Comics Week!
Last week Sarah A. Hoyt gave us a fantastic blog on the difference between short story and novel writing. This week, in honor of New York ComicCon, we're talking comics, leading off with the man, the myth, the legend, Keith R.A. DeCandido.
Just how many words is a picture worth, really?
by Keith R.A. DeCandido
Back in the mists of prehistory when dinosaurs roamed the Earth (okay, it was the 1990s), I edited a line of novels based on Marvel's superheroes. Over the course of 45 novels and seven anthologies, I hired a good number of comic book writers who had little to no experience writing prose.
One of the first things I realized was that these guys tended to a) not always get point of view (because comic books, like television and movies, are omniscient thanks to the visuals, so it wasn't anything they ever had to consider before), b) sometimes have difficulty in differentiating character voices (perhaps relying on where the word balloon was pointing…), and c) have their dialogue all end in exclamation points, resulting in stories filled with characters who all sounded like they were being played by Brian Blessed.
While c) is understandable (for years, hand-lettering and poor printing meant that comics writers were trained to use exclamation points as they're more likely to show up on newsprint than a period), the other two were more problematic, and something I often had to work with the writers on.
For me, the shoe is now on the other foot. After 40-odd novels, 13 novellas, and 30 short stories, I'm now doing a mess of comic books-a bunch of Farscape miniseries for BOOM! Studios, a Star Trek one-shot for IDW, and a StarCraft manga for TokyoPop.
Switching media is never the easiest transition, and while some can do it with no trouble (see folks like Neil Gaiman and Peter David, who have been successful in comics, prose, and on screen), it can be harder for us mere mortals. Looking back on my own previous comic book work (the 1999-2000 Star Trek: The Next Generation miniseries Perchance to Dream), I was wincing at how overwhelmingly wordy it was.
The most important thing to remember when writing a comic book as opposed to prose is that in the latter, you're on your own. With comic books, though, you're collaborating with the artist. I think the biggest stumbling block for me was to remember that the artist wasn't just illustrating my words. The art does as much to tell the story as the words do, and the best comic book work is one where the art and scirpt work together to tell the story.
This also means that the scripter really needs to boil down the wordage. A truism of writing short fiction as opposed to novels is that in short fiction, you cannot afford to waste a single word (see Sarah A. Hoyt's excellent discourse on the subject in this very blog last week, http://varkat.livejournal.com/62770.html), and that goes a thousandfold for comic books. The average comic is only 22 pages. In addition to remembering that the art helps tell the story you also have to remember not to clutter up the page with so many word balloons and captions that you can't see the art.
I recently took a notion that started out life as a novel series, which failed to sell. I repurposed it as a comic book, and one of the things I had to do was boil it down to its essence-and I realized why it failed as prose. I had too much extra, unnecessary stuff. Making it a comic book proved a crucible that made the story better.
Of course, the danger now is that the novel I'm working on won't have any descriptions in it at all. ("Wait, there's no artwork? Ack!")
Keith R.A. DeCandido is currently writing several four-issue Farscape comic book miniseries (most in collaboration with series creator Rockne S. O'Bannon) and a StarCraft manga series, in addition to the reams and reams of prose he has been perpetrating in a variety of media universes, most notably Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, World of Warcraft, CSI: NY, Supernatural, and (again) StarCraft. He is also a brown belt in Kenshikai karate and a cohost of the podcast The Chronic Rift. Feel free to annoy him at his blog at kradical.livejournal.com.