Stuff Jack Likes

I love writing, stories, and words–individually or together.  If I ever look up a word, nine times out of ten it’s to look up the word’s origin.  I spend a lot of time on the website Behind the Name, which will tell you the origin and meaning of first names.  I love seeing how words and stories are put together through different media–plays, songs, poems, stories…and comic books.  I love comic books, graphic novels, and the like.

I recently discovered a great graphic novel called I Kill Giants, written by Joe Kelly and drawn by JM Ken Nimura.  It’s the story of a young, misfit girl coping with a missing father, a dying mother, and much more.  She is obsessed with giants, and tells people that she is a giant hunter.  It’s difficult to tell if this is a real activity or just a fantasy constructed to somehow deal with her difficult life, but either way it’s a story that is at once magical and very real.  This story is not just written with words, either–it’s written with incredible images.  The words and the images work together perfectly to form a rhythm, producing a story that has a beating heart.  Read this and I think you’ll start to get where I come from as a writer and theatre artist.