It’s finally here, just in time for New York Comic-Con… Lone Justice Volume 1!
Ask
for it if you don’t see it and order it if it is sold out in your
store! The Diamond order code: JUL100357 LONE JUSTICE TP VOL 01
Or if you don’t have a store near you, order Lone Justice Volume 1
from Amazon.
Day seven, and we’re already seeing script fragments come in. I just read one, and sent back the note: “Decent screenplay, lousy comic.”
Why? Because he took pages to get to the point, a slow tracking shot that revealed very little about the plot, situation, or characters. While that can work on screen, it’s death on a printed page. Get to the point.
Mark Waid has a much better rant on this on this that I do:
At BOOM!, I get a l-o-t of
eight-page scripts that, for no good reason, burn up the entire first
page with a slow zoom into a New York restaurant kitchen. This makes me
homicidal. If your story is about a chef and geography is incidental, just show me the damn kitchen. Tick, tock.
I love RESERVOIR DOGS, but if you handed me a comics script that began
with four pages of gangsters debating the merits of Madonna, I would not
only reject it, I would break your keyboard.In a 22-page comic,
figuring an average of four to five panels a page and a couple of
full-page shots, a writer has maybe a hundred panels at most to tell a
story, so every panel he wastes conveying (a) something I already know, (b) something that’s a cute gag but does nothing to reveal plot or character, or (c) something I don’t need to know is
a demonstration of lousy craft. Comics are expensive. Don’t make me
resent the money I spend buying yours. Every single moment in your
script must either move the story along or demonstrate something important about the characters—preferably both—and every panel that does neither is a sloppy waste of space.
You do this by entering the story as late as possible, telling enough to get people up to speed on the situation and go.
Want an extreme example of this? Here’s the trailer for this past summer’s Knight and Day:
Fine trailer, but it just wrecked the movie– because Cameron Diaz has just explained to Marc Blucas what happened to her in under two minutes what will now take the first half-hour of the film to show– I have to sit through at least thirty minutes to get to where I get new parts of the story.
Don’t waste your limited number of pages, and don’t waste your reader’s time.
Remember: you can follow all the NaGraNoWriMo posts here!
By now, you should have an idea for a story, and you might even know who some of the characters are. Your next question: how are you going to present the story?
To quote the greatest criminal mastermind of our time: “Some people can read War And Peace and come away thinking it’s a simple adventure story.” How you present the story is very important.
Let’s say you were writing a Batman story… why not, everybody else has. What type of Batman story are you going to tell?
Remember, this is a character who’s a cheery Saturday morning cartoon on The Brave and the Bold but he’s also beating people to a pulp in The Dark Knight, a film that pushed the limits of PG-13. He’s a toy for toddlers, a sociopath in Frank Miller’s work, and sometimes just flipping weird in Grant Morrison books. And it all works.
But more on point, the tone of your story has to be considered. It’s easy to contemplate a noir Batman story, but you could just as easily write a science fiction Batman story. Or a comedy. Or a spy story. Or a fable. Or horror. Or musical comedy– okay, it’s tough to do musical comedy in comics, but it’s been done in other media.
And more importantly, you can tell the same sequence of events, but you can frame it in different ways. You can look at your buddy’s romantic troubles as tragic or hilarious– or both, if they’re like my friends.
This will also affect who your choice of artist will be. Granted, you may or may not have control of who will end up drawing your story, but you can write as if you are picking the artist. A Batman story drawn by Jack Kirby will feel much different than one drawn by Neal Adams, and that will feel different than a story drawn by Timothy Truman. But again, you can use that to your advantage. No one will expect a story drawn by, say, Gene Colan to be a laugh riot. And yet, there were a few funny Batman stories that he drew.
Tone is your secret weapon– people expect a comic book story to be told a certain way. Surprise them.
Remember: you can follow all the NaGraNoWriMo posts here!
Day 4. Hopefully by now, you’ve gotten an idea that you might want to turn into a story. However, you may not know how to put it down on paper. What is the format for a graphic novel script?
The short answer is: it varies. There are different variations, based on how different people work and how they expect to collaborate. Remember that a graphic novel usually has other people working with you, and you have to communicate with them before you communicate with the rest of the world. This is why some comics scripts seem conversational in tone, because they’re sending notes to a single artist, maybe remembering that they’re also including the editor, and sometimes the inker, colorist, and letterer in the conversation as well.
There is no one “proper” way to write a script. There are some common formats, however.
Full Script: Pretty much what it sounds like. The script is a modified version of a screenplay, with what should happen in each panel spelled out, including who says exactly what.
