Thursday, March 26, 2009

Waid Wednesdays #16: The Dictionary Is Wrong

Writing this one on the plane from La Guardia to LAX, so it may or not be posted by Wednesday depending upon how late the flight gets in.

In 1990, having recently departed my editorial position at DC Comics, I went to work for Archie Comics in Mamaroneck, NY as an assistant editor/proofreader/colorist/cover gag editor/researcher/monkey. And I would be lying to you if I said that I didn’t believe it, at the time, to be a step down. How had I gone from editing BATMAN: GOTHAM BY GASLIGHT to checking to make sure Betty’s hair was the right color yellow on every page of PALS & GALS? Was it only yesterday that I was helping proofread THE KILLING JOKE?

Dumb attitude. First off, the people were all terrific. Okay, the two gentlemen who who owned the joint and who were as close as brothers right down to owning identical cars and yachts, were [NOTE: OPINIONS EXPRESSED ON THIS BLOG DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE OPINIONS OF BOOM STUDIOS, JUST SAYIN’] erratic tyrants with hair-trigger tempers who would have sued an old lady out of her dentures if they’d only had the time to spare...but the managing editor, Victor Gorelick, was a patient guy who knows where more bodies are buried than most anyone else in comics, and he was always encouraging me to all the crafts involved in making comics. Most importantly, he set me up to learn a critically important lesson in storytelling.

In case you haven’t looked at an Archie comic book since about 1952, trust me, there hasn’t been much innovation. As it was for your parents’ parents, most every story remains between five and seven pages, with no more than six panels a page and generally only three on the first page (to allow room for titles and, when the Archie execs choose to run them, credits). Big, simple lettering and big, simple balloons accompanying big, simple art. This is not the format in which to attempt WATCHMEN.

I asked Victor for a shot at writing a story and, once we found a pitch he liked, he set me loose. I’d come to him with the idea that Riverdale High was searching desperately for a new assistant coach, and by far the most qualified candidate was a female basketball star who’d been confined to a wheelchair by an accident. The conflict in the story is from loudmouth Reggie, to whom it must be proved that a “girl in a wheelchair” can teach him anything about basketball. The new coach, of course, eventually gets Reggie past his “handicap,” as she puts it--his ego, which compromises the team. Hardly Dostoyevsky, but consider my target audience.

Anyway, I had six pages. About 28, 30 panels. And it took me longer to write the first half of that script than it has anything else to this day, because by the time you set up the problem (“We need a new coach!”), show how desperate the staff gets once the first few candidates prove unsatisfactory, ramp up the tension, and introduce the woman in the wheelchair, you’re already on page three. Of six.

And while the resultant solution (and lesson) is no doubt obvious to the experienced among you, it was only when I sweated my way into it that I realized one of the most fundamental rules of comics storytelling: start the story as late as possible. I didn’t need an extensive setup. I didn’t need scenes of tryouts or debates. What I needed was this:

PANEL ONE: Exterior, Principal Weatherbee’s office. Weatherbee and Coach Kleats, peeking out his door towards a group of ill-suited coaching candidates awaiting an interview, are visibly worried.

KLEATS: So, Waldo...how many of them do you think could do even one chin-up?

WEATHERBEE: Out of THESE applicants? One BETWEEN them...maybe...

PANEL TWO: Bee’s assistant sticks her head into the office.

KLEATS: I wish Coach Clayton were back from his seminar! He’d know where to find a gym coach!

ASSISTANT: Next interview, Mr. Weatherbee!

PANEL THREE: ROBIN GANTNER, an athletic woman in a wheelchair, enters the room, big smile on her face.

ASSISTANT: Her name is...

GANTNER: ROBIN GANTNER, Mr. Weatherbee! If you’re looking for a girls’ gym teacher...then I’m your woman!

I repeat: hardly Eisner Award-winning material, but efficient. I wrote a handful of additional Archie stories that year, each one easier to wrestle into submission than the last. I kept each premise increasingly simpler, started each scene as late as I could at ended it as quickly as possible. Dialogue was trimmed to the bone without losing the funny. And that training served me better than any other I’ve ever gotten. It’s easy to write long; it’s a bitch to write short. It was a terrific workshop. It would have lasted longer except one of the owners, livid, stormed into the bullpen one afternoon demanding to know who’d changed a word in a classified ad they were placing. I took the heat calmly, certain that he’d simmer down once I explained that I’d made the fix to correct a misspelling. He looked skeptical, so I cheerfully showed him the right spelling in the dictionary, ready to put his mind at ease. Instead, he screwed up his face in unbridled rage, slammed the book shut, and screamed, “THE DICTIONARY IS WRONG!” I ended the scene as quickly as I could by immediately turning in my keys and peeling out of the parking lot, never to return. It was a memorable ending. Not a beat was wasted.



