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Looking for help on something related to the comic medium

  
 
Crestmere
04:27 / 27.06.06
Hello.

So heres the deal.

I run an online comic creation message board. The site is at http://ptstoryworkshop.proboards99.com if you want to check it out.

And my idea is predicated on the idea that comics are just as strong of a storytelling medium as novels, stageplays, film, etc. And we just need to bring that forward to attract the most talented people towards doing comics.

So I'm trying to write an essay aimed at potentially interested creative types about why they should consider doing comic books (or manga, graphic novels or whatever other term someone would use).

I was going to list people that do comics in addition to other materials, a pretty long list.

Then focus on the potential freedom that comics can give you in terms fo not having to do a rewrite for budgetary reasons or because they could save 12 cents by shooting in Thailand.

I wanted to talk about how it was the closest thing to film out there.

What else do you guys think I should include?

In terms of art, I wanted to aim it at illustrators, painters and other visual artists.

In terms of writing, I wanted to primarily aim at screenwriters, playwrights and novelists/short story writers.

But I also wanted to put filmmakers in there somewhere too.

I also wanted to talk about the potential problems of the medium and how those could be addressed more easily by someone with a background in X.

So give me suggestions on this. If you want to email me, my email is nolanjwerner@yahoo.com

Thanks.

NJW
 
 
sleazenation
06:26 / 27.06.06
How obvious do you want suggestions to be?

I'd probably suggest you start with Eisner's and McCloud's books

Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics (MCCloud's books) are probably particularly useful, the first covering McCloud's taxonomy of how the medium works and the second including a section on what problems it needs to face to get better...
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
08:27 / 27.06.06
I think a problem with that is that people who write comics who have made their name doing something else are often not very good at it, and vice versa. Peter David is a well-respected comic book writer who... writes Star Trek franchise novels. Christopher Golden writes formula teen horror, albeit rather good formula teen horror. Brad Meltzer writes Grishamesque thrillers. Jim Michael StraJimski certainly has a devoted following for his work in television, but the television itself - Babylon 5, Crusade, that thing with Luke Perry - is marginal.

In mainstream comics, I think the best examples of genuinely successful workers in another visual medium who have written comic books are Kevin Smith and Joss Whedon. As it happens, their comic writing seems to have coincided with a period of... retrenchment in their other endeavours, but both have been recipients of a fair degree of commercial and critical success. Both of them also drew heavily on their childhood experience of comic books for their film and television woork, so there's a circularity there you could explore - Whedon by introducing characters and themes reminiscent in particular of Chris Claremont's X-Men, and Smith by sandwiching lengthy conversations about comic books into his movies.
 
 
Crestmere
12:52 / 27.06.06
In mainstream comics, I think the best examples of genuinely successful workers in another visual medium who have written comic books are Kevin Smith and Joss Whedon. As it happens, their comic writing seems to have coincided with a period of... retrenchment in their other endeavours, but both have been recipients of a fair degree of commercial and critical success. Both of them also drew heavily on their childhood experience of comic books for their film and television woork, so there's a circularity there you could explore - Whedon by introducing characters and themes reminiscent in particular of Chris Claremont's X-Men, and Smith by sandwiching lengthy conversations about comic books into his movies.





Yeah, I think I was going to focus more on some people then others.

I posted this on another comic site and people actually seemed quite offended that I'd even suggest this. But a lot of it seemed the normal fanboy whining about new talent coming in.

And I do realize that a lot of the people who have gone over to comics are hardly like acclaimed pulitzer prize winners (except Michael Chabon). But I really wanted to focus on the strengths of the medium and show that people have crossed over from other things so you wouldn't be alone.

The Eisner books would be a good place to start, but I kind of want to write an essay to get people to even consider picking it up because thats a big step.
 
 
Crestmere
07:29 / 05.07.06
Beginning of the essay, give me feedback.


