Writer Jeff P. Jones is coming out with a graphic story collection titled Bloodshot World. Markosia Books is publishing it for readers in the UK, and a current Kickstarter campaign aims to bring the book to American readers. Jones spoke to Cemetery Dance about working with international artists, how this book compares to his previous ones, and the unique stories in Bloodshot World.
(Interview conducted by Danica Davidson)
CEMETERY DANCE: Please tell us about Bloodshot World. What sort of stories does it contain? When will it be published?
JEFF P. JONES: Bloodshot World is a collection of six stories, all black-and-white. The stories are very different from each other, and each is illustrated by a different artist. The shortest story is two pages, and the longest is thirty-three pages. The collection in total is 100 pages, so it’s the rare form of not “graphic novel” but “graphic story collection.” The only thing linking the stories is that each comes originally from one of my literary prose stories. Two of the six stories — one about a zombie, and one about a woman who pulls her heart from her chest from time to time — qualify as bonafide horror stories. The other stories include: forbidden love on the Wizard of Oz set; a mother who has lost her only son in war and her attempts to shock people into awareness; a grizzled Seattle cop trying to find a reason to survive; and a love story told from the POV of a dump truck driver in a futuristic dystopia. For what it’s worth readers call my stories “dark,” “grotesque,” and “strange.” Markosia Books in the UK will publish Bloodshot World this fall.
Who are the seven international artists you found to work on the project, and how did you find them?
Three are US-based: Frankie B. Washington, Kevin Phillips, and AJ Smith. Elena Cerisciola and Marco Bovi are based in Italy. Grego Pulp is in Spain. Davi Santos Silva is in Brazil. All of them have been amazing to work with — professional and dedicated to high quality work. I found them all online through different sites: freelanced.com, Facebook, and Discord. Early on in the project Paul D. London helped me get my footing as a script writer. I worked on a single story at a time, and finding a match in terms of artistic style and sensibility was an individual process for each story. I took my time and didn’t rush the artists, and that’s one reason this first volume has taken six years to put together. I was figuring everything out as I went.
You’ve previously published a novel and a prose short story collection. How is working with comics a different experience for you?
Comics writing couldn’t be more different from prose writing. I had written a couple of screenplays — and comics writing is most similar to that form. However it’s even different from screenwriting in that the format for screenwriting is very strict. In comics writing there is no standard, really. It’s a single writer creating a script that will only be seen by a single artist and perhaps a letterer. The writing is purely functional — everything goes to serve the image. You don’t need to — and can’t, really — build an internal world like you do in prose fiction. It’ s all about present action, something I learned from Mat Johnson. He writes literary fiction and graphic novels. Everything has to serve the present action of the story in comics, otherwise there’s nothing to show on the page. Also you have to think in terms of page and panels — how many panels to tell the story of this particular scene? Or can it be a single splash image? It’s a lot of fun adding the visual but requires a different sense of rhythm.
One thing I hadn’t expected is that it also brings out aspects of your characters that can stay hidden in fiction. For example, race, age, appearance — all those come through immediately in an image but don’t have to be specified in prose. The artist imagines these things into being, and the room for the viewer to imagine shifts into the space between frames. So, allowing for that imaginative collaboration is another challenge of the form.
Do you have any favorite horror comics?
My older siblings left their comics collection at the house, and I grew fond of Weird War Tales from the late 1970s. It wasn’t always about war but had an eclectic mix of horror stories.
Where can people find out more about you and your work?
jeffpjones.com is my website, and bloodshotstories.blogspot.com is the blog for Bloodshot World.