Advantages: the writer gets more of what he wants in terms of story pacing, details, killer lines, etc. The editor can look at the script as a complete blueprint and make his comments there, which can be crucial if there are layers of approvals to go through.
Disadvantages: the artist can sometimes be constrained in what he’s doing, and sometimes the writer has not thought the visuals through, so a large chunk of dialogue can overwhelm a panel, and other problems of pacing can appear. And occasionally, the writer will get a bit detailed in his scripting– see any Alan Moore script, for example.
Plot First: This is occasionally referred to as “Marvel Style” because Stan Lee in the early days of Marvel did a lot of his stories this way: the writer would pitch a plot to the artist, hitting the major beats of the story and varying levels of detail, and then the artist would pencil the story. Once the penciled pages were back, the writer would then write dialogue based on what was in the art.
Advantages: It was often faster for one person to crank out a lot of plots and let the artist put in the details. It also freed up the artist to tell the story as he felt best, which often led to more dynamic action sequences and a more fluid style. It also meant the dialogue was fresher, because it was written a month or two closer to publication than full script.
Disadvantages: if the art is incomprehensible, a lot of covering dialogue and captions will have to be jammed in to make it clear. Also, for the purposes of NaGraNoWriMo, it relies on having an artist to draw it so you can come back and dialogue it, so it’s not good for the deadline. But this may work well for you.
Thumbnails: This is a rarer version, but some people swear by it. The writer not only writes the story, but also draws out thumbnails of the entire thing, to show how the people move, how the action happens, and how the shots and pages are composed. The artist then can follow both the script and the thumbnails. Depending on the circumstance, sometimes one person will do a plot and thumbnails, an artist will draw the story, then someone else will come in and dialogue based on the art and faces. (Often used by Keith Giffen, Kevin Maguire and J. Marc Dematties, for example.)
Advantages: The writer is very clear in what he wants. He also can see how his story plays out, whether the dialogue dominates the page, and sometimes resolve other problems.
Disadvantages: Time. Now you have to draw out the story. And you’re also assuming the writer has visual storytelling skills. (Giffen is incredibly fast, he thumbnailed all of 52— a comic a week for a year– and cranked out full pencils for the last 40 pages of Invasion! #2 in something like two weeks, on top of the schedule he already had at the time.) In some cases, it can also reduce the contribution of the artist (although in 52, this was intentional to keep storytelling continuity between the different artists).
Hat tip to Allyn Gibson for pushing this post to the front of the queue. And remember: you can follow all the NaGraNoWriMo posts here!
Isaiah Mustafa, best know to the world as “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” from the Old Spice commercials, is a big time comic fan and has made no secret of his desire to pay Luke Cage in the movies.
And now, Marvel has let him do exactly that.
Fantastic. Although, personally, I’d rather see him playing T’Challa.
We’ll start with a tweet I saw yesterday, from cr8dv8 a.k.a. Terry:
Gah, I wish someone had mentioned this in advance. I don’t think I can do do #NaGraNoWriMo this month. Maybe but I doubt it.
I sent a brief note trying to get Terry to go for it anyway, which got this reply:
It’s not that; I am in financial dire straits and not sure I can make the time. If it happens, it happens.
This is a common complaint, but still– it’s 31 days. As of this moment, there are people finishing up the first half of the assignment in 24 hours, not just writing but drawing too. (I was about to type “as well” but it might be as well as it could be.)
The drawback is that if you’re going to make this a career, you are going to lose a lot of work if you can’t make time. Because you never know when work is going to become available, and often sudden projects are going to have to be rush jobs.
It’s a cliche, but it’s very true: I’ve seen careers turn on a phone call. “Can you do this job by this time?” And this is for work that there’s no advance for, you won’t get paid until a month after you deliver the script– but it needed to get done.
Sadly, dire financial straits are also common to working in comics. So are other jobs. There are lots of comics pros who have day jobs and write comics in their extra moments for some spare cash or for the creative outlet– not as many now, because comics companies can offer health insurance to freelancers who sign exclusive contracts.
I don’t pretend to know the impositions on Terry’s time. But just make sure you aren’t mistaking “I don’t have the resources” for procrastination, for deferring that story yet another week, or month, or year, or a lifetime.
Remember: you can follow all the NaGraNoWriMo posts here!
On October 2, 1950, Peanuts premiered on October 2, 1950, in eight newspapers: The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Minneapolis Tribune, The Allentown Call-Chronicle, The Bethlehem Globe-Times, The Denver Post, The Seattle Times, and The Boston Globe. It began as a daily strip, reprinted above.
