The Writer’s Secret

In the comment thread after my Who Remembers Guru? post last summer, I mentioned that I wanted to try my hand at creating a similar “comic strip collage” using public domain images. A few weeks later I did a sort of trial run with the cover image for Jill Trent and the Flying Saucer Mystery, but with plenty of idle time over the Christmas break I thought I’d try something a little more ambitious.

I had a look round for a suitable idea, and came across this unpublished poem I wrote several years ago:

A world-renowned writer named Blott
Said of genres, “I’ve written the lot:
From horror and mystery
To fantastical history
And all of them have the same plot!”

Turning this into a Guru-style cartoon wasn’t as easy as I thought. There are thousands of free images on the web, but finding ones that fit (both thematically and stylistically) was harder than I’d expected. Also, the last line caused problems because it doesn’t have a natural visual interpretation. A fairly obvious idea did spring to mind, but I couldn’t use it on account of the “no porn” clause in Blogger’s terms and conditions. So I decided to go with a more abstract notion instead.