How to write a comic

wordmonkey

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A Ray of Hope

Despite all the doom and gloom, it is possible to find an artist.

I know.

I've done it.

I still do it.

But it's incredibly difficult. Out of the last, maybe 20 approaches I've made to pencilers, it breaks down roughly like this:

12 simply didn't answer
5 (and these I would say were the more professional) said no, thanked me for the interest and in some cases wanted to keep in touch (never burn bridges unless you really need to).
2 said yeah, lets do something. Then they'd disappear.
1 said yes and looks promising.

And I'm working in comics, have been published and recently got a mention in Wizard (did I mention I was in Wizard? 'Cos I'm in Wizard. No biggy. Just Wizard, right? With me in it!!! ;) ).

It's incredibly frustrating. But it is do-able.

You can also look at the smaller indie companies. They will sometimes be open to just writers. These tend to be a more studio-type set-up, where they're a collective of creatives and not a publisher per se. However, there is some value there. They'll find you an art team and when the book, or pitch is done, they take over and do all the leg work.

However, it's the same with every kind of writing. What you do at the start sucks. And when you look back you'll be embarrassed. So make sure that if you do get a publisher, studio or penciler to look at your work, it is awesome. It MUST be visual. You gotta do something so amazing that the penciler's reaction is, "I wanna start drawing that NOW!"

Easy, eh?
 

PeeDee

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It really isn't all doom and gloom. I've got an artist that I'm always working with. He's illustrating my serial novel entries, and I've just finished three pages of a comic script and sent them off to him. We have no promise of publication on this one, but he'll do a damn good job and we'll find a publisher for it before too long.

So it is doable. Wordmonkey's absolutely right.
 

AceTachyon

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Oh I'm sure it is doable. After all, both of you found artists. I probably just need to get off my butt and start looking.

Then again, I might just be too stubborn and try to do it all myself.
 

wordmonkey

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You can look at the adds on Digital Webbing. You can even post an add yourself looking for a penciler. However, I gotta warn you, unless you are paying a page-rate, your chances of finding a GOOD artist that way, are on the none-end of the slim-to-none scale.

I would recommend that instead you look at the samples posted by artists in the forums. DW has one; Figma used to, but seems to be dead now; PencilJack has one too.

You can do the same at Deviant.

Look through the online portfolios and try to find an artist that suits your style of writing/book idea. Then send them a nice email. Love your work, would you be interested in collaborating. Lather, rinse and repeat, and repeat, and repeat, and repeat, and... you get the idea.

The majority won't be interested, and a few will jerk your chain, but you will find the odd one here and there who are hungry and talented and committed to making it. And when you do, stay very close to them. They will go places and make contacts, and if they owe you for the start, you get to have an insider in places you didn't have before.
 

PeeDee

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Mostly, it wont' do you much good to seem plaintive and desperately trying to find an artist. It's a whole different world, the working relationship between artists and writers.

Write scripts. Have ideas. Be willing to work in different mediums. I wasn't actively looking for fresh work in the comic field -- I have other fish to fry, I have a novel and a serial that I'm busy with -- but the opportunity was there, so I went for it. In this case, it was an editor saying "It's a decent short story, but it'd make a great single-issue comic." Things like that. Be wiling to do other stuff, and be willing to go for comics when the chance appears.
 

PeeDee

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And if all else fails, remember...you can submit to most of the big publishers without actually having an artist. Just do up a script, usually a query letter, a summary of the series (whether it's limited or ongoing).

The odds aren't any better than anywhere else in publishing, and it doesn't hurt to have some credits to your name already, but it's an option.
 

PeeDee

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the biggest advantage to finding the aritst first -- and this may be for just me -- is that you can play to the artist's strengths with your writing.

I've talked about it before somewhere, but it's worth reiterating. If the artist does really wonderful Trolls and things Trollish, then why not do him a Troll story? It's just an example, but it's a good idea. It means the artist has fun, you can have fun writing something different, the art is stunning (which, in turn makes both you and the artist look good...)
 

wordmonkey

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Playing to an artist's strengths is a good idea, plus you can appeal to their ego. "I love your work, I would love to write something for you/your characters."

If you do that, I would also then try and find someone with a very different style too. The reason is that, since it's a visual medium, the Editor you sub to might love the comic you sub, go looking and see that this artist does awesome trolls, but bugger all else. If you have another comic, in another style, with another artist, YOU don't get stuck with the "can only do one thing" vibe.

Of course, I just doubled your problems, because then you're looking for twice as many artists.

Is this fun, or what? :D
 

PeeDee

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The solution to that problem is to just find a genius artist who can do everything,of course.

Yay!

Why not buy a yacht after lunch too?

:D

(Pete should be writing comic script instead of chatting here, he really should.)
 

