My assignment

MY TEACHER WANTED ME TO TALK ABOUT MY EXPERIENCE WITH COMICS, HOW I GO ABOUT SETTING UP MY FIRST DRAFTS, AND WHERE I SEE MY THIRD ACT GOING. HE WANTED ME TO DO THIS IN 200 WORDS. I DID IT IN 389. IF HE DOCKS ME POINTS, I DON'T CARE. THIS IS MY (SOMEWHAT ABBREVIATED) VIEW ON THE MATTER.

I’m a student of comics. That’s not to say I’ve been studying books on comics for years or I’m taking classes or anything like that. I’m just a huge, huge fan. Comics serve as an outlet the way few other things can and after reading them for so many years, I’ve come to understand the basic structure of storytelling within. There’s a different way to tell a horror story versus a super hero story and different ways to tell a western over a pirate story. The list goes on and on but there’s a pervasive theme that works through comics; and that is the marriage of picture and words. Writing comics for me is like writing a movie, and not in that they both use scripts, moreso in the way that the writer puts his ideas to paper and the director/artist brings those words to life.

The difficult thing for me when writing a comic is looking at the story from an artistic perspective. Since I’m not a visual artist, I’m very open to the artist’s interpretation of my work. It’s the essence of collaboration that really appeals to me in this medium.

In coming up with my first draft, I often outline my story with bullet points. I try to cover at least one bullet point per page so I like to have a bare minimum of twenty-two bullets to work from. As it gets down to the page itself, I take layouts from stories I love and single issues that flow well and I try to mimic those in my scripts. When I don’t know how to layout a page in a visually stimulating way, I go for the basic six-panel layout (two across and three down) and I have every bit of faith that my artist can make it striking.

In my climactic ending, Crestfall (the heroine of my story) is faced with the man who caused her condition. He’s manipulated her mentally and physically. She’s positioned herself in such a way that now she has the upper hand. Her biggest fear is finding out how far she’s willing to go. If she kills him that will be a choice she has to live with. But can she live with herself knowing that this monster is still around? It’s a morality question to say the least.