I thought it might be fun to do a little mini series here on the theme of How To Write Comics (or How I Write Comics, anyway - write comics however you want, I’m not your dad), using some examples from one of my recent / current / future series for The Phoenix, Daughters of the Demon. I’ve had a little dig around and found my original notes and pitch for the series. Here, to start us off, is my outline for the first episode, and I’ll be back at the end with some Notes and Thoughts…
Tigers in the Temple
By Neill Cameron
EPISODE ONE
We open with a dramatic big shot of the enormous LORD TRIARCHUS, a terrifying DRAGON-SCORPION HYBRID MONSTER possessed of unimaginably strong magic. Narration sings his praises, telling of his awesome power, of how he can take on human form, and how with his seven half-dragon sons as his barons he rules over the entire world in unquestioned majesty and dominion…
A voice cuts in: “that guy? That guy’s a creep.”
We break out of the narration. A small band of ARMOURED SOLDIERS and OGRE-LIKE HENCHMEN are standing before the bedraggled inhabitants of a poor village, as their leader - a tiny man with a giant helmet - reads self-importantly from a scroll. “Who said that?” he demands to know. Who dares speak thus of the all-powerful Lord Triarchus?
The terrified villagers shuffle away uneasily from one loud-mouthed kid, dressed in a Humble Peasant Type Cloak, who definitely said it. “What?” She protests. “He IS a creep.” She goes on to opine that he not only is a terrible ruler but also LOOKS STUPID, that being both a dragon and a scorpion is definitely a case of trying too hard, and that magical dictatorship is really no basis for a system of government anyway.
The head soldier orders her to be SILENT, and carries on reading from the scroll - revealing how in all his power, there is one thing the Dragon Lord has long desired - an ancient rumoured source of great magical power, which has finally been found - in the sealed temple HERE, in this obscure and pitiful village - and for which they have the long-thought-lost KEY!
The kid continues to be mouthy, pointing out that big deal, so what, it’s probably full of DEATHTRAPS and MONSTERS and such and that these idiots are OBVIOUSLY just going to get themselves all killed going in there.
The leader reflects on this and decides that this is a point, and so he declares his intention to throw all the villagers into the temple first as fodder to flush out some of the traps / get themselves killed to make the way easier. Starting with the loudmouth kid.
“Please, no!” Another kid pleads with him to spare the loudmouth. “Please, spare my friend! She can’t help being an annoying idiot!”
The leader grins and orders his men to grab the friend too. These two peasant children will be the first to have the honour of dying for the glory of Lord Triarchus. The hench-ogres use the magic key thing to open the temple… and THROW THE TWO GIRLS IN.
Inside, the girls bounce off some ancient dusty skeletons and such, and land with a thud on the stone floor of the pitch-black temple.
They get up, dusting themselves off.
“Ha, that was awesome. They totally fell for it.”
They cast off their peasant cloaks and light the place up - the loudmouth kid BREATHING FIRE and revealing an adorable little set of wings that were hidden under her cloak, and her friend summoning blue flames of magical fire as she strikes an awesome KUNG-FU STANCE.
“Alright. Let’s find this thing.”
…okay, so! A couple of notes:
‘Tigers in the Temple’ was very much what we call a working title.
It strikes me that this is *wayyy* more detailed than what I would normally recommend writing as an initial pitch. If I’m pitching a new series (and coming up on TEN YEARS OF MEGA ROBO BROS it’s a while since I’ve done it, so I’m a little hazy) I’d normally start with much more of a top-level Series Outline: a brief overview of what the proposed series would be about, the overall shape of it and who the characters are, rather than getting into the specific beats of the story in detail. I think I made an exception in this case because it was only ever supposed to be a little three-episode short story, which arrived pretty fully-formed in my head, and I felt the most compelling things about it *were* the story beats. Honestly the characters didn’t exist much in my head beyond their interactions, and the couple of Fun Big Reveals about them as they play out over those three episodes, so I thought I’d just share those.
Honestly though I don’t think you need to worry too much about the proper format or whatever at this stage; use whatever works for you, be as colloquial and informal as you like. One bit of Actual Advice, though: be brief. Your job at this point is basically to tell a story in such a way as to hook the attention and intrigue of one reader: the editor. And that reader is very busy.
I dunno, maybe that’s good advice or maybe I’m just being lazy because I’ve been working with the guys at the Phoenix for years, have a pretty good idea of what they like, and thought they would get a kick out of this. Who knows? Again: I really can only talk about how I write, not necessarily how you should.
Those who have a read the strip and are paying close attention will notice that this outline talks about dragons a lot - Lord Triarchus is a Dragon Lord, his sons are half-dragons, etc, rather than demons as it is in the finished version. Essentially, it was all going to be about dragons - so, SPOILERS if you haven’t read it, but Sana and Yngrid were both also going to be Half-Dragon. I even had a vague notion that the whole world of the story could be playing out on a giant, Great A’Tuin-sized dragon, drifting through space. Look, what can I say, I’d been on a ferocious binge of Ursula K Leguin’s Earthsea books at the time1 and my brain was all full of dragons. Anyway, my editors response to the pitch was basically ‘we love everything about it, just one small thing: can it not be dragons?’. They were, it turns out, actively developing another series about dragons at the time. You have no control over this kind of thing as a creator, all you can do really is roll with the punches and ask yourself what is essential to your story. In this case what I felt was essential, what was exciting and cool about this story were the characters, and the Fun Big Reveals, and that I would get to draw the cool ‘kids-exploring-the-dungeon’ spread that was basically the seed idea for this whole thing. The fact that it was about dragons… I really liked it but honestly it wasn’t essential. So I basically did a find-and-replace to change ‘Dragons’ to ‘Demons’. Which I think maybe works better anyway - it fits the idea of Sana and Yngrid having to wrestle with their complicated feelings about their terrible dad even better (dude is LITERALLY A DEMON: sure, let’s kill him), and led me onto the notion of him being a kind of a mashup of different animal parts and a lot of the creatures that populate his world being tied to this magic, recognisable animals but warped into different shapes, which opened up lots of cool and fun options and directions. And also meant that I could call the strip Daughters of the Demon, which I still think is a great title. (Daughters of the Dragon was out, bonus comics nerd points if you know why). Although on the flipside, it may have ended up getting us some angry letters from parents who… don’t want their kids reading comics about demons, apparently? People are weird.
Lord Triarchus: Original Dragon Version.
Lord Triarchus: Snake-Demon-Thing Version. (Better!)
If anyone has any questions about this kind of process stuff, by all means fire away in the comments. I’ll try and do another post some time, about THE NEXT STEPS!
A quick reminder while I’m here, that if you have any kids who are into drawing and comics, and indeed my comics, you can sign up for my live MEGA ROBO MASTERCLASS with the Phoenix, on Friday 4th August. Details and tickets HERE!
I don’t know how I made it into my forties without reading A Wizard of Earthsea and it’s increasingly extraordinary sequels, and frankly I consider it a failing of our educational system that this was allowed to happen. One of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century! No YOU’RE “prone to hyperbole”.
I love hearing about this kind of early(ish) development stuff! Especially since I'm currently in the midst of trying to work out where the line between "too much planning that will inevitably get thrown out once I start actually writing" and "not enough planning which will cause me to lose steam halfway through" is on a long comic project. How much long term stuff do you usually have planned out from the start, if any?
I love these insights into your process! Do you think your process would change if you weren’t also drawing the story yourself?