Oklahoma writer Rob Vollmar brings Twin Cities comic script to Twitter

Graphic-novel author Rob Vollmar, as illustrated by his “Bluesman” collaborator, Pablo Callejo.

Norman writer Rob Vollmar is involved in what may be a Twitter first – he’s tweeting the script to his planned comic book “The Twin Cities,” 140 or fewer characters at a time.

Twitter is a micro-blogging site on which users share their thoughts in 140-character bursts, called “tweets,” with users who have chosen to follow them on the site. Twitter also can be used via cell phone and a variety of other applications.

Vollmar wrote the Eisner Award-nominated “The Castaways” and “Bluesman,” which has been optioned for film. Vollmar said his Twitter breakthrough came about as he tried to figure out how to use Twitter in a way that would be of interest to readers.

Art from Vollmar's Bluesman, by Pablo Callejo.

“I didn’t have the faintest idea what to do with Twitter,” Vollmar said in a phone interview. “I had the account. I kept staring at it. I would occasionally poke it with a stick to see what happened. I was really having trouble getting my brain around the technology to use it in a meaningful way.”

Vollmar decided that a comic script, broken up as it is into discrete units, might make for a better experience on Twitter than a novel or something in longer form.

Vollmar is tweeting a page per day from the “Twin Cities” script at twitter.com/robvollmar. He’s organized the tweets so readers can read each page in order, rather than posting it chronologically from first to last. (However, the overall pages are in reverse order, as he posts a new page each day.)