Top o’ the day toadies,
We venture into Autumn with a new chapter of Satterwhite & Fosgrove! If you need to get caught up you find the first three comics: here, here and here.
When we last left the titular duo, Satterwhite was finishing up a double murder investigation in Kansas City, and Fosgrove was chasing a bounty through the woods, but then was left to rot in a giant hole. In this story, we find them reunited, only to be thwarted by a group of thieving bushwhackers.
Any serious writer knows that reading is a huge component of the craft. It spurs you on, either through inspiration or envy, and it draws you in, into new worlds and fresh concepts. Reading is the thread in which the writer weaves their tapestries.
I’ve read, and continue to read, a healthy stack of books in preparation for writing All-True – specifically Satterwhite & Fosgrove – and have gleaned a lot of nuggets of truth and myth from those experiences. What’s interesting is how these details make their way into the story.
Many books, fiction and non, are part of the Satterwhite & Fosgrove elixir. They may not come to the forefront of plot and character, but they’re found in the filigree of every page and panel. Like, when reading about the history of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, there are so many interesting factoids on Allan Pinkerton’s successful PI business and its transformation into an army for private capital. The books on forensic science and violent crime helped develop how deductive reasoning may have gone down 150 years ago. Ruminations on the spy novel and its role in American literature help guide the story along the track from mystery to resolution. Writings on Jesse James, his life, his family and the political world he was born into provide depth and authenticity to this period piece. Rereading the Aeneid helped guide the ideas behind the central adventure of the story, as well as tether the comic’s themes to the past. And of course, several comic books, from Jonah Hex to Stray Bullets to Suicide Squad not only contributed plot ideas, but also a visual coda. Not a lot of the above is prudent to the adventure tale of two detectives in the West, but we’ve tried to squeeze it into the nooks of the story.
I would be remiss not to gush about the rest of the team on this comic. Mauro, already equipped with vast talent, seems to improve with each chapter. He navigated these text-heavy pages wonderfully, and there’s a fight scene towards the end that is basically perfect. The wordier segments were astutely handled by Nikki; only a few lines of my precious dialogue were cut. Editor extraordinaire Claire has been a guiding voice since the first script, and her suggestions on how to think and rethink these characters and their motives shows up subtly all over the place, even outside of the comic page. Overall, I am blessed to have such insanely skilled collaborators on my longest, and most complex, story.
If you have any suggestions on further readings on the Old West and its people, feel free to hit me up! My “To Be Read” pile is massive but I’m always looking for new entries.
Westward!
~Jamil
