While I was living and working in Germany, I went on several trips around Europe. It was in Cadiz, in Spain, that a bolt of lightning struck me. I was standing in a comic shop looking at a graphic novel, when an image of the graphic novel version of Success! came into my head. After years of having the idea laying dormant in my imagination and being unable to concieve of a way to marry sequential images with printed music, It occurred to me that the solution was simple.
I could place the action of the comic, the pictures, the panels, all the drawings, basically, in between the vocal staves and the piano part. It would be like having a score with sequential drawings in the place of an instrument! I left the comic shop buzzing with excitement.
When I returned home to Bad Homburg, I made this sketch.
First sketch of what would become the comic book version of Success!
At this point, I hadn’t decided whether to write the music by hand, or use printed music. This sketch cemented my decision. This sketch took me hours to make, from drawing, to laying out the elements, to scanning, to cleaning up, and there are still some wonky lines and some weird mistakes. But the music, it turned out, was the most difficult part. So, I figured out that if I were to draw the entire comic, it would take me about 10 years to finish by hand. I decided, then, to cut some corners.
Around that time my friend Anthony came to visit me and we went on a short trip to Berlin. He told me about drawing tablets that photographers use to edit their photographs. He used one for retouching or for doing different designs. With a tablet and my MacBook, I could draw my comic directly onto the computer in Photoshop, make digital versions of the music, and put everything together, again in Photoshop. This was what I needed! So in 2011, in a Mediamarkt in Berlin I bought a Bamboo tablet and got down to work.
But there were problems. Drawing on a tablet proved difficult and time-consuming. Drawing on a horizontal plane but looking at the lines emerge on a vertical plane was mind-boggling. Again it took a long time to finish a single page. In 2011 and ‘12 I drew the first half of the Prologue (from Nicholas’s entrance to the panel with the debutante in the bar) on the BAMBOO tablet. You can see how different those pages look from the rest of the comic. Still, I like some of the details I was able to get with the different brush sizes. In around 2012 I shelved the comic part of the project for a while.
In 2012, just before leaving Germany to go back to Portland, OR for a short stint, I had discovered the story writing engine Dramatica. After submitting the play to a local Portland musical theater guru and receiving a reply with 28 revision notes, I decided Success needed an overhaul. I revised the script a few more times, until, in 2013, I submitted the play to the National Music Theater Conference, where it made the 3rd round of selections before ultimately being rejected.
My short stint in Portland became rather longer than I had hoped. I ended up taking a pause from Success! in order to write songs for Rich Rubin’s play Happy Valley. I met Rich through Rachel Sakry, a wonderful composer and songwriter who’s self-produced performance of her play Whatever Girl inspired me to want to stage Success! Of course, staging a play is very expensive, and very difficult. I submitted the play to several local theater companies, none of whom wanted to take it on. So I revised it again and settled on a table reading. I recruited some great Portland actors and in 2015 my then fiancée and I invited people over for a round-the-table performance. Following the table reading, Success got another revision and another submission to the National Music Theater Conference. It was rejected again, having again made it to the third round of selections.
My “short stint” in Portland became longer than I expected and I didn’t make progress on Success until 2016.