PeeDee

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Anyway, before we completely hijack the thread...maybe we should instead discuss the wisdom of which publisher you should pick, whether submitting your comic or just the script, or just the art.

There are a lot of them. Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Image, Vertigo (I know, they're sub-houses those last two, but you submit seperately anyway) DigitalWebbing...

...or sould you publish it through something like Lulu all by yourself? Or should you go through a POD comic publisher, like ComiXpress?
 

AceTachyon

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As for the preceeding posts on finding and working with artists, all good stuff. I'll probably start looking down that road and see where it gets me. I know about DW and Deviant. I'll check out Penciljack.
 

wordmonkey

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After the Penciler...

OK, so you have your penciler, s/he has done some amazing pages and you're jazzed.

What now?

Inker? Colorist? Letterer?

Now you could find someone who does the lot (though likely as not, unless you are going stylized, you want a real letterer to do the wordage, IMO).

My recommendation would be to ink with a view to no color. If the inking is good enough, it will stand as black and white OR can have color added later. There's another reason for ignoring color at this stage. Cost.

Self Publication would be my VERY last option, with one exception.

If you can get one full issue taken through to finished comicbook stage, and you are pitching, you can do a lot worse than pitch a "finished" book. This is not to say you have to make a finished book, but considering that most editors are gonna get there fair share of bad color copies and print outs where the cyan cartridge was running low, you sending them a bound book looks good. It stands out and makes an impression.

That said, if you have contacts, you can send lo-res PDFs over email and still be taken seriously (I know, I did).

Pitching to the big two is, I would say, a waste of time. But you can query them for a writing gig. Chances are slim, but you can try. Looking at both companies though, if you have no printed work, chances are they will not as to see your work.

Image and Dark Horse you can pitch to, and then you have a whole slew of companies. A lot say they don't accept pitches, but if you query them AND have something of a track record, you may be asked to pitch. You might even be commissioned to work on something for them. But do yourself a favor, research the publisher. Don't pitch "Bambi III: Buttercups and Roses" to a company that does schlock horror comics. And make sure your sample is approriate too.

Most companies don't accept anything from writers, but a few will. And again, if you have been published, they may make an exception.

Self Publishing your book is less of a stink-issue in comics, because you can go to cons and sell your book. It also makes a handy sample to hand to Joe Q when you bump into him at Wizard Con.

So, I thik I touched on almost every option without actually making any real push for one over another. Helpful, eh?

OK, PeeDee. Tag, you're it!
 

PeeDee

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I've been tagged, how cool. :)

Wordmonkey's got all the reasons nailed for why to generally avoid color when you're doing your own comics unless you can find a colorist. There are a lot of artists who do their own colors, and I'm never as impressed as I am when they're done by someone who makes a living (or a full-blown hobby) out of coloring.

Go browse the forums at DigitalWebbing, check out some of the samples of the colorists. See what I mean?

One big disadvantage to having a black 'n' white comic is, if you have white text bubbles against a black and white background, they can get lost in the page. This is the equivalent of the reader opening a book and finding no paragraphs, just block after block of text. There's no entry point, no easy entry point, if you see what I mean.

But that is not good enough reason to go with bad coloring.

In my opinion (and, somewhat, my experience) colorists are a little more willing to work on projects, so that's something to definitely check out DigitalWebbing type sites for. For one thing, if you're looking for a colorist, you've got an artist, and that means you're halfway there. It makes it easier.

As for lettering, if your artist can't do it cleanly and concisely (much more important than style; the best letterers like the amazing Todd Klein imply rather than display impressive styles.) then I would suggest having him draw you the word balloons, and then either you or him do it via a program like Adobe Photoshop, using a clean and easy to read type font. For comics, Arial or Verdana works well. Something readable. And remember, readable in a comic works in a different sense than readable in a book. You need a little stronger and smoother of a font, because it has a lot to stand out against. In a book, all it has to stand out against are other words.
 

PeeDee

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Let's talk comic scripts, too.

How detailed? how do you write 'em? What should they look like?

The answer here is trickier, in that there is no right answer. Comic scripts run the range, from Alan Moore's thicker-than-thick scripts that are nearly pieces of literature themselves....to the old Stan Lee scripts to Steve Ditko, where the script was basically a phone conversation that Ditko would then draw, and then Stan Lee would put some words in it.

(You may think I'm simplifying, but I'm not by that much. Early Marvel was pretty much like that, for quite some time.)

Some people fall more or less in the middle.

My answer: Write to your artist. This means that how you write a script will change each and every time.

The advantage to writing a thinner, less detailed script is that you're giving your story, you're giving the tone and idea of the comic...and then you're letting the artist really be inventive and creative with the visuals, letting the artist provide the texture and the tone that he gleans from your story. In a way, this is like having the comic drawn by a Beta Reader, if you will, in that if he's drawing a dark and gritty 'tone' to your comic, it's not because you wrote "I want it drawn in a dark and gritty tone," in the script, it's because you wrote a script that's dark and gritty and he's innately picking up on that.

