Oop. So much for one a day and discipline.
The story I’m currently writing for 2000AD, The Grievous Journey Of Ichabod Azreal (And The Dead Left In His Wake), is, as I’ve previously mentioned, a supernatural western, and its inspiration came from me loving three things in 2008. One is The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (long ungainly titles rule and piss off sub and art editors on magazines no end, heh), which is a beautiful, poetic, gloriousy cinematic slow-moving movie and one of the best films I’ve seen in years. OK, so it came out in ’07 but I saw it in ’08. Watched it on the projector one Sunday night, and I’m glad I did, because it’s one of those movies that really needs to be shown on as wide a screen as possible. Lovely Terence Malick-like long shots of clouds pasing over fields. Slow paced. Gorgeous to look at. I loved the ambiguous sense of fate of this movie, that the characters seem to know they’re stuck on a set path and can’t get off it. And superb performances by all concerned, particulary Casey Affleck, Brad Pitt and the always great, underrated Sam Rockwell.
Which led me to the beautiful Nick Cave and Warren Ellis soundtrack – Song For Bob is just one of the most moving, sad, uplifting pieces of music. I’ve been listening to Cave’s work throughout writing Ichabod. The far more sparse soundtrack for The Proposition, again written with Ellis, an awful lot of the balladic Nocturama (which allmusic.com thinks is one of his worst albums but I love. Go figure). Cave’s dark, biblical themes and occasinal sense of romance fit this type of material perfectly, I think.
And the final inspiration was the work of Daniel Woodrell, an astonishingly good Missouri-based writer. He’s largely concentrated on crime fiction in the past. I read Winter’s Bone first – the story of a poor teenager trying to find out what’s happened to her father before the police take her house away in a guarded community of backwoods drug dealers. It’s a stunning, sparse thriller and Woodrell writes like a dream. Then I immediately picke up his Civil War-era story, Woe To Live On (how’s that for an ‘up’ title? It was turned into a movie by Ang Lee a few years back and someone, possibly interested in getting people to actually go see this, decided to change the title to Ride With The Devil) and it was even better. Just masterful writing. Gloriously lyrical in his language, great memorable characters and Woodrell finds hope and light in some horribly dark scenarios. Woe To Live On really inspired me to try writing the 19th century prose that the narrator of Ichabod speaks – for better or for worse. I’ve just picked up two more of his novels off ebay. This is the most excited I’ve been about a novelist in years.
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