It Is A Circle Blog

Although I read plenty of comics and graphic novels, I’d never seen myself as a potential writer of said. In part because it’s such a visual form. When you see a comic, all you get is the finished piece, with little sense of what might underpin it. I’d seen some of Tom’s notes back when he was writing as well as drawing – lavish, complicated things, the descriptions poetic and as enticing for me as the images he’d create from them. I knew I couldn’t do that.

In many ways, a comics script has more in common with film and play scripts than it does with novel writing (having dabbled in all of these forms to some degree). However, with a comic, all the work of the director and actors also has to happen on the page and there are no rules about where in the process this should happen. I gather when a comic is very author led, the author can be rather prescriptive about how the pages should look. Coming into a project Tom had already started, it seemed nuts to be trying to tell him how any of it ought to look.

The biggest practical differences between comics and my usual story writing are as follows.

1) Very little narration. I throw in odd bits, but too much is clunky.

2) Like the script for a play, all the action has to be played out through the dialogue and key directions.

3) I have no control over how things look. (Other writers may, but I don’t contribute much there.)

4) Fantasy elements really come to life, which means more scope for indulging in them without getting sidetracked from the plot.

5) Writing is much quicker than drawing. I have to be patient.

I’ve also found that long speeches are a nuisance, and that ‘talking heads’ pages are bad – which I didn’t know when I started. I’d have handled some of the talking differently had I been aware of this! these days when I write conversations, I try to put them in the context of things happening, although Tom assures me that this is far more an artist issue than an author one.

For comics to make sense, there has to be a good relationship between the art and words. If the words are trying to do everything (as in a book) it doesn’t work so well. I cottoned on to that early in the process and try to leave plenty of space for Tom to bring his own ideas to what we do.

I concentrate on the voices of characters, trying to hear them as distinct individuals in my head. I offer a bare minimum of ‘stage directions’ if I need the image to convey body language, or a gesture. Most of the time, Tom’s work compliments what I’ve written. Sometimes he startles the hell out of me with an idea that makes the story as written seem entirely different from how I imagined it, and invariably improves it. He’s bolder than me, has more vision, and I’ve learned a great deal from working with him.