By Matt Martin

Even though they’d never met, Jesse Bradley and Adam Mazer collaborated via Google Chat and Facebook Messenger to create their a graphic poetry collection The Bones of Us, a collaborative effort with Jesse’s poetry and Adam’s images.

What inspired Jesse’s and Adam’s collaboration? “My marriage fell apart in April 2010,” explained Jesse. “During the death of the marriage, the divorce, and what came after, I processed the experience through writing. I shopped The Bones of Us around and got encouraging feedback, even was a Write Bloody finalist in 2011. In August 2011, YesYes Books asked to take a look at it. Twenty minutes after sending it to them, the publisher (KMA Sullivan) asked if she could call me. She came up with the idea to turn it into a graphic poetry collection. Almost two years later, we found Adam Scott Mazer, and the adventure truly began.”

So how do two artists in different places complete something as intricate and beautiful as The Bones of Us? According to Adam, not easily, “It varied for each image, but generally it went something like this:  first I’d read through the poem that Jesse sent, several times, just letting my mind wander through the images in the text.  Then I’d make a few quick notes of images that came to mind. Sometimes, these were lines of the actual poem, sometimes they were more expressionistic visuals that I felt captured the feel of Jesse’s words.  Then I’d put the poem down and think about overall composition, drawing a couple of small thumbnail sketches.  I’d settle on one and then do either a more in-depth sketch or just go straight to drawing the actual 11”x14” page.  In this phase, I thought a lot about the movement of the reader’s eye and how to use placement of the text to guide the eye seamlessly over the image.  For the final sketch, I began by drawing a loose, full-size pencil sketch and writing the text in pencil.  Then I used that sketch as a guideline for the ink work, for which I mostly used a No. 2 (natural hair) brush.  This took the vast majority of the time I spent on each page. The final images are about 95% drawn with the brush.  I applied an ink wash for the gray tones, and then finished it off by rewriting the text of the poem with a 05 Micron pen.”

According to Adam, this hybrid graphic poetry collection is, perhaps, one of the first of its kind, “I’m a huge fan of comics and graphic novels of all types, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a full-length “graphic poetry” collection before. I think The Bones of Us marriage of text and art straddles the line between illustrated poetry and experimental comics, carving out its own little genre in the process.”

Jesse agrees, “I think Adam put it best regarding this being a marriage of image and text. There are poems with illustrations out there but they don’t do what The Bones of Us does. There is a strong narrative thread created between the poems and Adam’s images (and subtle callbacks). Ideally, I hope what we’ve created is accessible to anyone, regardless if they have dealt with heartbreak.”

Buy The Bones of Us YesYes Books.

J. Bradley is the author of the graphic poetry collection, The Bones of Us (YesYes Books, 2014), with art by Adam Scott Mazer, the linked story collection The Adventures of Jesus Christ, Boy Detective (Pelekinesis, 2016) and Pick How You Will Revise A Memory (Robocup Press, 2016), a collection of prose poems disguised as Yelp reviews. His flash fiction chapbook, Neil, won Five [Quarterly]’s 2015 e-chapbook contest for fiction. He runs the Central Florida reading series/micro chapbook publisher There Will Be Words and lives at jbradleywrites.com.

Matt Martin is a writer, actor, and producer, a graduate of the Second City Conservatory program in Chicago, owns a bachelors and is working on an MFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia College Chicago. Matt is the Interviews Editor for Hypertext Magazine. Has been published in Hair Trigger, Trilling, Mad Licks, and Fictionary. Matt also writes a sports blog for Chicago Now.