Sinners represents the first of my writing on the Hopeless, Maine story. When I came to the project, Tom had already created a few pages in which Owen returned to the island and found a whole situation with consumption, and vampires. This draws on New England folklore that blamed consumption on vampires. I included Tom’s original story fragments in these graphic novels, and managed to weave them into a larger tale.

I’d written all kinds of things prior to Hopeless, Maine, but never a comics script. I had explored radio plays, so I drew primarily on this. Comics call for a really different approach to prose – you can’t have much narration, for a start. If you’re trying to describe scenes and action for an artist, you have to do that in a way that will sit on the page. At the outset, I didn’t have much sense of how anything was going to sit on the page, or how to pace things, or what anything should look like.

By the time these scripts were being translated into book form, I had more idea of how to make the text work. What came out in the Sloth editions was greatly pared down from the first draft. As a younger writer, I tended towards longer and more wandering sentences. Characters were circumspect, their intentions obscure, their speech misleading. I was all about the ambiguity. Frankly there’s only so much of that you can get away with in a comics page. I kept what I could of the flavour, but sometimes I had to cut the script to the bone and focus on getting the story across.

Comics are not my natural habitat. I’m too interested in the inner lives of characters, in thought and feelings, and as a young writer, I wasn’t big on action. As I’ve got older, the amount of action in my stories has increased considerably. Shedding literary pretentions like the dead skins they were, has helped a lot. Having more life experience has helped a lot too. There was such a long time between the first draft and the final script that I changed a lot as a writer along the way.

Initially, I wrote Hopeless (starting with Sinners) as a single script, because it looked like it was going out into the world as a webcomic. Also I had no idea how much script represented a page, or how big a book ought to be. I really had no idea what I was doing. That lead to a later process (when I did know what I was doing) of breaking the story into book length chunks, and then figuring out chapters, and specific pages. It took a lot of work, time, learning and thinking. I went from having no clue as to how a graphic novel works structurally, to having a pretty good idea.

I occasionally have thoughts about doing a small comic on my own – so far I’ve not got beyond three or four beat comic strips, but it might happen.

You can find the kickstarter for the Outland Entertainment hardcover version of Sinners over here – https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hopelessmaine/hopeless-maine-1-3-sinners-a-graphic-novel-series