An Essay for Writers
By
Nolan J. Werner

When you think about writing comic books, what is the first thing that comes in to your mind?
Maybe its an image of an overweight, middle aged man writing vaguely homoerotic teenage power fantasies, and probably not writing it all that well. Maybe this isn’t your image but, honestly, I would bet that your image isn’t much better. Your image is probably of something that you wouldn’t consider working in, being the serious artist that you are.
I hope to change all of that. In this essay, I hope to show you the diverse works and the potential of the sequential medium (comic books and manga). By the end of this essay, I hope that some of you will give working in this medium an increased degree of consideration, or, at the very least, that you will have an increased appreciation of the sequential medium as one for both serious art and serious literature. When I was on the academic team in high school, I was supposedly the guy who was in charge of literature and humanities related things (really, my job was to know obscure stuff that the one really good guy on the team didn’t know) and the other members of the team made jokes all the time about how comic books weren’t real literature. I dedicate this essay to all of you, I’m going to show you how wrong you were.
Before I go any further, I would like to give credit to some of the books I am deeply indebted to. Without them, this essay would just have been an idea. The books are: Alan Moore’s Writing for Comics, Writing for Comics with Peter David, Graphic Storytelling by Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art by Will Eisner, Writers on Comic Scriptwriting Volumes 1 and 2, Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud and Reinventing Comics by Scott McCloud. If any of this essay has inspired you, the books I mentioned are all wonderful resources to begin with. And, many of the arguments in this essay come from these, though the purpose of convincing people to write comic books is markedly different.
Name three movies or television shows adapted from comic books.
So what are they? Superman? Batman? Spider-Man? I bet that Road to Peridition, Sin City, American Splendor, A History of Violence, From Hell, Ghost World, Art School Confidential, Men in Black and V For Vendetta didn’t make the list. But all of those films were adapted from comics. Superheroes are not comics and comics are not superheroes. The superhero genre is but one genre within the larger medium of comics (the largest one in American comics but by no means the only one), the same way that romantic comedies are but one genre of film or horror is but one genre in the medium of prose. If the superhero genre doesn’t interest you then there are limitless other options, and, you might actually be able to go years without touching a superhero comic. Even within the superhero genre there is a great deal of diversity. And, outside the superhero genre, the diversity of projects is getting greater. Outside of the superhero genre, a market once dominated by them is opening up and books in new genres are slowly drifting in to both the comic mainstream and the mainstream of society with both critical and commercial success. Comics receive occasional coverage in places like National Public Radio, The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly (who has placed a number of comic creators on its coveted “It” List).
So what genres have been tackled besides superheroes? I’ll give you some examples of projects in other genres. Well, maybe you still want to stay in the speculative fiction umbrella but take it in other directions. You could try science fiction (Warren Ellis’s Orbiter), alternate history (Warren Ellis’s Ministry of Space), literary fantasy (Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman), swords and sorcery (Robert E. Howard’s Conan character has always been a popular comic character), alternate history with a fantasy twist (Arvid Nelson’s Rex Mundi) or horror (Alan Moore’ Swamp Thing).
What if you have no desire to do superheroes or anything vaguely related to science fiction or magic? You want to write stories grounded in the real world. Maybe something autobiographical (Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor), historical (Eric Shanower’s Age of Bronze), an intimate family story (Art Spiegelman’s Maus) or a story about a writer trying to write (Steven Seagle’s It’s a Bird). Maybe you want to tell a story from the perspective of a group that hasn’t always been included in the literary canon, you can do that in comics too. Stories have been told from the Black perspective (Ho Che Anderson’s King), the perspective of Iranian women (Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis), Gay men (Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby), Lesbians (Roberta Gregory’s Bitchy Bitch), Hispanics (Los Bros. Hernandez’s Love and Rockets) and Jews (Will Eisner’s To The Heart of the Storm), among countless others.
If you’re still reading at this point, maybe you think I have some sort of legitimate point. But your next question is, what can writing comics do for me? Well, the first answer to this is that, with the success of some of the movies listed above, movie studios are picking up the rights to adapt just about every comic series they can. That might not interest you though. The medium is far from a creative ghetto, in fact a number of creators cross back and forth from comics to other things. In fact, here are fourteen people who have done projects in comics and other media at least once in their careers.

1. Damon Lindelof (co-creator of Lost/Writer of Ultimate Hulk v. Wolverine for Marvel Comics)
2. Orson Scott Card (Hugo Award winning author of the Ender Saga and the Alvin Maker series/Writer of Ultimate Iron Man for Marvel Comics)
3. Joss Whedon (Creator of television series Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and writer/director of Serenity/Writer of Astonishing X-Men for Marvel Comics)
4. Michael Chabon (Pulitzer Prize Winner for the comic book related novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay/Contributor on and editor of Michael Chabon Presents The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist anthology for Dark Horse Comics)
5. Glan David Gold (Author of the acclaimed and bestselling Carter Beats the Devil/Contributing writer to Michael Chabon Presents The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist)
6. Alisa Kwitney (Author of Romance and Chick List novels like Sex as a Second Language and On the Couch/Writer of Destiny: A Chronicle of Deaths Foretold for DC Comics’s Vertigo, their Mature Readers line)
7. Allan Heinberg (Veteran television writer for shows like The OC and Gilmore Girls/Writer of Young Avengers for Marvel Comics)
8. Reginald Hudlin (Director of House Party and Boomerang, President of Entertainment for Black Entertainment Television/Writer of Black Panther for Marvel Comics)
9. Kevin Smith (Writer/Director of the acclaimed independent film Clerks/Writer of Green Arrow for DC Comics and writer of Daredevil for Marvel Comics)
10. Neil Gaiman (New York Times Bestselling Author of American Gods/Writer of The Sandman for Vertigo)
11. John Ridley (Screenwriter on the films Undercover Brother and Three Kings/Writer of Wildstorm’s The American Way)
12. Christos N. Gage (Writer for the television series Law and Order: SVU and Numb3rs/Writer of Deadshot for DC Comics and Arcana’s Paradox)
13. Douglas Rushkoff (Described by his website as an “Author, social theorist, journalist, and software developer”/writer for Vertigo’s Testament)
14. Rachel Pollack (Faculty member in the MDA program at Goddard College, tarot expert, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award for Unquenchable Fire and the World Fantasy Award for Godmother Night/Writer on Vertigo’s Doom Patrol and Brother Power, The Geek and New Gods for DC Comics)




