Following, some pompous rambling ideas about narrative media.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot, in a sort of over-simplified and competitive way, about how comics compare to other narrative media. Comics are as capable of telling stories as prose, verse, film, or video game, but the domain of narrative technique covered by each of these of course varies. This is why, I think, a perfect adaptation between media is impossible (as perfect translation between languages is impossible). People making stories must play to the strengths of the medium, then, right? Any story could be told as a comic, but not in the same way, with the same emphases, or necessarily as well as it could be told in prose or in film.
Reading Perdido Street Station is making me think about this. The way it’s written is so elegant and strange, and so tied to the English language and the author’s use of it, that the book and the invented setting of the book seem completely tied to the medium. I keep thinking about drawing something from the book but I don’t think I could do it. It couldn’t be adapted; it IS the book; it is the way it’s written. Visual representations of it would be too concrete, and would lack the voice of the book, which seems to be some elemental part of the story and its characters.
It reminds me of looking at a comic like Bone, and seeing the characters and the world of that comic, and being unable to imagine them existing in a world not made of Jeff Smith’s drawings. The world of Bone is made believable and real, but in such a way that it is tied fundamentally to the most basic aspects of how each image is drawn. The atoms of the world are in how he draws; how he renders the rhythm of the story.
I think this about my own comics, too, though I don’t mean to say I think I’m good enough for it to carry over into anyone else’s view of them. Overside is less a setting than it is the comics that take place in it– I can’t really wrap my head around Overside stories rendered in prose, or in film, or in video game. I have made these stories and their setting with comics in mind. I try to use the medium such that the stories seem tied to it; such that they could be rendered faithfully in no other way.
BE AWARE that the program I recorded this with has, because it was a trial version, covered a couple of minutes throughout in static, rendering a bit of it nearly unintelligible. But most of the recording is ok! And someone from SPX got the whole thing on video so hopefully we’ll be able to see that, too.
This is a panel that I’d like to do multiple times! I even feel like the five of us could have talked much longer on the subject. So hopefully we can run this panel at other conventions in the future!
Hey I hope you’re all aware of Aaron Diaz’s excellent blog that started recently; he’s been talking about a lot of stuff about comics and narrative art, and he is a Smart Guy who Gets It. The following post might be seen as a response to his post, Show vs. Tell.
A little while ago on twitter I said something to the effect of ’Saying that writing is more important than art in comics misses the point,’ and a lot of people replied to that, agreeing and contesting and wondering what I meant, etc. So I’ve been meaning to organize my thoughts on this and put them here, lest my twitter account turn into nothing but endless bitching about specificities of the comics medium that basically nobody cares about but me.
It’s easy to see comics as a sort of half-and-half medium: a fundamentally incomplete thing, made of Pictures plus Writing. I don’t think this is the case: comics are as ‘incomplete’ as any narrative medium, because no medium can convey a story as a fully experienced, believable thing (I think that film’s superficial 'realness’ lends to the idea that it is the highest and best realization of a story possible–certainly it is at least the most profitable, hence the growing influence of big-budget film adaptations of comic book stories on the recent SDCC). But the tools that comics have to convey story (still* images both sequential and discrete, and often text) are as capable, though in fundamentally different ways, as the tools at the root of any narrative medium.
I think that a central part of making comics successfully is eliminating the divide between Writing & Drawing/Words & Pictures– more precisely, revealing that divide as artificial. That sounds like a way over-intellectualized approach, but I guess it’s sort of extrapolated from how I try to approach comics at every level of making them:
From the start, from the earliest stage of planning a story, it’s helpful to be aware of the medium for which it is intended. I’ve written a little before about my idea of a story’s native medium, and this correlates well with McLuhan’s quote, ’the medium is the message,’ which Aaron mentions. If you’re making a comic, you should know what a comic is, and how you can use the medium to your advantage: how you can rely on images and the flow between images in the place of text, how you can use the two together or against each other, etc. In planning Vattu, I’ve tried to keep all of my notes visual and verbal: writing is efficient for working out some kinds of ideas, and drawing others. It’s a visual story, because it is a comic. And it’s a comic because it is a visual story. We’re extremely limited in what we can do within the medium, so let’s play to its strengths.
