THRILLBENT IS LIVE!
How do you engage this brave new world of comics?!
Go to http://www.thrillbent.com/
Click on the title you want to read.
Turn the pages with your arrow keys. Just like pages. Left and right.*
Done.
...
Well, that was anticlimactic.
*******************************
Which is, of course, the point. No music. No motion comics. Just pages of art and words.
We're not trying to re-invent comics. We're trying to hack out the tools by which some other, younger ferocious person will re-invent comics.
Content Density (look, ma, I made up a term!) at this point will run to roughly a regular paper issue's worth of material a month. It will vary in the future, but right now this allows us to contract artists, colorists, etc at a rate with which they are familiar and comfortable.
The updates are always in multi-page bursts, giving you enough new material to feel like you got a chunk of story each time you swing by. You can read about Mark's thinking on the size of these updates here. Personally I'd chalk our adoption of this structure up to Warren Ellis' FREAKANGELS. In my personal design notes, this was one of the first "We do it like THAT!" notes.
No advertising yet, as we're still tweaking the page construction. Yes, I know that means there's no income from this thing. Until we figure out the best way to get the material out to the humans, Mark and I are supporting the burn rate ourselves. He sold his fantastic comic collection. I am using the residuals from the Catwoman movie.
Up to you who has committed the greater sin.
There are a couple ways to optimize your viewing experience, in both the pdf download of LUTHER (and future pdfs) and on the THRILLBENT site.
PDF: In our preferred iOS pdf reader of choice, GOODREADER, you just tap the edge of the screen and the slides lay over quite nicely. The changing panels, additional dialogue balloons, etc all work as they should. Most tablet pdf readers work the same way.
If you're viewing the pdf on your computer, on whatever pdf viewer you're using you want FULL SCREEN and SLIDESHOW settings. Again, page advances will be with the arrow keys. I'd note that you can also open the file with the Chrome browser, grab that FULLSCREEN setting (farthest left on the blue bar at the bottom of the page) and it plays pretty damn fine.
Our comics are, in a word, dumb.
LIVE COMICS ON THE SITE: Blow your browser out to Fullscreen. Getting rid of the bookmarks bar will also help -- basically, it'll automatically resize to whatever screen you've got open, but it'll look better the more screen real estate you give it. Then click the arrow keys. Done. It reads like a dream on your tablet in browser mode also, with tap page turns or swipes.
IN THE APP: That's not quite ready yet. But it's getting there.
Okay, that should answer any questions. Enjoy, and as always your feedback is critical.
* (You can also click on the edges of the images, but I prefer the arrow keys, as it's more like turning a page. I am obsessed with skeumorphism in new media.)
Showing posts with label Waid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Waid. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 01, 2012
Wednesday, April 04, 2012
Oh, Hi. I'm the Sidekick.
In case you hadn't heard, Mark Waid is thinking of doing some digital comics.
Heh.
In a small way I've been aiding Mark as he's developed these ideas for the last three years. Any long-time reader of my blog knows I'm a systems geek. I coined the phrase 4GM, comparing new media models to asymmetrical warfare. Wrote about Netflix taking over TV back in 2007 or so. I'm fascinated by the way older content distributors and providers continually confuse the distribution system with the content -- hell, the WGA has chalked up some truly epic bungles with that mindset.
The only thing that's kept me from larger experimentation with alternate medium delivery is that, ironically, I'm running a TV show. Granted, it's one of the only independently produced TV shows in the US, but it's still distributed straight into your cable-box old-school style.
So, instead, I've been kibitzing Mark during three years of shared lunches. Mark had his own reasons for getting into digital. My interest in a new comics model came out of my work on trying to figure out new TV distribution models. Looking at other mediums, I kept hearing about how digitally distributed, serialized comics on the web wouldn't work ...
... and I kept looking at Penny Arcade and PvP and my personal favorite, Something Positive, and seeing independent humans making a living. Better than a living, in some cases.
"But John," I'd hear, "those are three, maybe four panel gag comics made for niche audiences, which only support individual creators, not companies."*
Yes, they are. They are serialized narratives combining writing and pictures which allow their creators to make a living telling stories. Which just happen to be digitally delivered.
If one man can kill a bear, any man can kill a bear, so to speak. I have to admit, Mark's got a multi-pronged business and artistic approach to this new model. I'm still humping the same idea I've been obsessed with for years -- the democratization of the creative industry.**
Now, of course, indie comics take years to build up an audience. And it's grueling work, with a high risk of failure. Sure. That's called capitalism, and it's awesome, and please show me the document guaranteeing your mass-market comic won't also flame-out no matter how much promotion it gets.
But although the webcomics gave us the first plausible premise (and now you should be reading John Robb's work on open-source warfare), Mark wanted to go even further. What were the artistic merits of moving to digital as a delivery system?
