Writing for Comics Pt1

I have been reading Alan Moore's (creater of Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Miricleman and more) 'Writing for Comics' and have found the subjects that he raises to be pretty interesting and a great help when it comes to thinking about how to develop and create my own.

He dedicates the first chapter to 'The Basic Idea' although before we get into that he mentions the superficial similarities between comics and films as well as comics and books and how he thinks that comics are granted the oppertunity to make the best of both worlds in that all three sources tell a story. A film is restricted in that it has an allocated running time and there is only so much information that can be contained and absorbed within that time. Books don't suffer from this drawback as they allow the user to progress through the story at a pace suitable to them, soaking in all the information they wish and easilly being able to back track and re-read sections of the story again. Books however don't offer any visual stimulation. He mentions that "since our current society has a greater visual orientation than a literary one, a visual flow of narrative gives a much more immediate and involving sensory impact to the work in hand," and goes on to say that a comic book version would have in many ways the best of both worlds.

He makes a point that the idea behind many comics, books or even stories don't have to be deep, meaningful and significant and that the idea is in no way the plot of the story, a common missconception. Moore continues by saying that "The nature of the idea isn't really important, what is important is that there is an idea in there somewhere. It can be silly and frivolous, perhaps just a single gag idea or it can be complex and profound. The only thing that the idea should definately be is interesting on some level or another". I found this outlook to be quite interesting as it made me re think and re evaluate the previous ideas that I had already considered and how Moore's advice had changed my perception of them. this was also achieved when he talks about the human aspect, as it will be humans that will read it and in order to give the characters a much more human feel you should study your own behaviour and the behaviour of people and events surrounding you. He suggested doing this by taking a very long look at yourself, find out what makes you tick, note down your likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses, be as honest as possible, expose yourself to things that horrify you and dettermine exactly why they do and how they make you feel as well as why they make you feel such a way.

Reaching the Reader

The 2nd chapter he dedicates to reaching the reader, structure, pacing and storytelling. I found this section to be very useful as I have been looking into many of these key features while planning my own comic and found his opinion to be a great insight into creating a comic book. Moore mentions that "If you're going to spend a lot of time preparing a communication, it would perhaps be an advantage to at least spend a little considering the person to whom it is addressed." He follows this up with his dislike of the steriotypical writing to offend the least amount of possible people which most comics tend to suffer from, the reasons behind this is that the writer is over compensating being too fearful of alienating their audience when a suitable audience will eventually find and enjoy the comic as there are lots of different people out there with many different likes and disslikes, some are very easily offended and some are very hard to offend but the majority of us are somewhere in between. Another reason for his dislike of this sort of writing is that it makes the comic bland and uninteresting, theres generally very little depth in there to capture the readers' attention. Moore follows this up by stating that "Instead of thinking about what might possibly affect the reader negatively and then expunging any trace of it from the work, why not think about things likely to affect the reader positively?" Which I believe is a much better outlook to have when creating something.

Structure

As the book comes to structure Moore offers us a few seperate examples of work that he has used and seen, one being a basic elliptical structure, where the elements at the begining of the story mirror the events which happen at the end, or having a particular phrase or image used at the begining and end insetad. He mentions that such techniques give the story a sense of neatness. 

Some of the other examples Moore gives are a story being told by seperate characters, depending on how much of the central action they happen to have witnessed individually. A centrepiece, where an abstract, poem or some other item acts as a centre piece and the story simply acts as a frame for it. He also mentions a style common used by Eddie Campbell where "he tends to give his stories a sort of informal anecdotal structure that mirrors precisely the way in which the stories are usually person to person, with bits of backtraking and wandering away from the point left intact." The last example mentions Phil Elliot as he describes his stories as having an "A" and "B" to define the start and finish. It's quite evident that structure can be applied to a story in many different ways, Moore even encourages the new writer to come up with their own styles and techniques as well as using tried and tested ones and see what works for you.

Storytelling/Pacing

Moore states "storytelling devices include transition scenes, pacing, rhythm, smoothness of flow and all other aspects that relate more to the story itself than to the unfolding of the events within the story." With this in mind I believe I will have to look more in depth at some of these fields as there are some I did not originally consider. My favourite quote from Moore shortly follows, reading "As I see it, a successful story of any kind should be almost like hypnosis: You fascinate the reader with your first sentence, draw them in further with your second sentence and have them in a mild trance by the third. Then, being careful not to wake them, you carry them away up the back alleys of your narrative and then when they are hopelessly lost within the story, having surrendered themselves to it, you do them terrible violence with a softball bat and then lead them whimpering to the exit on the last page."

Shortly after he talks about some storytelling techniquess that he commonly uses or sees to disguise the change in scenes, his most used one being overlapping dialogue, where a character finishes saying something on one scene and a word or phrase is repeated in another scene by a different character as he mentions it does a far better job than constantly using "Meanwhile back at the such and such..." which diminishes the feel of immersion for the reader, quickly reminding them that they are reading a story. "One thing I tend to do which eases the transition and is sometimes all thats needed to accomplish a good transition is to write in basic units of a single page". By this Moore means that he conceals the transition within the turn of a page. he also mentions Hitchcock's stunning device where the heroin of the story finds some old corpse, opening her mouth with an intake of breath to scream only to cut to a motorcycle reving up in place of the scream. This is a very obvious transition and isn't hidden at all but it adds to the story and makes it more interesting as the sudden change is surprising to the viewer. While I do find all the information on transitions useful I do not believe that I will have to hide many of them as my comic will be interactive, although there may be the odd static transition that will have to be disguised. Moore again encourages the writer to try their own hand at different techniques as certain things can work for certain people. "You can introduce elements that actually disturb the flow of your story and still get them to work in the context of the story as a whole."

Another noteable storytelling technique that Moore describes is fight scenes and how the introduction of text can really bog down the pace of a fight scene and make it slow and dull pretty quickly. He encourages image to image with as little dialogue as possible as it adds the illusion with static pictures of action taking place at a fast pace.