Quinn the Confessor

From Shadow and Light, Volume 4    

Part 1 of an occasional series on NBM’s Amerotica and Eurotica creators and their work.

"Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires."  WILLIAM BLAKE

In Volume 4 of Quinn’s original Shadow and Light series, his heroines do things that shock them.  What they do happens to be sexual.  Their stories, declares the author, are true; only the names have been changed “to protect the not-so-innocent-at-all.”  These women claim, in a get-this/surprised-myself moment of clarity, that their behaviour is out of character for them.  Their behaviour isn’t, not truly. 

Sometimes, the women and men in Quinn’s stories are forced to perform the acts they do, but always they want to—they are eager to.  All that has happened is that their genuinely erotic behaviour reveals a part of their nature they may only have suspected could assert itself.

This revelation of the sexy beasts we all can be, and of the secret desires we all have—followed by their inevitable unravelling and nursing—makes the five volumes of Quinn’s Shadow and Light (NBM, 1998-2004) highly charged and deservedly disturbing studies of human eroticism.

These are fully formed graphic novels, which, with their French flaps and oil-painted covers, read like fine art albums.  The neo-realist interiors are graphite on watercolour, very sensual, very mood-inducing.  Visually, Quinn falters only once throughout the series, in Volume 5, “The Neighbour, Part 2.”  The artwork is less technically effective and emotionally affecting—there’s too much light, not enough shadow. The sex is glaringly overexposed, draining it of the shuddering intrigue and sly nuance that are felt in the other stories.

Quinn the confessor

But Quinn is the confessor.  He is at his best when he writes and draws his stories like a man who has heard some of the most forbidden and improbable sexual thoughts and feelings from his constituency.  Released from his shady box, he is determined to place us in the basement room with the glory hole, on the kitchen table in an upscale apartment, or in a grimy garage—wherever, naked yet never alone, we might find ourselves stirred to unexpected life.

Although by Volume 3 it’s clear short forms are his strength (the vignette, anecdote or tall tale), a number of Quinn’s stories could be chapters in a longer, more connected work featuring ordinary people with perhaps too much free time in their schedules.  This is significant.  Quinn gives us vital stats—“Woman—Secretary, single, 23yrs,/Man—Occupation unknown, wealthy, single, 45yrs old”—followed by the average bodies of people usually in their twenties, thirties and forties.  His worlds are also meant to be familiar, common.

If breasts are big, they are naturally so.  If a 19-year-old has a magnificent hard-on, well, he’s a healthy young man, and the success of his seduction by two mature women accounts for the rest.  If we glimpse ourselves, fleetingly, in these pages, Quinn’s art invites us to look again, deeply, at the whole picture until we’re turned on by our own reflection: by what we see ourselves doing in it, and with whom, or to whom.

Rod or lash?

Domination is a fundamental aspect of Shadow and Light.  Quinn implies we all desire, sexually, the whip or the chain in some measure, and that this is true regardless of class, whether student or professional, white or black.  He explores with commitment this conceit throughout the series, his most accomplished interpretations occurring in Volume 4.  Here, the reader is never sure who’s really in control, as those involved seem seized by gleeful passions.

There is immense if uneasy poise between Quinn’s words and pictures.  “From the beginning of this series,” he wrote in his introduction to the French La Musardine edition of Volumes 3 and 4, “I was after a balance between the art aesthetic and the direct, pure element of raunch that we all love so much and is essential for the genre of adult graphic novels. I think I got better at this balance with each new story.”  

He did.  Words in Shadow and Light are crucial, noticeably when Quinn’s panelling becomes jumbled, as if all the sex were happening at once, simultaneously and not sequentially.  Even some of his later narratives could be pared for redundancies (see Volume 4, “The Pupil”; the second paragraph of the opening commentary needs striking out); but, in fact, Quinn’s books read/look like word-driven picture books.  This is a wise artistic choice, because we often turn each other on most with words, with telling a lover what we’re going to do to him or her before showing them.

More good news

Another turn on in Shadow and Light is the reminder that, younger or older, there’s always something pleasurable and exciting to discover about our sexuality, maybe something we haven’t tried before or with the right person.  Many of Quinn’s women impress with their voluptuousness and dreaminess and creaminess, but more so with their maturity and ability to seek their satisfaction from either sex without apology.  They revel in cocks that produce more come than they thought possible, in intense anal stimulation, in multiple partners doing multiple things to them, and often in being the catalysts or instigators of the far-flung affair.   

