Show & Tell

Well that was a huge, unanticipated break. My life underwent some technical difficulties and Near Death took the hit. That’s the thing about personal projects, they’re much easier to de-rail than work-for-hire gigs. So I’ll use this opportunity to have a pissy rant about something that bugs me.

Now and then you’ll hear this question discussed; ‘What’s more important in comics, story or art?”. This is a profoundly stupid question because in comics ‘art’ and ‘story’ are not separate things. What people really mean is ‘What’s more important in comics, writing or art’. And the answer, of course, is neither. The telling of the story is what’s important and the art should be telling you the story just as much as the words are.

But generally they don’t get to. Which is a massive problem because comics are a visual medium, so stories told in comics are most effective when told visually. But when people hear ‘story’ they still tend to think of words, either written or spoken, not visuals (maybe because the artforms that can tell stories visually, film and comics mainly, are reletively new compared to prose) but it’s this kind of thinking that I believe’s at the heart of a lot of what is wrong with how comics are executed.

When a new artform first emerges it tends to lean heavily on earlier forms before it learns how to use it’s own strengths. So in the early days of motion pictures films were basically silent stage plays. The camera would sit in a fixed position and record the events as they unfolded. No edits, cuts, close-ups, pans or zooms. No sequence. Over time filmakers discovered what they could do with the camera and how they could tell a story in an engrossing way that was unique to film, and movies became the most popular artform in the world.

Comics on the other hand never seem to have gotten very far from their early days as a combination of prose and illustration. In many early comics this would lead to a ‘doubling up’ where both the words and pictures were basically doing the same job. You’d have a caption that stated ‘Then Jack landed a blow on the thief’, an illustration showing Jack punching a thief, and a speech bubble that read “Ha! I’ve landed a blow on this thief!”. And although comic creators have gone beyond this kind of clumsy exposition they’ve never really managed to integrate prose and illustration, they still tend to just run parallel.

This problem seems to stem from the way comic scripts are written. If a writer starts by thinking “What are the best words I can use to tell this story?” and then gets an artist to produce pictures to complement those words, all they’ve done is write a heavily illustrated novel where the dialogue and description happen to sit directly on top of the pictures. This is how the vast majority of comics are created.

Not only do writers tell their story with words, they also dictate how it’s told visually. They choose the number of panels per page and all the panel breaks, they decide the panel content and describe shots and angles. And mostly they do this very poorly and arbritrarily. Which is totally understandable because they’re not artists. It’s almost impossible to work out a visual sequence without getting a pencil and paper and drawing it. Imagine if architects didn’t draw blueprints or create models but instead wrote a long piece of descriptive prose and handed that to the builder.

This tradition of dicatating visuals sequences verbally tends to lead to all sorts of problems which are the bane of a comic artist’s life. In fact most of your job as a comic artist comes down to solving visual problems caused by the script. Scripts constantly call for visuals that are not only awkard but often contradictory. The best you can hope for is a writer who doesn’t mind you changing the panel layout so it runs a little better, although you can never fix any of the basic problems this way, you’re just re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The tradition of writers dictating visuals has reduced comic book art to illustration. If an artist isn’t given the opportunity to develop a distinct way of organising a visual sequence to tell a story, the only way their work can shine is as illustration. Their art is taken out of the context of the page (so isn’t comic art anymore) and judged that way. Artist ‘a’ draws great anatomy, artist ‘b’ draws wonderful backgrounds, artist ‘c’ has fantastic line quality etc.

Ideally I think things should run closer to the way a screenwriter and director work. Imagine if you got a film script and you handed one copy to Michael Bay and another to the Coen brothers, how different would those films be? How distinctly would they tell that identical story?

A script should contain all the dialogue, captions and scene description but never dictate how to tell the story visually. No panel breaks, no shot choices, nothing. A writer might be excellent at writing tense dialogue but do they know what kind of panel shapes, angles and even what number of panels will communicate that tension visually? Usually not. They might write an initmate conversation and then ask for a distancing layout. They may write an epic scene and give you two pages to achieve it.

All of these things make for mediocre comics, and the sad part is it’s easily solved by writers doing less work and giving aritsts the room to do their jobs so comics can start to reach their full potential.

Page 1

I'm still in middle of character design but because all we see are the character's feet, I thought it'd be safe enough to jump ahead and draw page one. I haven't done the sound effects yet so you'll have to add your own 'Grrr-Bow-wow!' yourself. This is all drawn with Manga Studio Ex4 on a Wacom Cintiq.

