Thursday, October 11, 2007

On Writing Comics and Graphic Novels


An Essay
by Douglas Bushong

If you have never written a comic book before, it will probably be very difficult for you at first. Stan Lee often tells a story about Mario Puzo approaching him about writing a comic book. Stan gave him an assignment, and didn't hear from Puzo for about two weeks. At the end of that time, Mario came back and told him that he couldn't do it (I believe the phrase was "too tiresome").

He then went on to write The Godfather.

There are many difficult things that comic book writers have to deal with that text writers don't. First, there is very little narration in comics. There's no need to describe the scene, as the picture does that for you. As a writer, you simply need to make sure that you convey to your artist the scenes that you need to see. Second, and somewhat tied to the first, is that comics are very dialogue heavy. This is why some dialogue intensive screenwriters, like Kevin Smith, have little trouble transitioning into and out of comics.

Finally, comic writers must be able to segment and compartmentalize their work. If you are doing a story arc that spans 6 books, then you must write it as six 22-page stories that combine to form one big story. Each must stand on its own, to some degree, so that a new reader picking up in the middle of the arc won't be completely lost.

If you want some good resource material, I strongly recommend Making Comics by Scott Mccloud. He gives an outstanding explanation of the fundamentals, including storyboarding and panel-to-panel transitioning. Further, the book itself is written like a graphic novel, so every lesson that it teaches shows instead of tells.

An "arc" is a story within a story. It is a term that is used regularly for mini-stories within ongoing shows. Basically, every ongoing soap opera story has one or more arcs going on regularly. One of the more popular arcs was the Marty Saybrook/Todd Manning rape trial on the show "One Life to Live", back in the early 1990's. You've probably heard that professional wrestling is a "soap opera for men." Just like the daily soaps, professional wrestling has its own story arcs (though they sometimes call them "angles").

Some great examples of story arcs in daily comics can be found in the Funky Winkerbean comic. While it is mostly a comedy bit, the author has tackled some serious issues, such as teenage pregnancy, post-war mine fields (no kidding), adopted children searching for their real parents, and breast cancer. In fact, one of the main characters of the comic died from breast cancer just yesterday (the arc had been going on for months). If you are interested in reading some of these, they can be found online.

I suspect that the breast cancer arc will be added shortly to the others on that page.

Some good examples of story arcs in superhero comics were Marvel's "Dark Pheonix Saga" and "Infinite Gauntlet" series, as well as DC's "Armageddon 2001/Waverider" arc. The Armageddon 2001 arc was very interesting because it spanned across several different titles. He kept popping in and out of other characters' comics.

1 comment:

Dawn said...

Just wanted to add that Diana Gabaldon also wrote comic books. She wrote for Disney and even won an award for one. She also wrote scholarly scientific articles, was a leading expert on some kind of computer software. I've often wondered how her comic book experience helped her with novel writing.