The narrator in Volume 2 is quite right: “There will always be some thresholds that are impossible to step back over.  The power of certain experiences shifts our vantage point slightly or dramatically, but with certainty….”  Yet how “real” these experiences are may actually be of less concern to Quinn than how we live with the shifts their possibility elicit within us.  The repetition in Volume 4 of phrases like “juice pours out of me” or “come undone” by various characters suggests these as-told-to stories may owe more to fiction than fact after all.  No matter.  It is Quinn’s imagination that makes us believers in the sexy secrets of the heart he knows shockingly well.

The first two and a half volumes of the original Shadow and Light series are currently available from NBM in a hardcover edition.  Quinn is still working on the long promised Volume 6 in the series.  Its projected release date is 2015, at which time NBM intends to reissue, in hardcover and paperback, the remaining two and half volumes in the original series.

· Robert is the critically acclaimed author of the NBM Amerotica titles Attractive Forces, Stray Moonbeams and Great Moves.  His other books include the novel And Sometimes They Fly; the story collections Intimacy 101: Rooms & Suites, The Tree of Youth and Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall; and the memoir Sand for Snow: A Caribbean-Canadian Chronicle.

The art of turning erotic prose into comics erotica

With the 2013 publication of Intimacy 101: Rooms & Suites, my collection of erotic prose fiction, I realized I’d been fortunate to script all three volumes of my comics erotica for NBM: Attractive Forces, Stray Moonbeams and Great Moves.  In adapting my own short stories, I’ve worked with some fine artists, namely Justin Norman, Brandon Graham and Geof Isherwood. 

You’d think it would be easy to adapt your own work to another medium.  Intimacy 101 reminds me it isn’t always. What you’re working toward is not so much a faithful translation as much as a dynamic interpretation that offers new ways of seeing and appreciating a story.

Some can do it.  Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Charles Fuller’s stage-to-screen adaptation of A Soldier’s Play as A Soldier’s Story was as good as it gets.  Others can’t, not quite.  Alice Walker’s script for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple was passed over for Menno Meyjes’. 

I’ve had my prose stories called “compelling and erotic” by publishers, with “detail [that] is uncommonly vivid.”  Unfortunately, not even the quality of a story is of much use if the structure’s not resurrected soundly.

The most challenging of my prose erotica to adapt to comics has been Great Moves’ title story.  The original version plays with chronology.  Part 1 deals with a man’s encounter with a seductive young woman in a Montreal motel’s lounge bar.  Part 2 goes to the morning after and how the experience has left the man.  Part 3 backtracks to the night itself, and what really happened between him and the woman.

I tried to preserve the tricky timeline in the comic.  It read as confusing to Terry Nantier, my publisher and editor.  I considered his comments, offered another rewrite.  “Sorry,” he said, “still confusing.”  After a couple more email exchanges, I decided to stand down.  We went with a linear timeline: evening, night, morning after.

That the graphic novels I’ve produced for NBM have been aesthetically pleasing as well as stimulating has had much to do with Terry’s firm but fair guidance.  They are among titles from NBM that he calls “intelligently written [books] that really explore human sexuality and the experience of it.”  Terry makes sure I don’t outsmart myself in living up to those expectations.

There was no worry of that with “I Often Wondered What Your Face Would Look Like Were I to Make Love to You,” the middle story in Attractive Forces.  The prose version leaned toward the lyrical; it contained snippets of questioning, poetic reverie by the narrator.  There was already an implicit balance between words and images that was easy to transfer to the comic. 

I suggested minimal panelling and asked the artist to play with its arrangement.  The words with pictures are simultaneously intimate and isolating, echoing one of my favourite lines from Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”: We live—as we dream—alone.”

A fan-favourite in Attractive Forces is the last story, “Mirror Image.”  Since re-titled “Open Doors,” I took a Marvel-style approach to the script, merely describing what happens from page to page as the characters see, think and dream about each other.  The artist did the rest.  The result is pure sequential art and effective storytelling.  In fact, I used a different format for each script I wrote for Attractive Forces to generate a distinct mood and atmosphere from one story to the next.

My personal favourite from my comics erotica trilogy is “In the Mood,” the last story in Stray Moonbeams.  Of the 12 stories in these graphic novels, it’s the only one not based a prose story.  It came to me in images: a woman meets a man in a club, whom she beds because of the size of his ears….  It shows how a meaningful relationship can evolve from a whimsical or near flaky decision. 

What makes “In the Mood” and the stories I’ve written important and moving to me is their description of the heart of Caribbean folk, which is Creole at core, not exclusively black or white or what have you.  We often hear, backed by gospel strains of Harlem Renaissance fervour, about the souls of black folk.  The Diaspora’s philosophies and aesthetics are on display, too, in countless stories and poems and discourses and songs, from Aesop’s time to the present.  All this is impressive.  But there’s still plenty to be written about how we love, whatever the medium.