Word is born

When I first sat down to flesh out one of my ideas I originally didn’t go with ‘Near Death’, I chose a completely different story, a WWII/fantasy adventure. The main reason I picked it was because, of all my ideas, it was the most fully realised. You see most of the story ideas in my notebooks are one or two line fragments, a paragraph at best. This WWII thing on the other hand already had a beginning, a middle and an end. It was still brief but it was close to being an actual story. The rest of my ideas were merely scenarios that might, at some point, lead to a story.

So I worked my little idea up into a treatment that ran to about five and a half thousand words. This took the form of a long bullet-point list, mostly dealing with plot, and almost completely devoid of dialogue. That went painlessly enough so I rolled straight into the full script. I didn’t get too far before I realised that my little treatment, when worked up into a full graphic novel, would be roughly the same length as Akira.

As I wrestled with this behemoth of a script my mind kept drifting to one of my other ideas. The slower the WWII script went the more additional material I seemed to come up with for this new story called ‘Near Death’, and soon enough I had a full treatment done. This new story however was a much snappier, more contained affair. Considering this was going to be my first graphic novel I thought the wisest thing to do would be to ditch the WWII story and start over with ‘Near Death’.

A brief aside here, but there’s something about writing that I hadn’t thought about until I starting doing it on a regualr basis. No matter how much of a word count I rack up I feel like I’m getting absolutely nothing accomplished. You can get a little bit of that feeling from drawing too, especially when you work digitally, but it pales in comparison to writing. A picture just feels more real, more physical than a piece of writing. Plus you can appreciate a picture at a glance, but a page of text looks exactly like any other page of text until you sit down and read through the whole thing.

So when it came time to work the ‘Near Death’ treatment into a full script I decided not to write at home, in the hope that it would feel more like ‘going to work’ and less like ‘sitting around in the studio wasting my life’. I got up early and went to the local Starbucks, ensconced myself into the far corner (pictured above), and tried to make a grande Americano stretch over four or five hours. I even bought a new battery for my old twelve inch Powerbook so it would last more than the seven minutes it used to on a full charge.

Three weeks and about twenty two thousand words later I had a finished script. It’d gone very smoothly. Worryingly smoothly really. This had been my first time writing something so elaborate and I’d expected there to be lots of problems (dead ends, writer’s block, plot holes, re-writes; that sort of thing) but they never surfaced. Maybe it was because I’d nailed down a tight roadmap for myself with the bullet-point treatment, it was like having a safety net. I didn’t have to worry about plot, I could just focus on the fun stuff like the characters, atmosphere and dialogue. Not that I followed the treatment slavishly, sometimes in writing the final script the story would take unexpected turns. I’d find that things which seemed vitaly important in the treatment would end up being unnecessary. But I don’t think I would’ve been comfortable writing in this free flowing way unless I had the treatment there to fall back on.

Another thing that may have made the process go surprisingly smoothly was the fact that I wasn’t writing a finished piece of prose. It was just a script, so only the dialogue and captions had to be polished. The bulk of it was description and only I was ever gonna read that. I deliberately wrote the script the way I always wished comic scripts were written. That is with full dialogue and scene descriptions, but without any indication of panel breaks or choice of shots.

I always found it bizarre that the least visual member of the team, the writer, was the one who made all the visual decisions. Unless the writer is happy to let you throw all that out the window and go your own way it tends to mean you spend much of your time as an artist solving avoidable problems. So as ‘writer Stephen’ I tried not write anything un-drawable, and as ‘artist Stephen’ I’ll try not to cut any corners on the script. You know, like switching the scene set in the British Museum of Natual History to a snowy wasteland or something.

Turning Japanese

I’ve been drawing on a pretty much daily basis since I was two or three years old, (which, when I think about it, means I really should be a lot better at this then I am…but whatever). Anyway, the point is I’m pretty sure that I’m at least competent in the drawing department. Even more importantly, I think I can tell when something I’ve drawn is working or if it’s rubbish. Which is definitely not the case when it comes to writing.

I haven’t done much more than dabble with writing since school but I’ve always had a vague notion that I’d do my own stories at some point, so whenever I had an idea I stuck it in a notebook. Over the years I’ve filled a fair amount of notebooks but I’d rarely ever fleshed-out one of those ideas into a full script.

Then at some point last year my girlfriend started reading manga. Stay with me here.

You see over the years my girlfriend’s picked up the occasional random issue of a comic when she liked the art, she’d even collected Sam Kieth’s ‘The Maxx’ for quite a while. But even though she was interested in the medium she found it extremely hard to find many comics that appealed to her.

For example she’d really liked the X-Men cartoon from the 90’s so she was game to read the comics, but where on earth do you start? The mind-numbing Gordian Knot of continuity will deter almost anyone from following X-Men, or any of the major icons of American comics for that matter.

