Beasts of Burden: "Lost" - Early Beat Outline/OCD (Patreon)

The second issue of the first dedicated Beasts of Burden series was a story called "Lost", which often gets referred to as "the issue with the puppies". It's probably our most depressing story -- we've had three or four, at this point (five?) -- and probably the story that got the biggest reaction from readers. 

I'm not good at outlining stories, building slowly. steadily and smartly is where my process breaks down most often because of my inability to focus and my lack of patience. And there's an irrational fear that if I forget any ideas, those are the ones I really needed or at least might have to fall back on, so everything must be recorded and compiled -- resulting in piles of paper and multiple files for a single script. It's exhausting. I have a bad habit of rushing straight into writing a ton of notes and a bunch of scenes and too many dialogue exchanges and lines and then trying to fit thirty (or forty) pages of material into 22 pages of comics (or 20, the modern norm dictated by budget, which I dislike intensely, having been used to 24 or more for most of my career). 

These days I'm trying to act like a credible professional and outline my stories, and to some degree it's working (emphasis on "some"). But I also have a chronic problem sticking to a single process. Sometimes I work out a page-to-page outline on the computer, sometimes I break down the pages on index cards (each card a page), sometimes I do a long beat outline and then chop it into a page breakdown, sometimes I still rush ahead and slap down whole scenes which are too long and have a high chaff-to-wheat ration and cause a lot of headaches. Life gives you plenty of headaches, why add to that? I don't know. But I blame my parents. 

All too often I'd manage to do a little of everything on the way to a finished script, which turns a story into a 50-car pileup on Interstate 5 with fog conditions. I'm settling down these days and trying to move more slowly at first, and break things down first to avoid pitfalls and brick walls later. Which I know is best, but my anxiety/OCD tendencies tend to override my brain and lead me down some crooked paths and alleyways. Like, I was only going to post this outline stuff, but here I am typing away unplanned chatter. Thank you, bad mental wiring!

Here's what the first real attempt at organizing the beats for "Lost" looked like in the first Beasts notebook:

The pages from the story here are by series co-creator Jill Thompson, and were all done in traditional watercolor (there are images in the back of the collections showing off her layouts, pencils and painting process). It's a beautiful-looking issue, even the depressing parts are beautiful, which is what I was going for when taking Jill's work into account while scripting. When she first read the script she called me up and said, "I don't know how we're going to print a comic without a last page", because she said she didn't want to paint the ending. I know what she meant. I teared several times up while writing it, she cried while painting it (Jill's left tears on at least three pages so far, in "Lost", "Stray" and "A Dog and his Boy"), and some folks cried while reading it -- which was a first for something I wrote. For some reason no one cries while reading Dork or Eltingville, unless it's a royalty report.

A comics creator once told me, "I didn't know you had it in you" in reference to Beasts, and that was one of the best comments I ever had on the series. Because I didn't know, either. 

I'm still not convinced, but that's why I'm in therapy.