Writing Comics Is Hard. Also, Water Is Wet.

[the_gneech]

My biggest struggle with writing comics (well, second biggest, after actually coming up with a story) is that I am a very wordy writer. I always want to shove giant chunks of dialog into whatever I’m writing. I can’t help it– I’m a very texty sort of guy, and I do a lot of my expression of character through dialog. Take for instance, this interchange from the piece I’m working on now:

Tanya: It was a shantak. C’mon, we need to move before the surprise wears off and it just gets mad.

Verity: But… I need to stay put, they’ll be looking for me…

Tanya: Ha! You bet it will! And you don’t want to be here when it does.

That’s all in one panel! Granted, the panel takes up a quarter of the page, but still, it’s a lot of dialog to fit into one comic panel, but in the scope of my writing, it’s a tiny little piece.

The panel size limitation is probably a very healthy thing for me as a writer, as it forces me to economy. Of any given script I write, when I have acres of blank screen to write on, probably a good 10-20% of the words get chopped as I do layouts by simple virtue of having to force the story into pages and panels.

The problem comes when I get to a passage that I just don’t think can be chopped without losing an important piece. In that situation, I end up having to break chunks of dialog up into multiple panels, or squeezing a ton of exposition into a tiny space because I’ve run out of room.

The main thing I’ve got to remember as I go is to be prepared for things to take more panels (and therefore more pages) than I expect as I’m writing them, and plan accordingly. I can’t expect to tell a full story in an 8-page teaser, for instance, and I certainly can’t expect a single page to cover more than one plot point.

-The Gneech

Originally published at gneech.com. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

There's nothing wrong with talking heads! It worked for Albedo!

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

Sometimes, the heads simply must talk! But I do hope to at least add a bit of visual interest to those moments. ^.^

-TG

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

Well I have hordes that can certainly rampage, but they're not Mongol. Hope they'll do the job!

-TG

[kelloggs2066.livejournal.com]

Drawing a rampage is a lot of rams.

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

A whole page of them, in fact!

-TG

[rowyn]

... I found myself searching for ways to chop words out of that sample script, which I am pretty sure was not the point of the post. :D

I remember having a big problem with being too wordy (way worse than you here) the one time I took a stab at doing a webcomic. Oddly, IIRC it was less of an issue when I was doing the 24-hour comic, probably because I was scripting directly to the page so I could tell easily how much I could fit in one panel.

But yes, this is one of the reasons I prefer writing to doing comics. Much as I love comics, they are SO MUCH WORK. Not that I am not grateful when people like you are willing to do them so I can read them!