I think the assembly-line trend that still dominates much of mainstream comics goes against this effort to eliminate the Divide, and contributes the idea that comics are composed of two discrete elements. Often (usually?) several visual artists are expected to draw the pictures to match the writer’s script. Often there is little communication between writer and artist(s); the artists are seen as producing images to “go along with” the writer’s story (as opposed to producing the images which are the substance of that story). And the writer’s name is biggest on the cover, because the writer is the boss. This results in a comic that can be very well-drawn and well written, but where the division between writer and artist is painfully, distractingly obvious. At least, it is to me! The drawings might not fit the tone of the writing, or the writing might be at times rendered redundant by the drawings, or a creative and well-made story is rendered bland and unreadable by the schematically-drawn, airbrushed shit that I guess is supposed to pass for a “house style.”
But dividing the task of comic-making among separate people of course doesn’t mean you’re making a broken comic! I have never worked with anybody on comics, but I would guess that the fundamental element that’s necessary for it to work is communication– Assuming a writer-artist pair, each should be aware of what the other is doing, what their strengths are, how they work, and the shape and fundamentals of the medium. The writer knows what the artist can convey in a character’s body language and expression, and can edit their dialogue to work in tandem with those visual elements.
So ANYWAY– saying that writing is more important than art in comics misses the point. The art IS the writing, and the writing is the art. The whole point of comics is to make something that’s greater than the sum of two different media– something that is a completely different medium from both. A comic where a division is clear, where the art is used as a supplement to the writing rather than as the material of the story, and where the question of 'which is more important’ becomes relevant, is a poor use of the medium.
Working on a couple of different articles on worldbuilding stuff, will probably post one on using language in that context soon!
* Animation in comics shows up in webcomics, but this is still the exception to the rule. I think animation in comics contradicts the medium and how it is read, and can weakens and distract from it, regardless of the technical quality of the animation itself. In any case I think it’s a separate issue from what I’m talking about here! Might write more about this later, if I can figure out if I genuinely take issue with it or if I’m just afraid of something new and difficult to make!
A recent article on io9 (which refers to this original article) discusses Harry Potter as an example of accessible conveyance of backstory and worldbuilding. There’s some common ground with stuff I’ve talked about before…
While I don’t consider the Harry Potter books a particularly stellar example of an invented setting (though I really like them!), the article emphasizes a point about them that is really important to note, particularly if you’re interested in making invented-setting fiction yourself:
[J.K. Rowling]’s clever instinct, the editor said, was to postpone the point where you need to learn a complex background in order to continue following the story. By then you would have absorbed so many small, easy-to-learn, easy-to-digest details that when you finally got to the Big Lesson, it wasn’t intimidating.
In the context of the article this is presented as the “mainstream” approach, as opposed to the more hardcore sf/f approach of dropping in massive, distracting blocks of explanation of the history and context of the world in the midst of the story.
Maybe this makes me less of a serious genre-fiction guy, but I really think it is valuable to teach readers the setting and its rules in a way that goes along with the story and makes for a seamless, immersive experience– rather than going into asides to deliberately explain aspects of the setting, to an extent often exceeding their value within the context of the story.
Worldbuilding does not have to mean explaining every aspect of your setting.
Above, some overly-dogmatic-souding ideas I’ve arrived at in this kind of work. I’ll tighten up my notes for the whole talk and put it up in a readable format as soon as I can! I think the talk went pretty well….
Just filled my fourth notebook of Vattu notes and vis-dev stuff. Including two more books full of page thumbnails, that’s around 1000 pages I have filled working out this story. Towards the beginning of this process I was trying to do all of my planning/writing on the computer, but paper remains the easiest way for me to think. So now I’m going over everything by hand and then doing later drafts of each structure and scene in Scrivener.
