Graphic Novel - the life and ideas of Douglas Harding

Over the last two or three years I (Richard Lang) have been working on a project with a friend, Victor Lunn-Rockliffe. Victor had seen the film I made about Douglas Harding and suggested Douglas' life and philosophy would be a good subject for a graphic novel. I had never worked on such a project before, so Victor told me more about his ideas, and I said Yes! It has been a learning curve for me – hard work, and great fun. We have now completed about 80 pages, and have perhaps 10 more to do – followed by an in-depth editing process.  

My job has been to write the script. We agreed that in the main we would have a theme per page. So I have picked out important events and ideas in Douglas' life, and boiled each down to a page, keeping the words, including dialogue, to a minimum. I get as clear as I can on the content of each page, and each frame, then email the details to Victor. And Victor transforms my ideas into images. Magic! 

Here is a page we have just completed (June 2015). In the late 1980s Douglas was writing 'The Trial of the Man who said he was God' - it's a sizeable book. In many ways, the 'accused', the man in the dock, was Douglas, but the book is a fictional courtroom drama, and gave Douglas an opportunity to 'defend' headlessness in depth - to show how it was true, how it made sense, how it was sane... It also gave him room to wax lyrical about Who we really are. This page gives an overview of 'The Trial' – all 384 pages of it on one page!

We are looking forward to sharing the whole of our graphic novel, when it is ready.

When I send the ideas for a page to Victor, he first does a rough drawing, then a detailed drawing. To see these drawings for this page, click here.