And that’s the sad thing really, it’s the characters that are most likely to draw in new readers whose comics are the most impregnable to those same readers. My nephew loved Spider-Man, Iron Man, Hulk, Batman, Wolverine and all those characters from the movies, and was enthusiastic to get into the comics. But after reading a few collections he figured something out. These aren’t stories. ‘Batman’ is not a story. ‘Spider-Man’ is not a story.

They’re intermingled systems of stories, loosely connected by continuity of various levels of accuracy, written and drawn by people with wildly different styles and goals, staring characters in their twenties who have mostly been around for forty to seventy years.

This seems to be the end result of an industry intent on appealing to a tiny, but very dedicated, audience of hardcore fans over a potentially uninterested general populace. But as a new reader it feels like comics are going out of their way to repel you, which stops pretty much everyone sticking with the medium long enough to find material they might connect with. Anyway, after reading a few of Alan Moore’s books (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Promethea, From Hell) my girlfriend pretty much ran out of stuff in my collection that appealed to her.

Then while perusing the internet she found a Japanese film she like the sound of called 20th Century Boys. It happened to be based on a manga series by Naoki Urasawa so she bought it, and it turns out she loved it.

I read it myself and it totally turned me around on what you can do with this medium. The way the japanese approach telling a story in comics is just so different and more involving for so many reasons, but mostly what impressed me most about manga was the way it was paced. The effect of a story where the number and layout of panels is chosen by an artist instead of a writer is completely different. Especially when that artist has the luxery of a high page count.

‘20th Century Boys’ led me to other manga by Urasawa like ‘Pluto’ and ‘Monster’ and then to the works of other creators like Takehiko Inoue’s ‘Vagabond’ and ‘Real’. I even re-examined artists who’s work I’d liked when I was younger like Katsuhiro Otomo and Masamune Shirow. All of this kick-started me into digging out those notebooks and seeing if I could apply the storytelling techniques of manga to a story of my own.

The story so far...

So ever since I was about eleven I’ve wanted to draw comics and mostly it’s Jim Lee’s fault. Although I’d read comics when I was younger than that, they hadn’t made much of an impact. They were mostly black and white British weeklies like The Beano and Battle, no more important in the greater scheme of things than Roald Dahl books and Ninja Turtles cartoons. It wasn’t until I got my hands on the early Image stuff like Spawn and Wildc.a.t.s that I thought ‘Yes! This is what I wanna do’. I think X-Men issue one (circa 1991) was the first time I noticed a credits box and realised that drawing comics was a actual job done by real people.

So for the next twelve years or so I spent the vast majority of my spare time learning to draw comics. Luckily I had a few close friends with similar ambitions so it wasn’t the sad, lonely affair that it is for a lot of aspiring comic artist types. Mostly we drew in Stephen Mooney’s house down the road (who’s gone on to draw a boatload of books for IDW like Angel, The Mummy and The A-Team). Many a comic convention was attended from England to America and eventually I nabbed some work with Dark Horse. This led to work from Moonstone, Fangoria, IDW and BOOM! Mission accomplished.

Then a few months ago I realised that I’ve never actually enjoyed drawing comics. Which was a problem.

Now I realise most people don’t enjoy their jobs and don’t expect to, but the only reason to do a job like ‘comic artist’ is because you love it. The pay is pretty bad, the hours are long, I’ve rarely worked less than twelve to fifteen hours a day while I’m drawing a book, you have no health insurance or pension plan and so on and so on. The love of it is all you have, really.

But I do love to draw and I do love comics so what was the problem? Mostly I think it was the fact that I’ve found drawing comics to be a fairly uncreative job for the most part. Firstly almost all the comics I’ve drawn have been continuations of other stories, either based on movies and tv shows, or the further adventures of established characters created decades ago. Secondly I’ve generally had very little interaction with the rest of the creative team, especially in the early stages of a project. I’d get handed a finished script with art direction and then I’d draw it. The end. Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with any of that, I just don’t find it much fun.

The jobs I have enjoyed drawing are original stories with a beginning, middle and an end. Books like Life Undead, the one-shot written by Paul Zbyszewski and edited by Scott Dunbier I drew for IDW. That was a project I felt I could put my own fingerprints on, and that’s the kind of work-for-hire book I’d still be happy to draw. The thing is jobs like that don’t come along very often, so what to do?

Well if I liked self contained books and I liked being as creatively involved as possible I realised I needed to do my own graphic novel, something that would be wholly mine. T’was time to start writing my own ticket.