres, and coincidentally, Joëlle liked both of those, as well. It was actually her idea to do a hardboiled crime story for our second book together. Right now, I think we're in a place where we mutually are striving really hard to please the other person. I'm her biggest fan, and now when I write, she's my primary audience. If Joëlle is going to be impressed with it, then I am successful. You Have Killed Me introduces a private detective named Antonio Mercer, and he is hired to find a girl who has gone missing. The girl is a socialite who was due to be married, but a few weeks before the wedding, disappeared from a windowless bathroom in her family beach house. There was only one way out, and her little sister was in that room the entire time. So, Mercer has to determine what happened and he goes looking for her. The trail takes him to jazz clubs and horse tracks and gambling dens. The big wrinkle, though, is that the missing girl is his ex-girlfriend. He is actually a rich boy who has left the fold, and that causes him all kinds of complications.

We've had a blast doing it. The script is done, and Joëlle is already working on drawing it and if you liked what she did on 12 Reasons, prepare to be amazed. She's working with tones and an even cleaner, more classic line, and it's just brilliant.

TOS: Is it going to be hard for you to close the prose door on these characters, when you release the final part in your prose trilogy, with this year's Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?

JSR: Not really. I mean, Love the Way You Love is still going, and I know Lance Scott will show up again in prose, I'm just not sure where or how. That's really the hard thing, actually, that I've come to this stopping point and it's going to be the first time since I was like 19 when I didn't have these three books in my head and know what was coming next. I wish I was a greater idea man, that I had a notebook full of unexplored stories that are just waiting to be written. I don't know what's next for me as far as prose, so I'm going to step back and work on comics and see what percolates. I'm 34 now, so I have to find out what interests me as a writer in my 30s. I guess the Romance Trilogy is Mark I of my prose career, and I need to see what is going to be Mark II. I could continue to write books like those three with zero problem, but what would be the point? I have to move forward. Right now, I'm writing the next book for Joëlle and I, the one we'll do after You Have Killed Me, and I think that will have some lessons to teach me, and I'll just keep going where the muse takes me.

TOS: Do you listen to different kind of music depending on if you're writing for graphic novels versus prose, or does the type of music have no bearing as you write?

JSR: The music has no bearing on the form I'm working in, I more pick music that fits the mood of the story. I'm not the kind of guy that can sit in silence, I need to have noise happening, so I definitely try to soundtrack whatever I am doing. In the same vein, I also need visual noise. The area around my desk has to have images that inspire me. Directly in front of me, for instance, attached to the shelf on my desk, are two Audrey Hepburn postcards, a Rita Hayworth, a Faye Wong, and a drawing Joëlle gave me last year on Valentine's Day. One of the Audreys actually ended up being a prop in Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?.

TOS: Back in 2005, you collaborated with Andi Watson on (T For) True, a short story, as well as the novella, I Was Someone Dead. Is there any chance you two might collaborate again?

JSR: We just did two pages for Usagi Yojimbo #100, actually. That's the celebrity roast issue celebrating its Dark Horse milestone. Stan Sakai's current editor and my old boss, Diana Schutz, asked me to be involved because I was Stan's first Dark Horse editor. I suggested Andi as my artist because I know he and Stan are mutual fans. I'd love to do more with Andi, naturally, but for the most part, he's always got enough of his own thing going on that I don't see much point in him stopping to work on a longer project with me. The same goes for, say, Chynna Clugston. We work really great together, but her fans would kill us both if they had to wait for another Blue Monday while she drew some silly thing I wrote. That said, I love doing short stories and if there was an anthology option to work with either of them, I'd do it in a second.

TOS: Do you have any new short stories on the horizon?

JSR: Joëlle and I have done a 10-page story called Reverberation (Doubt) for a new anthology called Alien Safeword being published by Good Cat/Bad Cat, a new publisher out of Britain. I'm really excited about it, I think it's got a pretty cool structure to it. It's about a young man who is basically going in for an STD test because he might be infected, and we interweave memory, fantasy, and reality in a dizzying way as fears and doubts prey on his mind. I think it's going to be in the second issue and come out this summer.

TOS: Given your merger of music and romance in your fiction, any chance you've read Love Is A Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time by Rob Sheffield. He's a critic for Rolling Stone who recounts his romance and marriage to his late wife/fellow critic, Renée Crist, in the memoir. I'm about halfway through it and it's an amazing romp through 1980s/1990s music...

JSR: It's on my Amazon wish list, actually. I know Sheffield's writing, because he often reviews bands I really like, we have some similar tastes. I'm a terribly slow reader, though, so it takes me eons to finish a book, meaning I don't consume a lot of new stuff. I'm a classicist.

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