It’s dark, disturbing and surprisingly uplifting.
Inspired by Grimm’s Fairy Tales – the real stories, not the watered-down modern versions – Canmore filmmaker, photographer, writer and artist Joel Abrahamson has created a dark, brooding story about a young woman’s fall from grace and her eventual climb back towards salvation.
For the past decade, Abrahamson, a graduate of the Vancouver Film School, has been developing Alchemy, a full-length film based on a 10-page script he wrote in late 2004.
He says he sees the graphic novel as an extended storyboard to raise interest and funding for the film.
But as a graphic novel, Alchemy stands on it own, especially if you enjoy redemption stories and Grimm’s Fairy Tales. It’s also a testament to the hard work that Abrahamson has put into this endeavour.
“The process of alchemy, refining base metals, basically taking an impure substance and refining it into gold, is impossible. There’s no actual proof this actually happened, but for the story I took this as a metaphor for the protagonist, Becky Sinclaire, who starts in the first book as an impure substance,” he said.
“Red is you light the match and set the whole story on fire. It really is the meat of the story and it really is that process of all the burning and everything coming to a head. Gold will be the final, redemptive part of the story where you are left with the pure substance and she finds salvation.”
He moved back to his hometown of Edmonton after film school, where he got a job in a theatre as a projectionist. Each morning, he’d get up at 6 a.m. and spend half an hour at his desk writing and re-writing.
It took years to accomplish, but it allowed him to chase down his dream, rather than let it slide past him.
“You have to force yourself in the morning, or 3 a.m., whenever your creative time is. Sit there, and it doesn’t matter if you only write two words or you write nothing, some days you might write five pages, but it’s just blocking out that time. It’s a good way to get something done. You can spare 15 minutes. That’s how I got a script I was happy with,” he said recently.
During this time he also refined his ability to draw and the illustrations show his progression taking them from crude to complex.
“You can see in the first chapters the drawings are crude, the first ones I did. They’re artsy, but they’re not Picasso by any stretch,” he said. But he kept at it, refining his techniques and ability.
Interested in the idea of redemption, Abrahamson takes his protagonist and his villains to their absolute awful worst in book one, Black, to beginning to explore their motivations and history in book two, Red.
“You can see the motives behind things and you can see these characters becoming who they were, horrible, and really degrading towards other people, you kind of see their motives towards other people and they become really pathetic and it becomes a sorrowful story and you can understand their motives,” he said. “They’re really messed up and hurt and they hurt other people.”
But like the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Abrahamson’s story has a message and a reason behind the darkness as an exploration of why people do what they do.
“Why are they like that? Why are these horrible people so horrible? What is their motivation, where do they get the anger?” he said.
“People do these really bad things and then at some point you have that point where you feel sorry for them and, not that you want them to succeed, but it reverses from hating them to feeling sorry for them, to where you are almost rooting for them to break out of it. At the same time, there’s still that part where you want to see the whole thing crash down. All those desires definitely get fulfilled in Alchemy. There’s enough to go around.”
Abrahamson is planning to release book three – Gold – after the live-action film is made. As he has always seen Alchemy as a movie, he doesn’t want to give away the ending.
“I tried my best, but with my powers as an artist, and patience, I’m really looking forward to bringing it to the next medium. My powers of an artist were such that I just didn’t have the right skill at that point to be able to do it in the right form I wanted it to be. I’m looking forward to having actors and a camera and bringing this world to life, although it is very dark.”
Go to www.alchemygraphicnovel.com to learn more about Abrahamson’s project or to order copies of Alchemy, books one and two.
