For FOLKTALES, I plan to have a supplementary CD packaged with the book. The CD will include various audio experiments, which I’m calling “radio dramas”, designed to enhance the character and mood development of the graphic short stories as individual pieces, as well as a collection of stories that speak of common themes as a volume. The idea is to broaden or give greater dimension to the stories by telling them in more than one medium. I don’t think of these radio dramas as imitations of the original graphic story because the medium of sound brings to it something new, and the text from the original story has been expanded to encourage elements of mind theatre that are unique to audio performance. I tend to write out my graphic short stories in prose form, then reconfigure them to meet the needs of sequential story telling. This method necessarily leads to eventually cutting out a lot of narration and dialogue, which, for me, isn’t at all easy to do. The radio dramas allow me to resurrect those prose elements and in some cases go further with them. At any rate, here is the first completed radio drama based on stories from FOLKTALES. This one is called “The Passenger”, and it was produced in collaboration with Franklin Oros at Washington University in St Louis. It was a true collaboration in that Frank brought to the table a technical expertise that far exceeded my own and very quickly understood and embraced my vision behind producing these radio dramas.
Also helping in the collaborative process was Nick Francel, who played the vocal role of “Stewie”. Nick is an extremely talented printmaker, cartoonist, and student of mine at Washington University in St Louis, whose work you can see at http://www.roboticarmspress.blogspot.com.
Please excuse the strange title of the audio download. I’m not sure why it ended up with “Hit Mix blah blah blah” for it’s name, it just did. I can’t seem to change it, no matter what I do.
The idea of creating radio dramas – or audio supplements based on characters from my comics – isn’t new for me. In 2004, I produced a CD called “THE MYTH OF JACK RADIO HOUR” with my friend Adam Streed to supplement the “Belligerent Piano” story (see the Belligerent Piano category of this weblog). Below is the cover to that CD, and a couple audio pieces from it.
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