Monday, September 12, 2011

The Green River Killer - The Graphic Novel?


Yes.

From a piece in the Los Angeles Times...

GB: It took you a while to finish this project and do so in this medium; like your father you were on its “trail” a long time. Talk a bit about the path — it started as a magazine article, correct?

JJ: I’m a journalist, so when I got the idea to tell my father’s story, I thought: magazine article. It was a story with timely, relevant themes that I thought a lot of people would find compelling — the lasting impact of catastrophe; a confrontation with evil — so I pitched it to GQ. In the winter of 2003-04, I interviewed my father, his colleagues, Ridgway’s lawyer, and even got some written answers to written questions from Ridgway himself. But the first draft of the article was a mess. It was too long and the tone was all wrong. I couldn’t figure out if I was writing true crime or memoir. It worked as neither, or as a mutant hybrid of both. By the time I figured out how to approach it, I had missed the window of opportunity, and GQ and I parted ways. That was some hard failure. I remained determined to tell my father’s story. There some powerful moments that I wanted to share with the world — moments I began seeing as comic book scenes. I had written comics in the past for DC and Marvel. And it was my father who introduced me to comics as a little kid. He used to read them to me when he got home from patrol. The more I thought about the more I fell in love with the idea of telling his story in dramatic form, with a graphic novel. It would be a personal, meaningful, creative way to tell the story. It took me a couple years to get around to pitching it to publishers. Just about the time I was ready to do so, I became waaayyy obsessed with “Lost,” and my wife was diagnosed with brain cancer. Strange, tough times. In 2008, I approached Dark Horse about the project — I wanted to work with a Pacific Northwest publisher — and began working on the book, with my father’s blessing.

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