Gutting the cost of entry allowed for more artistic experimentation and variety, of course. But he's been doing this for 25+ years, and he's a shitload more ambitious than I am. That's when he found Balak, and we began to trade this graphic back and forth obsessively:
about DIGITAL COMICS by ~Balak01 on deviantART
This work began to nail down some of the rules of digital comics. Mark was the one who actually quantified most of these over the course of endless emails -- I'm just good at pithy summaries.
1.) Like paper comics, the reader should control the pace of the information in digital comics.
2.) Using layers, the creator can pull focus and create additional dimensions of storytelling, including time and subjective perception.
Motion Comics, those filthy bastards, fell into the trap of mistaking medium for content. The digital screen is made for TV and movies. Therefore, comics on a digital screen should look like TV and movies. Add animation and voices!
Hence, monstrous hybrid.
If, instead, you just treat the screen as an odd-shaped page which can be instantly updated and is conveniently in almost every home and office on earth, you get a much more accurate idea of how to proceed.
Of course, none of this is revolutionary -- I'm just tracking how we hacked away at it, amateurishly and arduously, over three years. Along the way, the Kindle started hitting critical mass, and we tore that model apart. Despite there being some comic successes on the Kindle -- manga in particular transferred well -- formatting issues prevented comic artists from taking full potential of that distribution channel. Of course, now that the new Kindle Fire is moving them over to an HTML-based publishing model, things should get much easier. Pablo Defindini has done outstanding work demonstrating how comics might use responsive design on the new readers.
But the Kindle lesson, in the rise of the Kindle-only million-seller author, was a valuable one: you don't have to be famous to make a living telling stories. You just have to be famous enough, with a devoted enough following.
Then the iPad hit. Comixology did a great job of getting out front on the tablet comics market. But they were forced to figure out a way to convert pages laid out for a larger space down to that seven-odd inch screen. That led to "guided panel view" which was pretty spiffy. However, in TV and movies, we call that "pan and scan", and no one's fond of it. Because it's not how the writer and artist meant for you to experience the story.
This tied in to another discussion we were having, summarized by Mark in an email:
3.) "We live in a wide-screen world. Use it."
Most long-form story-telling comics on the web were essentially back-door physical world comics. The Blind Ferret guys (very smart humans), Warren Ellis' Freak Angels, all of them were laid out for easy reproduction in a classically formatted portrait alignment hard-copy publication. They used the screen to distribute, but they did not use the canvas of the screen. (This is all a pretentious way of complaining about scrolling down when reading each page of Freak Angels).
And sure, you want to be able to publish that hard-copy some day. But again, that weird-sized widescreen potential comics page is in almost every house and office in the Western World. There's no inherent advantage to portrait view. Shouldn't the more widely distributed canvas have the artistic advantage?
So we experimented with resolutions and orientations. Friends of mine, Geoff Thorne and Todd Harris, developed some sample art, 8 pages of a comic with chuffah dialogue, to lock down landscape presentation, art resolution, a bunch of the artist-y numbers. Web designer Gary Henderson developed our first story software models, trying to incorporate additional materials such as scripts and layouts into the primary presentation. At the same time Mark chatted with artist Jeremy Rock, who was experimenting with how to create image flow on landscape pages which then seamlessly joined into readable portrait pages for the hard-copy phase of the comic's life. While I screwed around with e-readers and grind-it-out bullshit, Mark had Jeremy re-draw one of his BOOM! stories, "Luther", experimenting with the ideas of information flow (the staggered captions, etc.) We then plugged it into the reader, and bob's your uncle, a creatively satisfying longform story made for the screen. Not the first, not the best, but a reproducible model, done as a layered pdf. (None of this was rocket science, but it was ... fiddly.)
About this time, Joe Quesada at Marvel decided to drive the company much more aggressively into digital comics, and Mark began working with those lads. Mark changed the way he developed and wrote comics to take advantage of the new style. Momentum shifted, and now you have the the great -- and I mean goddam GREAT -- Infinite Comics experiment at Marvel.
Meanwhile, I was screwing with distribution, trying to live up to one of my pet theories about media:
4.) Information should be dumb.
By dumb I mean "as platform independent as possible." Your comic should work well in a pdf reader on a tablet or laptop or desktop computer, on a website, in an app. Your workflow should allow you to easily slot your comic into as many different platforms as seamlessly as possible. As cool as that Infinite Comic Nova comic is, there's nothing in there you can't do with a bone-dumb pdf- reader. It's all about execution. A reconception of how you can tell stories graphically now that you can experiment with layers and time.
Also, there should be different ways to make a living at this -- you shouldn't have to be waiting around, gambling on prestige print collection, before you can make a living telling your story. That's the stuff we're still working at now, and will be the subject of future posts and some of Mark's future announcements.