Edited to eliminate the in-air brainslip of IDing the owners as brothers. They weren't, really, but we always thought of them as such.

Edited AGAIN to fix a typo that put Mamaroneck in NJ and not NY. Apologies to both states.

52 comments:

JamesO said...

Brevity is a lesson a lot of the British comics writers learn at 2000AD magazine, where before you can be let loose on Judge Dredd or introduce your own, new characters to the reader, you first have to write a handful of Tharg's Future Shocks. These are five page, one-off stories with a twist in the ending and are a nightmare to write.

Pretty much every big-name British comic writer cut their teeth on these stories, and then the five or six page a week serial stories that are all 2000AD runs. Except Alan Moore, of course, who cheated and ran some of his Future Shocks over two episodes.

Theliel said...

writing short has always been m particular sysphean task, though if i do manage to keep it short it usually works out well.

Though heretical pronouncements such as 'the dictonary is wrong' would likely have resulted in physical harm from what I recall of high school english class. We didn't have sports, so all the agression came out in the debate and poetry clubs.

Matthew Dessem said...

What was the misspelled word?

Marty Nozz said...

Just think, if not for your use of an obviously outdated dictionary you may have ended up EIC at Archie instead of BOOM.

Seriously though, that's one thing I like about having very few pages to work with: you have to really get to the heart of a story.

Mark Waid said...

"What was the misspelled word?"

Restaurateur. "Restauranteur" has, over the twenty years since, become a gradually more common substitution, but back then, it was just sloppy--particularly when it was in an ad going into a magazine for restaurant owners and operators (the execs were on one of their periodic explorations of what it would take to open a chain of Archie restaurants.)

Andrew Cosby said...

Words to live by.

"I'm sorry I wrote you such a long letter; I didn't have time to write a short one."
— Blaise Pascal

Anonymous said...

Mamaroneck is in New Jersey? Who knew.

Mark Waid said...

Ghaah. Fixed. I was the one living in NJ at the time, not those guys, obviously. Which made it an hour-and-a-half drive each way.

Prankster said...

Good Lord, Mark, have you worked for every comic book company in existence? I gotta say, that's kinda cool...I do get the general impression that Archie is a bit of a fascist dictatorship (remember the hubbub over not letting the Sabrina actress pose for some girly mag?) but in theory, I always give it up for the companies that are still trying to produce kid's comics, and still make newsprint comics that you can find on the magazine rack.

In general, I have a long-lasting affection for the little guys over Marvel/DC. I increasingly feel that most future comics masterpieces are likely to come from studios like, say, BOOM!

...Yes, I'm shameless.

BTW, mega-kudos to you guys, Mark, for landing the licenses for The Incredibles and The Muppet Show. That's a HUGE step in the right direction, and undoubtedly a smart business move as well. Also, you show excellent taste in getting Roger Langridge to do the Muppets. So much better than that hack writing The Incredibles! :)

Stephen R. Smith said...

When I started writing flash fiction, keeping under 1,000 words was difficult, the 600 word hard limit almost impossible. It's taken time, but I've learned how to write deep without writing long. I'm applying that to longer works, trying to maximize content with as few words as possible.

The best advice I received was from Kathy Kachelries about editing, that was to 'cut out everything you don't need, and half of what you think you do.'

Archangel Mark said...

O.O That is some epic tyranny right there. "The dictionary is wrong"? I didn't think people actually SAID stuff like that!

As for writing short, I think the biggest challenge I've ever had was writing for a drabble competition online - a drabble being a story told in exactly 100 words, no more, no less. The thing I had to do was take an existing story I'd already written (nearly 5,000 words) and retell it in 100 word. Not summarize, but try to make it just as impacting and emotionally profound as I'd tried to make the original, a full story in itself, with only 100 words.

The original 5000 word story took me an intense hour and a half. The 100 word re-telling had me sitting and typing and poking and growling in frustration for five hours.

Says something, that.

Dave said...

Interestingly, one of the lead designers over at Blizzard pointed out last week that they limit their writers quest text descriptions to all of 511 characters to detail what needs to be done and give it flavour for both technical and gameplay reasons.

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