When working on adaptations, it's best to work from the outside in. Meaning, not just the initial, eye-catching details like the cover image or logo, but just developing the overall look and feel of the book as well. And developing just the right look for the characters.

The characters are the most important of all. In TGASS, there are at least a dozen important, prominent characters that appear, and multiple locations and lands as well. With a novel, the author can be descriptive, but not feel constrained by visuals. Especially with someone like Clive Barker, who works more with concepts and ideas and lets the readers draw conclusions of their own. He doesn't write his books like he's casting a movie. Instead, a character is described by their dialogue, by their actions. Which leaves all kinds of room for interpretation.

When I discussed IDW's previous Clive adaptation, THE THIEF OF ALWAYS, Clive mentioned how the characters didn't look at all like he intended or thought they ever should... until he read the comics and saw that the visuals fit perfectly. And that, he said, is the charm of seeing books adapted to comics—seeing the writer and artist's interpretations of what he's written. He made it clear that he's not interested in telling us what we should be doing, and that he wants us to take the book in the direction that would best fit the comics.

For Gabriel (Rodriguez, the artist on TGASS), this will be incredibly liberating, especially after working on projects that required likenesses (CSI, LAND OF THE DEAD). So it's up to me to get things started, through solid character descriptions that not only give the characters a pleasing façade, but also

With characters like the two lead "villains" (not really an applicable word for this book, really, although one comes to represent the side of good and the other, evil, although both are flawed human beings), they get most of the screen time in the book. Both undergo subtle transformations throughout, but again, some of this is at their core and not an easily translated thing, visually.

The book opens in Nebraska, in the Dead Letter Office of a post office. And the man working in this dead-end job is a guy whose life has been a series of dead ends, Randolph Jaffe. His physical description isn't really important in the book, so it's not described vividly. But in reading the book (twice, and selected bits again and again), things started to stand out to me. This man, who hates his first name and comes to call himself "The Jaff," after he figures out a way to evolve himself and gains mind-expanding abilities, is still ultimately a loser. He becomes a powerful weasel, but remains a weasel nonetheless.

So I went with the few physical details that are given in the book, such as the fact that he's losing his hair on top, and started with this initial description for Gabe to work with:

Randolph Jaffe/The Jaff
38 years old, maybe 5’7." losing his hair on top. Like Steve Buscemi, only with thinning hair. He’s a small man, and a bit weasly, but also scrappy. He looks like the kind of guy that most people, and certainly most women, avoid. The kind that don't appear threatening but that you still decide not to mess with because there's something behind his eyes that says he has nothing to lose.

Jaffe soon evolves, though, using the “Nuncio,” a chemical concoction that Jaffe and another man, Richard Fletcher, create together, a stuff that seems made from Creation itself, transforming whoever it touches. When Jaffe is touched by this chemical, he starts referring to himself as the Jaff. His appearance stays essentially the same throughout the book, but at certain times, when his power is manifesting, a huge, transparent image of his own head appears visible over his own face. Sort of like a huge, paper-mache head that people wear as a decoration at Carnival in Rio. It's only visible when people aren’t looking closely at him. I’ll see if I can sketch out what I mean by this.

I couldn't—sketch out what I meant, I mean. I tried, and it didn't work. So I hit Google, looking for reference as to what I meant. There are things like this throughout the book, descriptions of situations that would mean one thing to one person and another thing to someone else. But in the comic, we have to decide what that thing is and show it to you. So I take what Barker says in his book, and see how it might work as a visual in this form. The good thing is, there are no constraints at all to what we can show in the comic, other than our own limits of imagination. And with Gabe, that also doesn't seem to be a problem.

Before delving into this any further, he wanted to get to the bottom of what I meant by this description of the "floating head." I was still making sense of it myself, so I tried explaining what I meant a bit more, knowing full well that if I were on the other side of my e-mails, I'd just be increasingly confused. Luckily, this isn't the case. A few minutes after I muddled along in my description, I got this from Gabe, asking if this was close to what I had in mind:

And of course this perfectly illustrated what I was having a hard time describing. This book is going to work out just fine with Gabe's input and creativity...

