I’m kicking off something new for the newsletter: A regular sub-series where I’ll be talking to writers, artists and creators about how and why they do what they do. I’m calling it “A Lot to Process.” (Get it? Because it’s about the artistic process, and everything in the world is a lot to process right now.)

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a process junkie, and after my last newsletter where I talked about art and reading about other artists’ processes, I thought, “Hey, I know a lot of creative people. I could ask them about how they do what they do!”

Meet Alejandro Arbona

It’s always good for a creator to have a crew, and I’m very lucky to have a good one. Once upon a time, I worked for a company called “Wizard Entertainment,” which was ostensibly a magazine company but was mostly an excuse for a bunch of dudes (and we were, I’m sorry to say, mostly dudes) to engage in arrested adolescence and have a lot of fun with comics and toys. The friendships I made there, naturally, are some of my most enduring.

Because we all loved comics, naturally a bunch of us also wanted to be writers. I’m proud to say that many of my Wizard friends are extremely talented creators, and I’ll be talking to a bunch of them over the coming months for “A Lot to Process,” starting with my friend Alejandro Arbona.

Alejandro Arbona is a writer of comic books, graphic novels, prose, and other media, a comics educator, a former filmmaker, and a 20-year veteran comics editor. Proudly born and raised in Puerto Rico, Alejandro is now based in New York City.

Alejandro’s current project with artist Gavin Guidry is called Lake Yellowwood Slaughter. It’s the “official comic adaptation” of a movie that doesn’t exist — an ’80s slasher film shot through with an Italian giallo horror sensibility.

The idea for the comic came from one of our friend group’s pandemic-era virtual movie nights. (I missed this one!) While watching Sleepaway Camp 2, Alejandro says, “We were all kind of reminiscing about childhood summer camp memories. And I jokingly, I just said, imagine a slasher movie where the parents are excited to have their child-free summer of sex and booze and drugs. And then the killer goes after them instead.”

Justin: I know the origin story of the germ of the idea of Yellowwood. What did you do to bring it from that germ to a full story?

Alejandro: I have strong feelings about comics versus movies, how each one is its own unique medium. Once I got the idea for Lake Yellowwood Slaughter, one of the things that really excited me about it was the challenge of specifically doing "a movie" as a comic. Movies and comics are not the same, and doing "a movie" as a comic is not as simple as it sounds.

I went to film school, I learned to make movies. More importantly I learned to write screenplays. But then I used that experience and those skills to break into a career in comics. Learning how comics are made, under the hood, meant learning a completely different storytelling language, even though both are exercises in visual storytelling. I brought all my knowledge of how to make movies to bear on learning to make comics, and learning to make comics gave me new insights into how movies are made. I began to learn the critical distinctions between each medium, what each one could do, what each one did differently, and what things each one couldn't do.

So when I hit on the idea that I wanted to do a comic that would riff on a specific kind of movie, the very first obstacle was how. You can't just imitate the conventions of moviemaking in a comic because they're totally different. You don't have music, you don't have sound effects, a scream doesn't have the same visceral effect that makes your pulse spike. Most importantly, you don't have the same control over the passage of time. When you're watching a movie, you surrender yourself to the movie unfolding in its own time. When you're reading, whether you're reading a comic or prose or anything, you control the passage of time. You can read as slow or as fast as you want, you can linger over a single bit and read it over and over again, you can do whatever you want.

So the first thing I knew was that I wanted to do a comic that would be "a movie" but the next thing I realized after that was that I wanted to shift it as far away from moviemaking conventions as it was possible to go.

In light of that, the very second idea that came to me, right after thinking of the premise, was the idea of doing it as "the official comic book adaptation." Right away my favorite thing about this idea was that I'd be separating "movie" from "comic" as far apart as they'd go by deliberately tying them together and calling attention to their similarities. I hope that by underlining how connected they are, it works even better how much I'm trying to pull them apart.

At this point I'm still talking about vague medium and genre things, not the actual story, but those ideas started to come quickly after that. I can't exactly describe how I developed the ideas without getting into spoilers about the plot, because I started with the big picture, but I knew I wanted to pursue a few things.

I'm pretty allergic to doing a story that doesn't have some kind of social commentary or that isn't about something real that gives me strong feelings, so this quickly became about that in a lot of ways. I started to think about the characters and the relationships between them, and those relationships are governed by various issues, primarily class. I came up with this story's version of the "Final Girl," and about how class and wealth in adulthood would bring a twist to that old slasher trope. And since all those old summer camps always appropriated Native American names and all kinds of Native vocabulary, I quickly hit on the idea of making it a story about stolen land.

I love those old '80s and '90s comic book adaptations of movies. I especially loved when a super-violent, gory, R-rated movie would get adapted as a comic book which, at the time, would have been all-ages-friendly and "Approved by the Comics Code Authority." There were comic book adaptations of Nightmare on Elm Street, of Robocop, of Darkman. Some of those movies also got adapted into cartoons and toy lines at the time, which is even wilder. So that quickly became part of what I wanted to do here, was to do a super-violent, gory, blood-soaked horror movie, but do it with florid narration captions and grawlix "#$@!%"-style swearing.