Plus, it means you get surprised when something comes back that's clearly your story, with yoru words, and your ideas...except it's not yours in a lot of ways, and you get to delight and thrill in reading it, as if it were a story written by a soul-twin that you somehow know, without knowing.

...

A piece of advice: Unless important to the story, if an artist returns a result that's a bit different from what you intended and it works, then think carefully before changing it.

When I write, whether it's comic scripts or short stories or novels, I have very clear visuals in my head. WHen I write comic scripts, I can concentrate hard enough and see how the panels look, how the characters look, how the page will be set up, all that. I always know how the characters look in my head.

But sometimes, the artist picks up on details (as I mentioned above) and goes in a little different direction. A key example is, my artist for my robot serial sent me a concept sketch of one of the key characters in the story that looked nothing like I envisioned, but exactly like what I think I meant, under that all. Do you see what I mean? What I saw was different from what distilled onto the page, and that's what he picked up on and drew from. Now at first, it jarred me because my instinctive reaction is "That's not how he looks," but that's a knee-jerk reaction and nothing more. I like how he drew the character, and that's the image that I write to now. I think it writes a stronger character.

Let your artist surprise you, and let yourself be willing to be surprised.

...

Back to comic scripts.

My default method of writing a script is pretty basic. Here's a rough idea:

...

PAGE ONE (nine panels): Three panels on top, one long strip panel, three panels below, two panels below that.

PANEL ONE: A shot of our man walking down the street, hands in his pockets.

NO TEXT.

PANEL TWO: A shot of our man, same as before, but shadowed heavily.

TEXT (People shouting, off-panel): Oh my God! What's THAT!? Look out!

PANEL THREE: Our man looks up, startled.

CLARK(thought): This is how you know the day's going badly.

PANEL FOUR: A robot lands on top of CLARK KENT, scattering bits of road and cars all around it in a heavy, heavy shock wave. We see a bit of John's hand and foot sticking up in the panel, out from under the robot's big feet.

PANEL FIVE: Complete blackness.

CAPTION: "That really hurts. I don't care how invincible you are, big robot landing on top of you equals pain."

PANEL SIX: A side shot of the robot's big leg. It's raised up out of the hole in the ground, CLARK's hands pushing it up. His skin is intact, his sleeves are tattered and filthy.

CAPTION: "And honestly, a big robot? Who wakes up and thinks 'golly, today I will build a big robot, what a great idea.' Seriously?"

PANEL SEVEN: CLARK sitting all the way up, arms over his head, still holding up the robot foot. His teeth are clenched. He's filthy and his clothes are shredded and dirty, but his skin is intact.

CAPTION: "If that's how they think, I don't know why I even need to stop the bad guys and save the world. They aren't getting out their front doors this way."

PANEL EIGHT: A shot from behind CLARK, who is now standing up in the hole. His arms are back, he's just flung the robot off him and despite being six stories tall, it's gone sailing away from him.

CAPTION: "Still, I don't get on the front page of papers by looking good in tights, which is a shame."

PANEL EIGHT: A shot of CLARK'S chest, where he's just ripped open his tattered shirt and jacket, to reveal the SUPERMAN uniform underneath.

CAPTAIN: "Guess I'd better get on with it."

...

Now, maybe when the robot lands, I'd want to provide a little more description about what he looks like. Is it a big blocky foot that lands on Clark Kent, like a Gundam robot or a Transformer? Is it smooth and rounded, like Metallo or an android? Is it white with red trimming? Gray with green trimming?

On the other hand, this is where a good rapport with the artist comes in handy, in that you can casually mention in your e-mails back and forth (and I do mean casually, assuming you two just talk) that your robot's big and green, and here's a DeviantArt picture that you think really looks kinda' sorta' like what you're going for, but not exactly. And then the artist goes "Oh, I get what he means," and goes off and does something cool.

OR, in that same script, I could have detailed every little thing. God knows I have it in my head. I know that when the robot landed, it threw up bits of concrete that punctured the windows of a Taxi Cab, that at the edge of that long panel was a man in a brown suit ducking, with his briefcase held over his head, against which deflected a small chunk of concrete, and in the background is a woman running away between tall buildings, and a street light that's red.

But what's the point? For me, none, unless the artist requests and needs that level of detail provided. If I say Clark's in "Downtown Metropolis, daytime, busy, on the sidewalk," then I'll probably get something that's along the lines of what I intended.

On the other hand, if the look of the comic is important to the story (I need a certain character to have a certain facial expression every time he says a certain phrase) then I would want to be specific about that. If something's wrong wiht the world, I'd want to mention that. If I need the tone and image of the comic to look a specific way to benefit the story, then I should go into as much detail as possible to convey that.