From there, now that I've worked through some of the prejudices of readers, I'm going to talk about the things the comic medium can offer in terms of storytelling.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
09:54 / 05.07.06
Are you looking for compositional critique or fact-checking, Nolan?

On the second, in your list:

What if you have no desire to do superheroes or anything vaguely related to science fiction or magic? You want to write stories grounded in the real world. Maybe something autobiographical (Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor), historical (Eric Shanower’s Age of Bronze), an intimate family story (Art Spiegelman’s Maus) or a story about a writer trying to write (Steven Seagle’s It’s a Bird). Maybe you want to tell a story from the perspective of a group that hasn’t always been included in the literary canon, you can do that in comics too. Stories have been told from the Black perspective (Ho Che Anderson’s King), the perspective of Iranian women (Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis), Gay men (Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby), Lesbians (Roberta Gregory’s Bitchy Bitch), Hispanics (Los Bros. Hernandez’s Love and Rockets) and Jews (Will Eisner’s To The Heart of the Storm), among countless others.

I think some of your choices are a bit off: Age of Bronze isn't really historical, Maus is admittedly an intimate family story, but it's also a Holocaust memoir. Also, Roberta Gregory's Bitchy Bitch is not a lesbian character - that's Bitchy Butch - the anthology the character appears in was called Naughty Bits. Generally, in this section, i think you need to think about the distinction between "written from the perspective of", "representing the experience of" and "written by a member of".

Worth noting also that of the non-superhero books you cite, at least two (Swamp Thing and Sandman, feature superheroes.
 
 
This Sunday
17:16 / 05.07.06
And, if you don't qualify other types of prose, such as not mentioning when a book is 'fantasy' or 'science fiction' or whatever, you shouldn't qualify 'chick lit' or 'romance' as such. Bad form.

Also, please rethink 'literary fantasy' since the term just begs a debate on literary vs nonliterary, as well as serving to downplay the quality or intensity of the other works listed. Which, in some cases might be reasonable, but for matters of taste and representation...
 
 
This Sunday
17:26 / 05.07.06
You might, also, want to throw in Norman Mailer, since a large collection of his personally-made comics were just made available to the public in a thick collection. And it'd look good and respectable, probably.

And don't necessarily forget the newspaper funnies. Remember, real actual prose authors thought 'Li'l Abner' or 'Pogo' to be the best writing done by Americans.

The celebrity testimony itself might help. Dorothy Parker was a self-confessed comics fan. As were Nabokov, and Bill Burroughs, and Kathy Acker, and so on. Throw in some actors or something, if necessary. Helps to vary. Add on Ronald Reagan, even, if you can stomach the thought of enjoying some of the same things.
 
 
Mark Parsons
05:28 / 12.07.06
Jeff Loeb started as a screenwriter.

Jules Pfeiffer was an Eisner assistant (which mean the had huge impact on the stories) then did editorial cartoons, novels, kids books, screenplays (Carnal Knowledge).
 
 
Mark Parsons
05:35 / 12.07.06
Larry Niven
Harlan Ellison (worth shouting: HARLAN ELLISON!!!)
Kevin J Anderson (is he already on yr list?)
Michael Moorcock
Loads of Mutant Enemy (Buffy, Angel, etc) writers: Jane Espenson, Drew Goddard, David Fury, etc
Gahan Wilson (ok, he's a cartoonist)
Caitlin Keirnan wrote The Dreaming for Vertigo, but was already an award winning horror/dark fantastique writer (Please check her out she is growing into a writer who can be shelved alongside Machen, Blackwood & Lovecraft)
 
 
Mark Parsons
06:06 / 12.07.06
John Byrne wrote a novel, I recall.
Jim Starlin did too (with his then wife).
Steve Englehart (novel; videogames)
James Robinson: well, let's say he has a lot to answer for in the screenplay department.
Gardner Fox wrote many scifi books as well as Golden Age comics
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
07:47 / 12.07.06
Chris Claremont also wrote novels. They were awful. It might be best not to cite too many actively awful works in the list, though.
 
 
Crestmere
05:20 / 27.07.06
I'm rewriting this right now.
 
  
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