There were ideas I discarded, too. Like at one point I thought it could be funny, during a pitched and suspenseful sequence like a chase or something, to include random panels of someone shredding electric guitar or pounding the keys on a synthesizer, to suggest the soundtrack that would play during that scene in a movie. But then I decided that didn't really contribute enough without just being confusing, since it ultimately didn't serve the medium.

Justin: So the "movieness" of it was always part of the idea. How did you bring in Giallo and decide to meld that with slashers?

Alejandro: I was already starting to get obsessed with giallo at the time, and at first, it was just an impulse. By the time the idea hit, I was fully in the tank with Dario Argento movies like Deep Red and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Tenebrae and I quickly thought I wanted to skew more toward that than the slasher style. I love slasher movies, but they're pretty plain, while giallo has these incredible color palettes and extravagant settings.

But I started to develop the idea, and I watched a ton more giallo movies, branching further afield into other directors like Sergio Martino and Luciano Ercoli, and then I started to realize that it was like serendipity. My instinct to make it a giallo actually suited the premise of this book perfectly. Slasher movies usually have a cast of teen victims, in teen settings, like high school, the dance, summer camp, babysitting, the suburbs. Giallo movies, which preceded slashers by the way, usually featured adult casts, people in their 30s and 40s, people with money and exciting careers and expensive homes, often fancy apartments in the city, or big country mansions. So in hindsight, this idea that the killer would be a summer-camp slasher who saw the parents heading to their lakeside mansions and followed them there, it actually dovetailed perfectly with the gag that it's a slasher movie until the killer literally walks out of that genre, crosses the lake, and walks into the trappings of the other genre.

Justin: So to back out of Yellowwood for a second, how do you determine which ideas to pursue and turn into a full project?

Alejandro: I have notebooks and notebooks piled high with the detritus of ideas that never panned out as anything, and they usually have the same things in common. I guess I tend to get ideas starting with the big picture, like the main setting or the overall premise or a key theme, but those ideas are only going to amount to anything when you can flesh out a human story within that. Sometimes I've hit on a premise that sounds irresistibly fun, but when I start trying to imagine living human beings behaving like real people within that idea, it just doesn't come to life.

With Lake Yellowwood Slaughter, I started from the outside in, with the genre and the time period and the tropes and the clichés, but when I started thinking it through as a story, I found the old friendships, the characters' inner lives, the frictions that would really spark something. I've had ideas where that elevator pitch is a killer, but if the humanity within the story never comes alive, I just can't do anything with them. I'm thinking of an idea right now that I've been glancing at from time to time in a notebook that I'd still love to develop someday, but if that real spark of life doesn't manage to animate it, it'll never go anywhere.

Justin: Do you ever start with character and back into a high concept? Or always vice versa?

Alejandro: I'd love to say that sometimes there's a character living in my head and then I build a story around them, but I'm failing to think of any examples I've ever come up with that way, not a single one. For me it always seems to start with the high concept. Then again, I like writing genre stories, so that tends to start with a weird world or a what-if or a premise.

Justin: That’s the same for me, by the way. Anything else about your process I didn’t touch on?

Alejandro: One thing that comes to mind is how much writing and rewriting there is, or isn't, depending on the person.

A writer I know doesn't like to share his comic book ideas until they're done. DONE. Written, scripted, all the way through the end, all scripts finished. Not even with the potential artist, or publishers, or even with other writers just shooting the breeze and kicking ideas around. That couldn't be further from the way I work. The minute I have a new idea, and I mean the very instant I have a new idea, I run it by my best friend who's also a writer and editor. I can tell from his reaction if it works. I just texted him an idea the other day and he replied "Neat!" and nothing else, and I thought, "Yeah, that one's a non-starter." But without fail, when the idea's good, he thinks of some brainstorm like "Oh but then what if THIS happens" and that always makes it better.

The next step after that is writing an outline that's maybe one page, very brief, very sketchy, just the vaguest arc. I share that with an artist I might want to collaborate with. That was the point when I brought Gavin aboard Lake Yellowwood Slaughter, for example. His initial reply was that he wasn't a major fan of slashers, but that his wife was, and he told her the idea, and SHE loved it, so he agreed to do it. And it's only after that, when at least two or three other people have weighed in, that I start fleshing out a detailed outline and writing a script.

I've had this conversation with that writer friend and suggested he give it a try, because he really suffers and grinds over detailed scripts for months before anyone ever hears his ideas, and it makes his pace of work pretty slow and laborious. But that's just not the way he works. Meanwhile his way of working is anathema to me. Everything I've written has turned out way better because the artist and others have been collaborators all the way from the idea stage.

My thanks to Alejandro for his time and the insights into his process. You can find him on Bluesky.

My hope is to do one of these “A Lot to Process'“ newsletters each week, interspersed with regular newsletters. Fortunately, I know a lot of creators and creative people! (Some of them never even worked for Wizard!)

If you have any thoughts on this format, or ideas of who I should talk to, drop me a line. Thanks for reading!