SUSAN BY GREYHOUND and SUSAN IN COPA ALDEA Images, sketches and drawings by Jen Frankel
"Susan By Greyhound" and "Susan in Copa Aldea" are a pair of novella-length stories of which one, the former, is actually finished. They've been naughty stories, hard to settle down and pick a form. I thought for a while -- maybe still think -- that they would be far better as comics, and have done random pages here and there to work out the ideas on paper. The extant chunk of "Susan In Copa Aldea" includes the funky cartoons that comprise part of this series of images.
YOUTH VAMPIRE - This pencil illustration is the frontispiece of the chapbook edition of "Susan By Greyhound" I published a while back. It shows the villain of the piece, the woman who's lived for thousands of years by "downloading" her experiences into others and stealing away their youth while become younger and younger herself. She doesn't realize that the sacrifice means that she has not only no continuity, but no purpose.
SUSAN 2 - Susan, about age 15, trying to make sense of the fact that she's aged almost en years in two days.
SUSAN 2 - This drawing includes what came to be the first lines of "Susan By Greyhound," but maybe the start of "Copa Aldea" (here called Copa Villa) will be the same. The person is not Susan, but (as I've labelled it) apparently "some untalented drama scum," Susan's words, I'm sure, not mine. But she is wearing a shirt I had at her age with FRONT on the front and BACK on the back. Sometimes I wore it backwards, just for fun.
SUSAN 3 - Here, Susan is wearing the FRONT/BACK shirt. In "Copa Aldea," she ages in three days from 7 to 18, and here I'm trying to work out the signposts along that bizarre and disorienting road.
SUSAN 4 - Never one to jump into a story with a firm plan in mind, this is the first page of a series of ideas following Susan into Copa Aldea, to her friend Heather's confusing and dangerous school, and into the path of her own destruction. Someday, I WILL get to the end of the story. . .
SUSAN 5 - A picture I love. I'd love to paint it, in fact. It shows Susan in the office of Heather's school trying to get answers about how to find her friend while livestock roams, the ceiling drips, and everyone is way too happy filing reams of blank paper. There's a filthy sign for "National Tidiness Week," another that says, "You don't have to be crazy to work here; you'll be that way soon anyway," and there appears to be a dead man on the far filing cabinet.
SUSAN 6 - The centerpiece of this sketch is a map of Heather's school which will not help Susan in the least. According to the text, the only room labelled turns out to be a boiler room.
SUSAN 7 - This drawing is of a fanciful "elevator" I came up with for the school which looks like a leaf or bird and is directed with a joystick. It not only ascends the shaft but can fly you to your room as well, and returns on its own when you're done with it. I don't know how it operates -- science or magic -- but either is a fair guess in this world.
SUSAN 8 - Susan meets her "roommate," who is variously named Marcia or Marsha or half a dozen other things. I still haven't settled on one. I was being clever, having Susan seen reflected in the mirror behind the other girl's head.
SUSAN 9 - Here, I find better faces for both Susan and her roomie; I think "Marsha" might be mixed race, and Susan especially at the age of seven is no beauty.
SUSAN 10 - I like the idea of Susan having nightmares in the strange room and strange bed, with nothing but vague warnings about bad things happening that could terrify any child. I would definitely fall into common bad dream imagery in a re-working of this moment, especially to contrast with the very adult and even more confusing and horrifying realities she will soon face.
SUSAN 11 - The next morning, Susan is older in appearance by a few years, although no one else seems to notice the change. Without an adult or authority figure to talk to, she accepts the change but remains troubled.
SUSAN 12 - This is the last picture I did during this phase of development of the idea. I do like to leave myself at a cliffhanger moment; it's always easier to get back into the flow of storytelling if you end at a point where you are forced to start asking questions that drive the flow of the narrative forward. In this case, what are the girls going to do to find Heather? Is anyone looking out for them at all? How old will Susan be by noon? The end of the day?
25 artworks that Jen Frankel plans to never ever actually create.
The 25 Imaginary Works series started off as a kind of a joke: to create a description of something that could never be achieved in actual media of any sort, but that would stimulate the imagination. Now they exist as twenty-five framed calligraphic treatments, digital versions of the same, and as post- and greeting cards. Eight have been made into short animated films. So twenty-five bits of impossibility have developed what you might call a life of their own, entirely outside the realm of the abstract and yet still without the potential (or at least the likelihood) to be rendered the way they themselves say they should be.
