7/2 ‘In Xanaduum…’

Director's Commentary

LAB artefact #002

‘In Xanaduum…’

There follows a brief insight into the infrastructure of the creative process where seemingly disconnected and fleeting notions begin to coalesce into clumps of associated meaning and slowly fuse into a potent tangle of possibility capable of strangling Reason itself.

PAGE 1 development art

The initial seed of an idea that germinated into ‘In Xanaduum…’ was an idle speculation on the nature of a sperm’s journey towards the egg; as we know millions of these spermatozoa set out with great enthusiasm and high hopes on the journey but only one makes it to the moment of fertilization.

Something about this sequence of events connected in my head with the notion of the sole survivor at the end of slasher films, usually a girl. The Agatha Christie story structure where one by one a group of people are picked off by some malign force… there was something pulsing gently there but still in its genesis, as yet unformed…

This fused concept hummed away in its incubator at the back of my mind extending ungainly potential limbs and branches before finding gruesome purchase in the eerie,  magnificent 14th century Welsh epic The Spoils of Annwn from The Book of Taliesin –  this early Arthurian epic (a lifelong source of inspiration for me, providing the spine for a kitchen-sink fantasy novel I wrote aged 18 entitled The Winds of Chaos and surfacing most recently and notably in my Seven Soldiers series at DC) details a mind-bending and costly voyage by Arthur and his knights into a bizarre Otherworld of revolving glass castles and prisons fashioned of bone.

 ‘And three times the fullness of Prydwen we went into it. Save seven none returned’ recalls the somber refrain.

From these loosely constellated notions – memories disappearing closer to the source of death, the final sperm that fertilizes the egg, the ‘last girl’ from slasher movies, the armies of Camelot reduced to a handful of warriors at the gates of the Otherworld, memories disappearing closer to the source of death – an idea began to develop  form and structure, condensing into the master image of sperm-like drones swimming through a dense and collapsed semiotic landscape in search of – something...

The increasingly vivid emergent ball of connections began to spin, drawing in associated but previously disconnected concepts and feelings to its accelerating gravitational pull. In came a recent reappraisal of my Batman comic Arkham Asylum with Dave McKean. musings on haunted houses, House of Leaves, fragmentary cut-ups, Jack Kirby’s collage work, Mick Travis’ target wall from if…, Orton and Halliwell’s bedsit, the Qabalistic Sphere of Chokmah, Jim Steranko’s At the Stroke of Midnight - until the lightning-struck lump of inert speculation suddenly roared and reared up in all its misshapen glory and terror!

So was born ‘In Xanaduum…’ and from that moment of ignition the story’s beginning, middle and end, its Acts 1, 2 and 3, its scares and reveals, its shocking denouement, unfolded quite naturally and effortlessly into my sketchbooks.

PAGES 1-3 original thumbnails

The faces in the drone screens are only able to show the seven basic emotive expressions – Fear, Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, Surprise and Neutral.

Colour concept art for the Jizzum ‘emotions’

The way they look was inspired by Neal Adams’ powerful anti-war story ‘A View from Without’ where Adams himself portrays an alien whose face appears in a little screen at the top of a recording device playing images from Vietnam. Adams repeats various expressions of shock or horror as the disturbing and all-too real events of the story unfold.

Adding their own mysterious input were the sleeping countenances below glass of the hibernating astronauts from 2001 A Space Odyssey – these never wake or have speaking roles and just lie there through the whole film as wholly passive characters, before being gently killed by the malfunctioning HAL 9000 computer – In Xanaduum could be their adventures in the bardo…

The sperm-drones of course recall the shape of the spacecraft Discovery also from 2001.

The faceplates resemble classic domino ‘burglar’ masks, as worn by superheroes like Robin or Green Arrow.

PAGE 1 & 2 composition development

PAGE 1 script text cut ups

Newspaper cut-ups are from The Sunday Times, the Sun, New Scientist and Closer!

Keeping the collage motif in mind, the Xanaduum mansion is loosely comprised of bits of various houses I’ve owned or lived in.

PAGE 2 development art

Finished pages on the launchpad

What are the drones? What is their mission? Who are their operators – and what does it all mean?

The story continues next month…