If you’ve never heard of Peanuts, I, for one, would like to welcome our new alien overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted blogger I could be
helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves!
So we’re already getting questions in (and if you have questions, post them in a comments thread or use the feedfack form for privacy) and the most immediate one is– why 48 pages? Why not 50, or 45, or whatever length seems appropriate for the story?
1. If a picture is worth a thousand words, and National Novel Writing Month wants a minimum of 50,000 words– you do the math.
2. We’re going for the shortest length of comic book that you can put a spine on as a prestige format book.
3. More to the point, the production requirements of comics limit you to the number of pages you can use, usually in multiples of 8 or 16. With a novel, you can enlarge or shrink the text to fit those multiple page counts– and obviously, you can’t do that with pictures that are designed to go a certain way. Printing more pages so you can fit those extra three pages in can mean a huge increase in the cost of printing the book. (Production limitations show up in other areas too. As a quick example, there’s little more irritating to an editor to have a double page spread come in that’s supposed to go on pages 11 and 12– which are back to back pages, not facing pages. We’ll discuss others in future installments.)
Understand, the script you’re writing will probably not be 48 pages long, but you have to write that when it’s all drawn that it will fill 48 pages. Your script may be shorter, or it may be far longer. The Killing Joke was a 48 page graphic novel, and it took Alan Moore over 16000 words just to describe the first quarter of the book. That’s 39 single spaced pages of typing for 12 pages of comics, people.
Is there a right ratio for your script? Actually, yes– if you do a thumbnail version of your story as part of your process, then obviously your layout should match the number of pages. But we’ll get into that next time.
Remember: you can follow all the NaGraNoWriMo posts here!
Every November, thousands of intrepid souls, all around the world,
embark on a great novel-writing adventure. National Novel Writing Month,
or NaNoWriMo, as it’s affectionately called by participants, was begun
by Chris Baty in 1999, with the goal of getting writers to tackle a big project.
But that’s next month. For October, ComicMix is declaring it to be National Graphic Novel Writing Month! Or, yes, NaGraNoWriMo. Or #NaGraNoWriMo on Twitter.
The goal is simple: By October 31st, you write a script for at least a 48 page long graphic novel.
You brush your teeth every day? Feed the dog every day? Complain about Brightest
Day? Good. Now add “write part of my graphic novel script” to that
list. No excuses. If you’ve said “I should do it, but–” this is your time.
For our part, we’re going to have posts every day about what goes into a graphic novel script from a wide variety of comics pros, talking about how to do it and– most importantly– how to keep going.
We should also note for the TRULY hardcore that tomorrow’s the annual 24 Hour Comic Book Day.
Comic creators all around the world participate to create an entire 24
page comic book in just 24 hours… written and drawn! We implore you to
think about that. Think writing a 48 page graphic novel in a month is
too hard? Well, just realize there are some awesome people out there who
can knock out half of that in just one day! And hey, if you participate
at 24 Hour Comic Book Day, you could use that for the first half of your NaGraNoWriMo
project. If you don’t want to crank out a comic in 24 hours, you don’t have to, of course,
although it can be considered training for working for certain
publishers.
So who’s in? Sound off in the comments!
We keep telling you this is going to happen, if not with you then with your kids. From AP:
Children are ready to try e-books, with some thinking that
a bigger selection of electronic texts would make reading for fun even
more fun, according to a new study. But a solid majority of parents
aren’t planning to join the digital revolution.
The 2010 Kids and Family Reading Report, released
Wednesday and commissioned by Scholastic Inc., offers a mixed portrait
of e-books and families. Around six out of 10 of those between ages 9
and 17 say they’re interested in reading on an electronic device such as
the Kindle or the iPad. Around one out of three from the same age group
say they’d read more “for fun” if more books were available on a
digital reader.
Among the books that can’t be downloaded: the “Harry
Potter” series, published in the U.S. by Scholastic. J.K. Rowling has
said she prefers her work to be read on paper.
The e-market has grown rapidly since 2007 and the
launch of Amazon.com’s Kindle device, from less than 1 percent of
overall sales to between 5 to 10 percent, publishers say. But the new
report is also the latest to show substantial resistance. Just 6 percent
of parents surveyed have an electronic reading device, while 76 percent
say they have no plans to buy one. Sixteen percent plan to have one
within the following year.
Of course, the proper response to this is to not market comics to kids. After all, our existing audience for comics will live forever and keep buying the same stories forever in the same printed format they’ve been in forever.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
Stephen Colbert, we have your writer for “The Chronicles of Amber”!
January 20, 2023
The Law Is A Ass #460: Those “For Life” Sentences Are Nonsense
February 24, 2022
