The Inaugural Year of an Independent Comic Artist

Scripting – This is how I roll
It’s daunting to write a script for something you will end up putting in visual sequence. It’s equally daunting to try to describe that process in an articulate manner for others to understand how it’s done. In this particular post I am going to be posting a lot of sketches and first drafts, a lot of rough, in process art that is really not meant to be consumed by any audience. This is the raw and unfiltered, the unprofessional before it is packaged into something comprehensible and challenging. It’s notes to oneself, doubt about particular initial ideas and working through what you want to do and what comes off as horribly cliche. I hope all of this documentation is helpful, but it’s also important to critique it as a work in process. An artist opening up their process for review is a delicate and sensitive topic, one that deserves honesty and integrity in discussions.

That being said, crap is crap and it should not be tolerated from a professional artist. It needs to be headed off at the pass and euthanized. As I said, honesty is very important. That doesn’t mean you have to like everything… in fact, it’s better if you don’t.

Today I’m going to look at two related stories that I worked on for a number of weeks (including initial doodles and scraps, more like a few months). The first is Leloran Anima, a fantasy story that was initially conceptualized as a GURPS game I made to play with my young brother and sister to introduce them to tabletop role playing games. I felt that they spent a lot of time competing with each other, and the games they had at their disposal were encouraging this behaviour, so I created something cooperative that I thought would speak to them. Leloran Anima takes place in a world that is just industrializing and dealing with shifts within traditional monarchy systems. There are four main characters, the most important being the youngest daughter of a prominent royal family that is overthrown by their people. I wanted to challenge the traditional good vs. evil convention in fantasy and bring some social maturity that tends to predominate science fiction stories.

Writing Leloran Anima

So, the first thing I wrote to get the ball rolling was the character’s personalities and conflicts between them. This made sense, because the world was so involved that I needed something to ground my ideas before I jumped on a general plot. The story is very character driven, so outlining who these people are became of utmost importance. The foundation of the plot and the secondary characters came out of this exercise, and further changes were to shift the narrative in a direction that I felt was important.

There are usually two ways of writing fiction (or anything really) – additive and subtractive. Additive writing is when you start out with an outline and fill it in. Subtractive writing is where you write down all the ideas in your head and pare it down to an outline. I tend to be an additive writer. It drove my university professors nuts, because in lower division classes we would have to hand in outlines for our proposed papers and mine had enormous amounts of content. Eventually, I would take the nugget of the idea out of this content and structure into something that flowed well and got my point across. It was unconventional, but I haven’t received less than a B+ on a paper, so it definitely works for me. I took this same approach with Leloran Anima; I started out with the thick description of the plot, a linear discussion of what the story looked like, and then pared it down to an act by act outline.

While writing this, I became immediately aware that even with the emphasis on the characters rather than the world, the story was still too involved as a first attempt. Writers have to be careful about falling into this trap – we live in our heads and sometimes these heads come up with concepts that are too involved to accurately gauge whether they will engage us for the amount of time it will take to write them. We can also start to think that these are precious parts of ourselves, and then we don’t want to share them with others. At this point you have to stop and remind yourself as to why you’re a comic artist to begin with. It’s not to make our precious little comics in our basement where we get to sit and admire them in isolation. We make this art for other people to read, to engage with them and an old tradition of passing on ideas, truths and understandings from person to person through a medium. You are not your art and your art is not you. It’s a process that you have no control over once it leaves your brain and reaches the page.

What was my solution to this problem of scale? I broke it down. Nothing breaks down a huge project like a smaller short story, a vignette or a prequel. I went with prequel. I took two of the characters whom I knew were going to be involved prior to the beginning of the main narrative and decided to write the story about how they met.

Writing Airship Arc Winds

Airship Arc Winds came to me while I was teaching comic books to 9-12 year olds. I was watching them approach their pages and stories with the tips and tricks I had taught them and was inspired by their lack of doubt. They’re so used to being told to jump into the water without knowing how to swim that they don’t even think twice about it. They don’t care that they’re not the best at drawing, or that no one will like the story because they are working under the authority of someone who will make them do it anyways – the teacher. I took their lack of hesitation and pushed them to look for the great things they were doing and push those, rather than dwell on the mistakes. I decided I could do the same with myself. I picked up a piece of scrap paper and wrote the first ten pages of Airship Arc Winds and the outline for the whole story in about 4 hours. I had thumbnails in another 30 minutes, and was finished pencilling the first ten pages two weeks later. It was amazing, and then it fizzled out. I became confused, the longer I worked with stale ideas I didn’t write down, the more I forgot the essence of them. Keeping a story in your head doesn’t work, just like keeping a memory, it begins to be twisted and recontextualized as time passes on.

So, I needed to revisit what I was doing. I wanted to keep it loose, and I wanted to maintain the voices of the characters, so I dictated my first spoken script. I did this with dictation software on my computer and a microphone. It worked amazingly and, once I got over having any punctuation, the story flowed nicely. I was able to go from scene to scene with little difficulty, and the visuals in my mind were on the computer with me simply speaking them aloud.

Nonetheless, I didn’t feel passionate about the project for a bit. So I put it aside. Now that I look back at the amount of content, I realise this was a mistake. I already have the ground work, all that needs to happen is the drawing. Really, when you’re scripting, that can be the hardest part. Like I said in an earlier entry, it’s hard to tell when you’re critiquing your work and when you’re being a self conscious pansy. In this instance, I was being a self conscious pansy and I should really continue to draw it. Perhaps I will continue with page 11 tomorrow.

So, those are the major scripts for a relatively big project. This project was made by me, with little or no collaboration with Wei. In the near future I will discuss writing, drawing and making comics in collaboration, because that’s a whole different monster.

Until then, I hope this was as enlightening for you to read as it was for me to write.