After working on Hellraiser: Bestiary for Boom, I started pressing Boom and Barker’s people about putting Harry D’Amour in comics. Harry always felt like a cross between Philip Marlowe and John Constantine to me. Being a big Hellblazer fan, and having written a couple pitches for him, as well as wanting to write some pulpy noir stuff, I felt D’amour could satisfy both desires.

My idea for adapting “The Last Illusion,” D’Amour’s first appearance in print, was to make it a prologue to an ongoing series starring D’Amour. Harry is a character with so much history unexplored (though I haven’t read “The Scarlet Gospels” yet). It would be a thrill to contribute to filling some of that in.

Adapting a few scenes from “The Last Illusion” was my second attempt at adaptation work (the first was a Robert E. Howard short story), and it really gave me the bug. It’s very satisfying to bring great work to another medium. But for me the real fun of the challenge is to present it from a new angle, something that offers existing fans a different way to experience the work, and maybe guide new fans to the original work.

Too often in comics, I see writers take the cut and paste approach to adaptation. Sometimes that’s out of laziness or inexperience, and sometimes reverence for the source material. For the latter, why even bother, then? Sure, it’s great to see some visual interpretation of a beloved story, but if I want to enjoy a story I’ve already read, I’ll just read it again. Also, since you’ll never be able to fit everything into a blow by blow adaptation, the work ends up feeling incomplete to me.

Another area writers seem to falter in when adapting is self editing. Sometimes they leave in way too much of the original text or scenes. Yes, that one scene was awesome, and yes, you love that passage of prose the author wrote, but the same principles apply as when writing your own stuff: learn to cut the superfluous material. Use economical wording to control the pace. The pacing for any medium, be it short story, novel ,comic book, or film, will be unique unto itself and therefore must be adjusted for any adaptation into another format. Find ways to present that text with half the words. And don’t forget your co-storyteller, the artist! The art should be doing some of the work. Those words that so inspired you should also inspire the artist, and, in a way, replace those same words. A good artist already knows this, so find one who understands that and is up to the challenge.

Many comic book writers seem to get trapped in interior monologues. In a novel or short story, an author can afford to spend an entire page or more on a character’s interior monologue. In a comic book, it really throws off the pacing and can imbalance a story. A writer doing adaptations really needs to learn how to boil things down to their essence. You also have to keep the letterer in mind. Few things are less attractive than a page full of dense captions and balloons. Not to mention it can obscure the amazing artwork of your co-storyteller. So don’t be afraid to reword that character’s lengthy ramble so that it takes up less space. The benefit is that you learn how write for brevity without sacrificing the power of language.

Writers should not be afraid to inject their own original ideas into an adaptation, nor hesitate to alter things like scene chronology, eliminate or combine characters, reduce cumbersome flashbacks to single panels, or whole chunks of dialogue. Indeed, these changes should be encouraged. Often times, it is a new idea that can solve problematic sequences by transducing the author’s original material into a more compact, and impactful, element, while still staying true to the spirit of the work.

Using my D’Amour script as an example, on page 2 panel 4, a woman references Harry’s case on Wyckoff Street. In the original story, information is relayed to the reader about that case. You could easily relay that same information in a caption, but it would be dry and lack excitement. I don’t like easy. I like to work hard at storytelling.

Since D’Amour appeared in a few other books from Barker, I created a timeline pertaining to everything Harry D’Amour. In that timeline, events in Everville go into more detail about the Wyckoff incident. I used imagery and text from one of the “Everville” scenes and crafted it into a single flashback panel to replace information in “The Last Illusion.”

It’s dramatic, horrifying and cryptic. And fit well into my proposed plan to use the existing timeline for Harry D’Amour as a guide for filling in his life between and around those published instances, allowing for a mixture of original content, as well as reference what had already been published. I employed the same device again when Wyckoff is referenced once more, and used that opportunity to reveal more of the Wyckoff incident, ramping up the tension and hopefully instilling a sense of dread in the reader about what happened on Wyckoff.

I have a selfish reason for this, too. As much as I genuinely enjoy adapting someone else’s work, or working from another’s ideas, nothing brings me more satisfaction that writing my own original material. So if I can inject something original into an adaptation, I can feel a certain sense of ownership. Obviously, I would never supersede the author’s ownership, or seek to diminish it in any way. It’s a humbling privilege to work on another writer’s work, and I would only do it if I felt I could treat the author and his or her work with respect.

One of these days soon I’ll post some scans of what the process of working from story pages  looks like. I print up the digital versions (fairly purchased!), and then do my mark ups for the eventual script.

I’m always up for discussion and questions about the creative process, so please feel free to contact me.

Finally, here’s what you came for: The script sample for Clive Barker’s “The Last Illusion.” I’m also including the excerpted scenes from the short story that I chose to adapt for your own reference.

Maybe we can get a movement going to convince Mr. Barker to let me do this, yeah? 🙂

The Last Illusion exerpts copy

D’AMOUR SAMPLE SCRIPT