As for Jaffe himself, Gabe nailed him with his first attempt:

TGASS eventually comes to be a sort of ROMEO AND JULIET, only with more fantastic circumstances, but the idea is similar—star-crossed lovers are drawn together despite differences in their background. Only, in this case, if the two do pair up, it could result in the end of everything. We’ll get into the story details of why this is so later on. But our Romeo (Howard Katz) and our Juliet (JoBeth McGuire) are the offspring of Jaffe and our next character, Richard Fletcher. Jaffe and Fletcher remain in the book, even when the story turns to their progeny’s travails. So we needed to nail down Fletcher at the start, too. My description to Gabe:

Richard Fletcher
Age 43, 6’1.” Fletcher was a brilliant scientist, but he’s now disgraced. His appearance is completely up to us, but I picture him a bit like Geddy Lee from the band RUSH (but with lighter brown and gray hair), a bit tall and thin, taller than Jaffe, but he stoops a lot. He’s been beaten up a lot in his life. His hair is in a ponytail, and he wears glasses and has a bit of stubble—all of which shows that he’s too busy in his own head to worry about his appearance. He wears shabby shirts and overly baggy pants. When Fletcher, too, evolves, he basically just appears much brighter, something that’s more easily shown by the colorist. His appearance doesn’t change much, although he finds himself blinded in one eye after looking too long at the sun during his transformation from the “Nuncio.” Randolph is the light to Jaffe’s dark, but he’s not a pure soul by any means. He’s just the lesser of two evils, weak where Jaffe is opportunistic.

Gabriel is from and lives in Chile, so when I describe things from my point of view, I often do so with the unreasonable expectation that my worldview will be the same as his. When I picture Geddy Lee as Fletcher, I actually have no idea if Gabe is as familiar with Geddy as I am—I mean, I grew up with an older brother who foisted RUSH on me all throughout childhood. Luckily, Gabe said he was a huge RUSH fan, too, so we were off on running. And even luckier, he nailed Fletcher right out of the gate:

Raul
5’4”, Raul is an evolved ape that appears to be mostly human, but with simian features—hair where there shouldn’t be hair, like on his shoulders and even light amounts on his cheeks, and he has long, simian arms, longer than humans. He’s short, and stocky, and looks more human than ape, but not by much. He’s pretty ugly, although inside, we learn, he’s one of the more pure and well-intentioned figures in the book. He has no whites in his eyes, just dark, full eyeballs. Fletcher has given him clothes so he can appear more human, but they don’t fit him right. Even jeans (rolled up many times for his short legs) t-shirts, all he can really manage to fit over his big shoulders, don’t look right (he has short legs, long arms, and a very broad back).

As you can tell by these character descriptions, they don’t delve too deeply into the characters themselves beyond the surface. To do so might confuse the issue at this juncture, and I really just wanted Gabriel’s visceral first take on the characters. For Raul, he saw my description this way:

On this one, I felt it was important that we emphasize his humanity just a bit more. Why there’s a half-human/half-ape in the book is something that will be explained as we go. For now, I just wanted to bring him forward on the evolutionary scale just a bit. So I suggested giving Raul more of a human mouth and chin, and shortening the distance between his nose and mouth. And once again, Gabe nailed it:

The last character we’ll look at this week is named Kissoon, one of the enlightened few who’ve been safeguarding the land that’s at peril in the book, Quiddity.*

*Now, it’s at this time that I tell you again that I realize that many things I’ve talked about here are thus far wholly unexplained and maybe don’t make much sense. They will, as much as a land like Quiddity can make sense to anyone. I don’t want to say too much, though, as we’re just getting going on the columns, and the actual comic is months away from showing up in stores.

At any rate, Kissoon is the last resident of the land called the Loop (the desert region pictured on the first cover, as discussed last week). I had a specific image in my head for him, which was once again nicely realized in gabe’s initial sketch.

Kissoon
Eternally 59, the last of the Shoal, the group who tries to protect Quiddity. Kissoon lives in the Loop, a timeless place that sits outside of reality. Kissoon sits cross-legged most of the time, in his little hut. He has wild, greasy and gray hair, like a more extreme Einstein. He looks slightly crazy. Okay, more than slightly.

And that’s where we’ll cut it off this time. Next time, we’ll have more character descriptions and sketches of our two lead characters, the star-crossed (to say the least) lovers Howie Katz (son of Jaffe) and JoBeth McGuire (son of Fletcher and twin sister of Tommy), and some of the other important players, too. And a look at the finished second cover for the first issue as well, offering up the first look at Quiddity.

/chris

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