Words and music.

The filler between Issues 21 and 22 has been pages from the program book of Doctor Hymn’s special concert at Sanctuary Six.  I’ve been writing lyrics for the past week and a half, and it’s been more fun than I thought it would be.

It’s been a fun little challenge, too.  I love music but I’m no composer, and there’s no soundtrack in online comics, so I’ve been attempting to portray the grandeur of Doctor Hymn’s choral works in the lyrics alone.  I decided to take a minimal approach to each song’s lyrics, and the result has become a poem for each update.  I did not expect to be presenting my attempts at poetry for this between-Issue break, but here we are.

It’s also mildly frightening for me.  I’m not confident with my prose when it stands alone.  When I graduated college my first attempt at something creative was to work on “the next great fantasy novel.”  It was terrible.  Absolutely terrible.  None of my friends could get through it for the purpose of giving me feedback.  Their silence was feedback enough.  The lesson I took from that experience was that my words alone were not good enough to tell a story.  I needed a visual aid.  I needed the medium of comics.  Fifteen years later I’m still making comics, so it was a valuable lesson to learn!  But going back to words and words alone is reminding me of my previous failure.

Whether or not I’m any good as a poet or lyricist isn’t important.  The important thing is that I’ve been having fun pushing myself back into uncomfortable territory.  Creative boundaries are sometimes meant to be broken, and this has become my attempt to reclaim the part of my imagination I had locked away.