I am proud of this in a way but it is kind of an invisible accomplishment that won’t matter until the whole comic is done.
Above and throughout this post, preliminary artwork for Vattu.
Where do you get your ideas? is the question I have heard more than any other question, and other comic people I’ve talked to about it have gotten it a lot too. After writing the following I sort of realized it is the best I can do at an answer:
So finishing OoT, and gearing up to start drawing Vattu, and trying to solidify several nebulous ideas for another project into something workable, have got me thinking about ideas and how they work.
Between Rice Boy and Order of Tales I think I’ve gotten a sense for the process by which I work from idea to product, wide to tight. The experience of finishing the actual Work (years-long, grueling and usually boring, at the very least) and seeing it line up well with the Idea (easy, fun, and completely untainted by reality) is kind of interesting, and has only really happened for me with Order of Tales I think.
The little idea-seeds that start everything aren’t often very clear or very detailed, and if I try to articulate them to anybody else I realize they’re usually uninteresting outside of my own head. It’s a vague sense of the way that a story or a character or setting should seem: not specific enough to record straight to paper faithfully, but specific enough to know a direction, and to know when you’re off track. I think the major bottleneck for people asking the HowDoYouGetYourIdeas question is this: realizing that anything is fair game, and essentially training yourself to funnel your observation of the world into idea-generation. I do not know if that makes sense but that is what I do most of the time.
There seems to be a sort of purity in the idea-seed, which can be lost as it’s worked over and developed. For example! My ideas for things usually start with some mood or visual aesthetic; much less frequently with a discrete concept. Koark started as a sense of a tall, mysterious person, obsessed with fictions, visually dramatic but with a sense of awkwardness that sort of disarms the self-importance of him. I found myself looking back at that seed throughout my development of the character, and throughout the story. That seed is what got me interested in the character, and what got me interested in making OoT at all, so I guess I figured that there was something essential there, and I made it a point not to get too far off-track.
But getting off-track can be useful, too, can’t it? It’s easy to get stuck on something, or to get too attached to a character or idea or passage of the story. It doesn’t really help to invest these things with too much importance before they’re realized; I think it’s good to remain open to different arrangements for as long as possible in each successive stage of making the thing. Having somebody you can go over stuff with while it’s still embryonic can be helpful– I find myself making a lot of basic assumptions about the structure of a story long before it’s worked out tightly enough to make such assumptions, and it sometimes takes someone else’s input for me to realize I’ve been making them at all. If that makes any sense! I guess this is something that editors are for but I have never had one; I talk about stuff I am working on incessantly with my girlfriend Lela and she is very helpful.
Ok. It’s important to know that pretty much everything starts vague and simple, and when we say that we love the IDEA of a story, it’s more a testament to the skill of the creator in realizing that idea than it is to the quality of the idea itself, I think. I try to err on the side of underestimating the value of ideas, because it’s easier to have them than to realize them, and we shouldn’t get excited about them and burned out before we’ve started the actual work!
I want to write more stuff about comics. Maybe we can consider this Part 1 of a thing. Let me know if there’s anything in particular you’d like to read.
So I finished Order of Tales a little while ago. Didn’t realize how much work went into it until I was done, and now I am relieved to take a couple weeks off from drawing! 744 pages drawn over 2 years, and about another year before that of writing. Very happy with it, very happy I carried through to what I feel was a much better ending than Rice Boy, very happy I’m improving by any metric that I care about. But I’m sick of thinking about it for now so ANYWAY–
I’m starting a new big Overside comic on July 26th, called Vattu. I guess I’ve been talking about it a lot in other places on the internet. Have been doing a lot of planning for it over the past several months and I am very excited to start. Have some other non-Overside stuff I’ll probably be able to start before the year’s over too, which will be really fun to do!
Moving to Brooklyn soon, and when I get there I’ll probably have to be locked in my room drawing comics all day! This is not a bad thing.
