Writing Prose vs. Writing for Comics

Hi, Folks!

This is a short presentation Benita and I brainstormed to be delivered at a recent Writer’s Retreat. This might be of some assistance to those prose writers who are looking to break into the graphic novel or webcomic scene.

Writing for Comics:

By Scott Story and Benita Story, © 2009

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN PROSE AND COMICS WRITING

Whereas prose is very descriptive, establishing the narrative through words and the theater of the mind, comics are primarily a visually based.

When we say comics are visual, this doesn’t mean the writer is unimportant—in fact, he is just as necessary as ever.  But, the comic writers’ role is different than that of the prose writer.

Consider this: With prose, you establish a mental picture or emotion in the reader’s imagination; in comics, you present a mix of images and words that instantly elicits a response from the reader.  A non-fictional variant of this would be the word “Stop,” and then seeing a red stop sign.  The word intellectually tells you to stop, but the stop sign downloads directly and creates an instant mental response (hopefully followed up by a physical stop!)

Inside The Book No. 14

Here, our resident hulking behemoth of a villain, Alaric the Axe, has almost taken his final form.  At this point I envisioned a huge axe tattoo on his chest, and that might have been cool, but it never made it to the final design.  If I think of it in the future, Alaric may just get that tattoo.  That massive leather codpiece is certainly an attention grabber, is it not?  This particular illustration was one of my early explorations into watercolor, a medium I quickly fell in love with.

Evil for Evil's Sake

Good Morning, Folks-Welcome to December 08.

Recently, I requested a critique for “Johnny Saturn” on a certain forum, and several of my webcartooning peers were kind enough to offer their opinions.  One such critique set me to thinking, though: It stated that many of our “Johnny Saturn” villains were evil for evil’s sake, and that we didn’t offer good reasons for them to be this way.  This criticism centered on Tactical and Dr. Wissenschaft.

As much as I welcomed the critique, I have to respectfully disagree with this assessment.  There is that old Stan Lee adage, that “there are no villains, just fallen heroes.”  That same line of reasoning goes on the express that everyone is the hero in their own story, and every villain believes he’s on the side of the angels no matter how awful their deeds.

I don’t buy it.

Josef Mengele, the so called Angel of Death, is a loose inspiration for Dr. Wissenschaft.  This should be pretty obvious to those of you who know anything about 20^th century history.  Did Mengele feel he was walking a moral high ground in doing the things he did?  I doubt it.  My guess is that he was all about the science, and that he was a total sociopath, devoid of any empathy for his victims.

Tactical, in his origin as a Balkan war criminal, is loosely based on any number of similar war criminals, both those that have been brought to trial in the Hague, and those that have yet to be apprehended.  Did these men relish the slaughter they ordered and oversaw?  Did they feel terrible about the massacres and rape camps?  I doubt it.  I think they performed their deeds in a misguided sense of nationalism.

Does every villain have some defining moment in their life when they become evil?  An “origin,” you might say.  Or, are they all sociopaths and psychopaths?  This is the standard comic book way, but I don’t think it’s the real way.  I think many of these people grow up in hell holes, and they grow up with cruelty.  It’s what they know.  They become inured to the suffering of others by their environment, and they learned cruelty as a second nature.

To put a point on it, many of the “Johnny Saturn” villains are simply those who put the ends before the means.  If they want something, they will do anything to make it happen.

In the real world, we know some people are bad, and we neither know (nor usually care) what made them bad.  The same rule applies to the “Johnny Saturn” villains.

Scott.