Well it's worth saying that though you don't want the characters in an explicitly humorous style, that doesn't mean that they can't be stylized, and that you can't therefore express a good deal or more of what you're leaving behind from prose through that stylization. In comics, you have ART and you have WRITING, but both of them fall under the heading STORY. One can lead the other quite happily, but I tend to think that comics are at their absolute best when they are working in sync to bring out the best in each other.
For instance, your example above "Susan screamed like a banshee" could be conveyed in a number of ways. One way of doing it would be to have her face contorted as she screams to put that across, maybe evoking Munch or something. You can almost be more effective here because you have a greater variety of means to unsettle the reader, transmitting emotion through composition and colour as well as the juxtapositioning of letters.
Remember that only about half of what you write will end up on the comic page. If you're not a writer/artist, then your aim in writing is very similar to your aim in prose. You are painting pictures with a sequence of words, trying to transmit as much of what you can see in your head in as little a space as possible. But what you put across is not the finished product, and the writing needs to reflect this.
Essentially, you're writing two halves of a story. For a prose writer, you're writing different parts of the same story in two different ways and then smooshing them together. In this way, comics writing is far closer to screenwriting than it is to prose (so looking up stuff on screenwriting, which is far more available on the web, might be a cry).
For the reader, you're writing the scaffold of the story, the nuts and bolts of what follows what and how it's all strung together (plus character dialogue and any prose you need to put in caption boxes). That's the stuff that really needs to read well, because that'll be visible in the finished product. That should be the stuff that comes easy to you, I guess.
There rest of the writing (the stuff you're doing for the artist) is really a form of descriptive allusion. Remember, again, that none of this stuff is seen by the reader and it's only there to get the point across to the artist, so anything goes here. You can be poetic, metaphorical, conversational, dry, descriptive, nebulous, whatever.... It doesn't need to be particularly consistent and the voice you use here can even be completely atonal to the story, it just has to do the job for the panel it's needing done for, so pull any trick out of the bag that you want. It'll depend on the type of relationship you have with your artist exactly how you go about this.
Might have more later..... any of that of use? |
