Iām going to get the Actual News out of the way up top this week! Tickets have just gone on sale for this very cool live event where the entirely brilliant superstar of comics Jamie Smart and I will be engaging in Ultimate Comics Battle, on a stage in London, in front of a live theatre audience! Basically we draw a bunch of deeply silly stuff while being heckled by children. The last time we did this, in a big top at a festival last summer, was an absolute blast - we made each other laugh a lot, at any rate, and I think the audience enjoyed it also? - so I think I can guarantee that this will be a Very Fun Time. Tickets are on sale now, if you have any young comics fans who love Jamieās work (or indeed mine), bring them along! More details and tickets here!
If you canāt make it along to that for whatever reason, a REMINDER that next Friday 4th August I will be doing a MEGA ROBO MASTERCLASS, live online, so you can join in wherever in the world you are. Details and tickets here!
(OH AND ALSO: both of these events are in part to push the release of the new Mega Robo Bros book, CARNIVAL CRISIS, which is also outā¦ next week? Goodness that came around quick. Available for pre-order now!)
Okay. Where was I? Right: HOW TO WRITE COMICS.
So last week I shared the initial pitch / outline that I sent my editors for what would end up becoming my occasional Phoenix series, Daughters of the Demon. Once theyād said, basically, āthis looks cool please go aheadā the next step was to write essentially a tight outline; again an episode-by-episode description of the story, but this time broken down into a bit more detail describing what would happen on each page. Iāll share that here - this time, for your reading enjoyment Iāll jump to Episode Two, because honestly the tight outline for part one was pretty much exactly what I shared last week but with āPage One / Two/ ā etc inserted between the paragraphs. So hereās the second episode, and Iāll be back at the end with some notes and comments.
EPISODE TWO
PAGE ONE
Our two heroes - YNGRID (loudmouth, wings, breathes fire) and SANA (serious, has a plan, COOL POWERS weāll get to in a bit) set off, bickering amongst themselves as they explore the TRAP-FILLED TEMPLE.
PAGE TWO-THREE
We get a cool giant spread tracing their path downwards through an isometric view of the temple, following them as they negotiate PUZZLES, PITS, SPIKY COLUMNS and STRANGE TENTACLED CREATURES on their way downwards through its levels.
Fortunately for our heroes, they turn out to be PRETTY HANDY.
YNGRID, the loudmouth, seems to be part-demon herself; she can fly (a bit), and breathe fire, and is generally pretty handy in a scrap - particularly once she helps herself to a giant war hammer from one of the templeās monstrous / undead defenders.
SANA, the sensible one,Ā seems to be in charge of their strategy, and is apparently a master of some cool form of martial arts that involves manifesting COOL DEMON CLAWS OF MYSTICAL BLUE FIRE around her hands when she does a particularly nifty move.
PAGE FOUR
After all this adventuring, they reach the templeās innermost chamber - a large hall, absolutely crammed full of dusty old skeletons, surrounding a raised platform which containsā¦ a CRYSTAL ORB, glowing with warm sunlight-like light. They reach out for itā¦
āā¦and thatās quite far enough.ā
It is the soldiers from episode one! They have followed our heroes down through the temple, taking advantage of having all the traps and monsters cleared out of their way. The large-helmeted leader admits he wasnāt expecting all of that to be dealt with by just two little girls.
Well, says Sana, striking a cool pose and manifesting her FIERY PSYCHIC DEMON ARMOUR. As you can see, theyāre not just any two little girls.
No, says the leader, he can see that. Which is why heās taken precautions to deal with them. And he raises his gauntlet aloftā¦
ā¦and all the skeletons in the hall start to stir, brandishing cobweb-covered but fearsome-looking swords and turning their glowing red eye-sockets on our heroes.
Wow, says Yngrid, as she holds the orb aloft. Your boss must want this thing pretty bad, huh? Be a shame if anything happened to it..
No! Cries big helmet guy. You would not dare! The orb must not be shattered! You have no idea of the destruction you would unleash on the worldā¦
āDestruction, huh? I like the sound of thatā¦ā
And Yngrid THROWS the orb down, SHATTERING on the temple floor!
ā¦so! Some things to note.
You may notice that thereās really not that much more detail than what I showed you last week - the purpose of this step is really just to break it down into pages, figuring out where the action beats and page turns will fall.
Other comics writers might skip this step, jumping straight to writing a full script, but as I personally prefer to skip that step, something like this helps me figure out the basics of whatās happening on each page. Iāll then jump straight from that into writing-through-drawing, which maybe Iāll talk about next week.
You may notice that the outline above reads as a bit unevenly weighted; some pages get a lot more description than others. Page one, for example, looks on the face of it like almost nothing is actually happening, whereas page 4 is a whole detailed blow-by-blow scene. Basically, you have to have a sense in your head of what each pageās job is, and plan accordingly. Page one here has to establish where we are, re-introduce and re-establish the characters, include space for a STORY SO FAR recap, and have room for a Big Cool Hero Shot to help sell us on these guys being exciting people we want to read about. All of those are really important things, and take up a lot of space, and basically feel like plenty enough for one page to be getting on with.
Similarly, Pages 2-3 here are less of a description of story beats than essentially just a statement reading ālook, trust me, I am going to draw a big fun cool thing hereā. (I am very lucky to work with people who will let me get away with this sort of thing.) As I mentioned last time, the big Exploring The Dungeon spread here was kind of the seed idea for the whole thing, just a cool thing I wanted to try. But in story terms it actually is doing an important job, too; apart from (hopefully) selling a sense of exploration and excitement, itās our first chance to really spend some time with these characters, to get to see them in action; what they do and how they interact with each other.
Due to all of the above, Page 4 ends up doing the bulk of the actual Moving The Plot Forward work, hence its relatively very long and detailed blow-by-blow description above. As I say, you have to have a realistic sense about how much is going to actually fit on a page, and indeed I think I erred on the side of back-loading this episode a bit too heavily and a couple of moments here end up being lost / condensed in the final version. Honestly I probably should have asked for an extra page here; that whole bit with the bad guy bringing all the skeletons back to life sounds really cool and exciting and I fear maybe didnāt quite have enough room to do it justice in the final version. I was going to say that that intense pressure on page real estate is just something you have to get used to when telling stories in these short 4-page instalments, but I am currently working on a 200-page graphic novel and having the exact same problem, so I guess thatās just comics? Your ambition will always expand to fill and then slightly exceed the space available.
I canāt overstate my opinion of The Importance of Cliffhangers in weekly serialised comics. Theyāre the most important beat of each episode, the one thatās going to live in the readerās mind for that full week, so give them something fun to think about. When breaking a story into episodes I basically start with whatās going to be the cliffhanger for each episode and then fill in the gaps from there.
Something I just noticed reading this: during the course of this episode Yngrid picks up a Cool Giant War Hammer. The exciting cliffhanger is then her smashing the magic orb thing. Why on earth then does she do so by throwing the orb onto the floor, rather than hitting it with her cool new giant hammer? That would be way better. Did past Neill notice this too, and change it? I actually canāt remember. I guess weāll find outā¦ NEXT WEEK!
See? Cliffhangers!