But at the end of the day, comics are to tell stories in an interesting and artistic medium. Even the late, genius Will Eisner agreed that art was there to serve the story, not the other way around.

You could do worse than Will Eisner.

(edited to add: Don't be too hard on that random page of comic script up there; I just made it up on the fly as I wrote this post/article/thing. On the off chance that I start writing Superman after Richard Donner quits, I'll probably do a little better of a job.)
 

wordmonkey

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I really can't argue with any of what PeeDee said above.

I generally spend some time before I start writing the script, working with the artist on concepts. It's just a massive brainstorm session. I throw in all my ideas and the artists does the same. My key advice here is leave ego at the door - whatever is best for the project stays, no matter who came up with the idea.

One additional piece of advice I would offer is to remember the visual. If you are working with color, do a little research into color theory and write that into your script to emphasise mood or set a clue. You can work with your colorist on this, but if it's in the script, they know and will likely come to you and ask whatyou want. And if you have a colorist, USE him/her. I have a mini-series due out through Arcana later this year. There is a lot of stuff that I chatted with the colorist on that are visual hints at what is to come.

Also remember that you can specifically add things to the art. And you can do it a lot more subtly than you can in prose. I want to do a murder mystery and have it so that the murder weapon is in the room the whole time, I have to mention it in a description of the room, (unless I'm cheating) and then I've risked tipping my hand to the reader. In a comic book, I can make sure it's there and if I lay on a big description of everything else in the room, the reader doesn't know.

What I try for is to write visually and, if it's the case (like in a mystery) that when you get to the end of an arc, you can go back and re-read it and suddenly all the clues you missed before are obvious and you can enjoy it again. This sometimes means you have to start writing a plot arc at the end and work forward.

I'd add one last thing. Panel layout. I tend to write like PeeDee's example. Top of the page I set out the page layout (because, as I said, I've thumbnailed the page). Now if you have a great artist, they could well rework this (and I do tell all the artists I work with to completely throw out my panel layouts and even my description of a panel ifthey canmake it better), but I can't stress enough the need to think about the panel arrangement as you write. It is NOT just happenstance. You are guiding the reader through the story. And where in prose you might use short punchy sentences to kick up the pace, extra panels can do the same. And overlap dialog between scenes as a way to lead the reader from one scene-change to another.

There's a whole world of technical stuff beyond just telling the story, involved in telling a story in comicbooks and you ignore these at your peril.

Good enough is never good enough. If you wanna brea in, you have to better than what's out there - by a long way. And if you wanna stay out there when you get there, you have to keep improving.

This is turning into some kinda master class here.

We should charge admission, PeeDee.
 

PeeDee

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It'd be a Master Class if it were Alan Moore "in conversation" with Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon on how to masterfully write comic scripts.... ;)

Wordmonkey's absolutely right about panel layout. In my above example, which as I pointed out was quick and sloppy, I give the 'gist' of the panels, and nothing more.

But do not just leave it up to chance. Panel placement is important. Panel placement can be the beat of your story, and you would do very well to pay attnetion to panels. They give you more benefits than they detriment you.

For example, in a comic, I could literally have three panels of the character staring around the room silently, and they go "beat - beat - beat - speech"

In writing, that beat lasts as long as it takes the reader to skip down the line from "He said nothing" down to "and then he said..."

On the other hand, in prose, I could say "There were two men in a park, one of them was black and one of them was white," and you would have no idea which one I meant. Harlan Ellison did that, and it worked wonderfully.

Some comics stick to the nine-panel page almost rigidly, and that's not always a bad thing. For one thing, it means that if you have fifty pages of nine-panel pages....and then suddenly have a two-page splash image, it's all the more effective.

Some superhero comics have splashes nearly every other page, and this isn't always useful. Pretty, sure, but not useful.

If every shot is a glory shot, then none of them are glory shots.

Dont' just mix up your panel shapes for variety, don't just change them around 'cause someone else did it. Change your panel shapes for a purpose, the same way you start a new paragraph in prose, so to speak.
 

wordmonkey

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It'd be a Master Class if it were Alan Moore "in conversation" with Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon on how to masterfully write comic scripts.... ;)

Dude!

THEY don't know that we aren't.

I'm from England and married a US gal and now live over here. I COULD be Gaiman. You can tell 'em you're really JMS and your Avatar is a subtle clue.

They'd never know...

...oh...

...wait...

I probably shoulda PM'd this one.
 

PeeDee

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Can I be Garth Ennis instead? Then I only have to write six lines of comic script every month (and out of them, five of them are just swear words.)

:)
 

wordmonkey

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Can I be Garth Ennis instead?

This is America! You can be whoever you want to be!

Well, except me.

But that's mostly because there's isn't enough excitement for one of me. If I had to half it, to share with a second me, life just wouldn't be worth living.
 
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