Recently, I requested a critique for “Johnny Saturn” on a certain forum, and several of my webcartooning peers were kind enough to offer their opinions.  One such critique set me to thinking, though: It stated that many of our “Johnny Saturn” villains were evil for evil’s sake, and that we didn’t offer good reasons for them to be this way.  This criticism centered on Tactical and Dr. Wissenschaft.

As much as I welcomed the critique, I have to respectfully disagree with this assessment.  There is that old Stan Lee adage, that “there are no villains, just fallen heroes.”  That same line of reasoning goes on the express that everyone is the hero in their own story, and every villain believes he’s on the side of the angels no matter how awful their deeds.

I don’t buy it.

Josef Mengele, the so called Angel of Death, is a loose inspiration for Dr. Wissenschaft.  This should be pretty obvious to those of you who know anything about 20^th century history.  Did Mengele feel he was walking a moral high ground in doing the things he did?  I doubt it.  My guess is that he was all about the science, and that he was a total sociopath, devoid of any empathy for his victims.

Tactical, in his origin as a Balkan war criminal, is loosely based on any number of similar war criminals, both those that have been brought to trial in the Hague, and those that have yet to be apprehended.  Did these men relish the slaughter they ordered and oversaw?  Did they feel terrible about the massacres and rape camps?  I doubt it.  I think they performed their deeds in a misguided sense of nationalism.

Does every villain have some defining moment in their life when they become evil?  An “origin,” you might say.  Or, are they all sociopaths and psychopaths?  This is the standard comic book way, but I don’t think it’s the real way.  I think many of these people grow up in hell holes, and they grow up with cruelty.  It’s what they know.  They become inured to the suffering of others by their environment, and they learned cruelty as a second nature.

To put a point on it, many of the “Johnny Saturn” villains are simply those who put the ends before the means.  If they want something, they will do anything to make it happen.

In the real world, we know some people are bad, and we neither know (nor usually care) what made them bad.  The same rule applies to the “Johnny Saturn” villains.

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Here, our resident hulking behemoth of a villain, Alaric the Axe, has almost taken his final form.  At this point I envisioned a huge axe tattoo on his chest, and that might have been cool, but it never made it to the final design.  If I think of it in the future, Alaric may just get that tattoo.  That massive leather codpiece is certainly an attention grabber, is it not?  This particular illustration was one of my early explorations into watercolor, a medium I quickly fell in love with.

This is a short presentation Benita and I brainstormed to be delivered at a recent Writer’s Retreat. This might be of some assistance to those prose writers who are looking to break into the graphic novel or webcomic scene.

Writing for Comics:

By Scott Story and Benita Story, © 2009

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN PROSE AND COMICS WRITING

Whereas prose is very descriptive, establishing the narrative through words and the theater of the mind, comics are primarily a visually based.

When we say comics are visual, this doesn’t mean the writer is unimportant—in fact, he is just as necessary as ever.  But, the comic writers’ role is different than that of the prose writer.

Consider this: With prose, you establish a mental picture or emotion in the reader’s imagination; in comics, you present a mix of images and words that instantly elicits a response from the reader.  A non-fictional variant of this would be the word “Stop,” and then seeing a red stop sign.  The word intellectually tells you to stop, but the stop sign downloads directly and creates an instant mental response (hopefully followed up by a physical stop!)

One difference is detail.  While the writer has the leisure to expound on a scene or character in great detail and subtlety, in comics the ideas must be distilled down to just enough to tell the story, no more or no less.  Some writers have noted that writing for comics is like writing Haiku, where the writer has to carefully choose his words and there is little room excess.

In prose, character traits are often internalized part of the tapestry of the character and who he is.  In comics, due to the mediums visual nature, primary character traits are often portrayed in the character’s image.  For example, in prose a character with multiple personalities might appear perfectly normal despite his fractured psyche; in comics, you’ve got someone such as Two-Face, whose split personality is externalized.  (This is why so many comic villains are scarred or malformed in some way.)

In prose, time and pacing are controlled by the writer.  In comics, which are composed of consecutive two-dimensional images, space equals time.  Panel width indicates how long a panel lasts; for example, a tall, slim panel would last just a moment; while a wide panel would cover a longer period.

With prose, Western readers are taught to read left to right, and then top to bottom, in that order.  It’s the same in comics, except that the images that are being “read” as well as the words.  Action in comics usually takes place left to right as well, unless the writer wants to cap off or end a scene, and then he may conclude with a right-to-left panel.

In prose, words are the medium that carry a narrative.  In comics, even when there are long silent scenes without words, the writer still controls the story because he is the one who decided what would happen and what the characters would do.  The writer could be said to be writing with pictures in this case.

In prose, you are usually saddled with a standard font and pt size, and all emoting or emphasis needs to be done through the use of other words with a dose of italics and bolds.  In comics, you can change the font, pt. size, color, or any other facet of the lettering you wish, all for effect.  There are different shapes and styles of speech balloons and tails, and uses of these elements telegraph different meanings to readers.  You can add numerous layers of subtlety with how the text is arranged and presented.

APPROACHES TO COMIC WRITING

There are three different ways you can approach writing for comics.  Since you are not creating finished, stand-alone prose, your script can take one of three basic forms:

1) Full Script: Much like a movie or play script, this is a panel by panel, page by page script, complete with all the information the artist needs to draw what you call for, and the letterer to letter the pages that follow.  There is no set style for comic scripts, and their basic layout varies from writer to writer.  This is the most common style of comics scripting.

2) Synopsis: Sometimes called the Modified Marvel Style, this is a short synopsis of what occurs on each page or small group of pages.  The artist decides how to break up the pages into panels, and the writer creates the exact dialogue after the art is done, making the words fit the story more exactly.

3) Marvel Method: Not used much anymore, the writer creates a synopsis for the whole comic issue, and then turns it over to the artist to break into pages and panels.  After the art is done, then the writer composes the captions and dialogue.  The synopsis might be long and detailed, almost a short story; or it can be very short.  An example of a short synopsis would be the famous “Have them fight God,” as told by Stan Lee to Jack Kirby in Fantastic Four no’s’ 48 to 50.  Kirby in turn created an epic which introduced the Silver Surfer and Galactus, used Dr. Doom for a plot reversal, and then Stan Lee wrote the dialogue to fit this truly titanic tale.  The reason the Marvel Style has fallen into disuse is because the writer has to have an artist who is a skilled storyteller in their own right, plus a level of trust between the writer and artist.  Such relationships are rare these days.