Now that some time has passed since finishing Nighthawks, and while I am slowly mulling over my next story and wondering whether to make it a (mostly) wordless comic, I’ve had a bit more time to mull over Nighthawks and the lessons learned in the process of plotting and drawing the story. I realise I do not spend a lot of time on the artwork, personally the story is more important and the artwork merely serves as a vehicle for conveying that story to the reader. There are some panels I wish I had been more careful with, but I am not about to go back and change it now. I should be thinking more about my next story and the new drawing style I need to utilise. Today is also our 10th anniversary; time really flies. Tonight, I will drink a toast to another happy ten years.
I suppose that writing and inking a story in the stream-of-consciousness, mostly unplanned, extemporising way meant that Nighthawks became a few pages longer than I had originally envisaged, the feedback I have received so far suggests that the story still seemed fairly seamless, each page segued into the next one without too much disjointedness, despite the weeks I sometimes left between drawing and planning each page. I had a rough plot in mind and although I wasn”t completely sure exactly how I was going to end it (until the very last page), I already knew the sort of low-key ending I wanted. The story was always going along the lines of Joe, the solipsistic waiter, who lives inside his own head, and strives to create an impression of a somewhat more exciting life. Perhaps the reader would empathise more with Joe as there was never any question about him being a dangerous stalker, only perhaps a rather creepy one. The title of Hopper’s painting, Nighthawks, also carried with it a sort of subconscious suggestion as to the type of story I would write; marauding hawks and their prey, set in the central scene of a lonely flourescent-lit diner late at night – the sort of greasy spoon that I would usually take pains to avoid but never cease to be fascinated by nevertheless.
While I have never particularly admired Hopper’s technical skills as a painter, the Nighthawks painting has a special resonance for me, partly because the diner seems to me like a safe port in a storm. The entire street is dark, the surrounding buildings are closed, shuttered off, unavailable to the viewer, but the corner diner is brightly and starkly lit, and there are people in there. None of them seem to be interacting despite their proximity to each other, each seems lost in his or her own thoughts. The Nighthawks, hunter and prey together, are closed off to one another in the isolation and loneliness of the big city. I made one subtle allusion to the title of the painting when Joe writes about the woman and describes her as a ‘poor, lost bird’ lost in the frozen night. He might as well have been writing about himself.
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