So that's the rough version of how we got here. Mark's the one driving this, with the able Lori Matsumoto handling the technical stuff, while I'll continue to fiddle over here in the corner. We'll be referencing a lot of very smart humans who've been working on (and succeeding at) this for much longer than we've been playing at it. Some of this is going to work, some of it is going to fail miserably, but we'll show you all the spinning gears as we go.
Mark's been gracious enough to include one of my new webcomics on his site when it launches. Mine will be nowhere near as artistically mature as his work. It'll be a comic, written and formatted for widescreen, serialized for online delivery, but not as aggressive in playing with narrative flow. Frankly, I don't have the chops for what Mark's doing. But it'll be fun as hell. I hope we manage to work out enough of the kinks to help you make your comic someday, tell your story.
*New rule -- if your own model is based on selling books to an audience which numbers less than one-tench of Wil Wheaton's Twitter followers, you do not get to call anybody else "niche."
** I was a stand-up comic, the ultimate freelancer, hopping from club to club, booking my own gigs. That experience burned freelancer instinct into my DNA: how many gigs in how many weeks to make my nut? To pay the mortgage, to put a little away? I love metrics. What can be measured can be managed, etc. etc.
Heh.
In a small way I've been aiding Mark as he's developed these ideas for the last three years. Any long-time reader of my blog knows I'm a systems geek. I coined the phrase 4GM, comparing new media models to asymmetrical warfare. Wrote about Netflix taking over TV back in 2007 or so. I'm fascinated by the way older content distributors and providers continually confuse the distribution system with the content -- hell, the WGA has chalked up some truly epic bungles with that mindset.
The only thing that's kept me from larger experimentation with alternate medium delivery is that, ironically, I'm running a TV show. Granted, it's one of the only independently produced TV shows in the US, but it's still distributed straight into your cable-box old-school style.
So, instead, I've been kibitzing Mark during three years of shared lunches. Mark had his own reasons for getting into digital. My interest in a new comics model came out of my work on trying to figure out new TV distribution models. Looking at other mediums, I kept hearing about how digitally distributed, serialized comics on the web wouldn't work ...
... and I kept looking at Penny Arcade and PvP and my personal favorite, Something Positive, and seeing independent humans making a living. Better than a living, in some cases.
"But John," I'd hear, "those are three, maybe four panel gag comics made for niche audiences, which only support individual creators, not companies."*
Yes, they are. They are serialized narratives combining writing and pictures which allow their creators to make a living telling stories. Which just happen to be digitally delivered.
If one man can kill a bear, any man can kill a bear, so to speak. I have to admit, Mark's got a multi-pronged business and artistic approach to this new model. I'm still humping the same idea I've been obsessed with for years -- the democratization of the creative industry.**
Now, of course, indie comics take years to build up an audience. And it's grueling work, with a high risk of failure. Sure. That's called capitalism, and it's awesome, and please show me the document guaranteeing your mass-market comic won't also flame-out no matter how much promotion it gets.
But although the webcomics gave us the first plausible premise (and now you should be reading John Robb's work on open-source warfare), Mark wanted to go even further. What were the artistic merits of moving to digital as a delivery system?
Gutting the cost of entry allowed for more artistic experimentation and variety, of course. But he's been doing this for 25+ years, and he's a shitload more ambitious than I am. That's when he found Balak, and we began to trade this graphic back and forth obsessively:
about DIGITAL COMICS by ~Balak01 on deviantART
This work began to nail down some of the rules of digital comics. Mark was the one who actually quantified most of these over the course of endless emails -- I'm just good at pithy summaries.
1.) Like paper comics, the reader should control the pace of the information in digital comics.
2.) Using layers, the creator can pull focus and create additional dimensions of storytelling, including time and subjective perception.
Motion Comics, those filthy bastards, fell into the trap of mistaking medium for content. The digital screen is made for TV and movies. Therefore, comics on a digital screen should look like TV and movies. Add animation and voices!
Hence, monstrous hybrid.
If, instead, you just treat the screen as an odd-shaped page which can be instantly updated and is conveniently in almost every home and office on earth, you get a much more accurate idea of how to proceed.
Of course, none of this is revolutionary -- I'm just tracking how we hacked away at it, amateurishly and arduously, over three years. Along the way, the Kindle started hitting critical mass, and we tore that model apart. Despite there being some comic successes on the Kindle -- manga in particular transferred well -- formatting issues prevented comic artists from taking full potential of that distribution channel. Of course, now that the new Kindle Fire is moving them over to an HTML-based publishing model, things should get much easier. Pablo Defindini has done outstanding work demonstrating how comics might use responsive design on the new readers.
But the Kindle lesson, in the rise of the Kindle-only million-seller author, was a valuable one: you don't have to be famous to make a living telling stories. You just have to be famous enough, with a devoted enough following.
Then the iPad hit. Comixology did a great job of getting out front on the tablet comics market. But they were forced to figure out a way to convert pages laid out for a larger space down to that seven-odd inch screen. That led to "guided panel view" which was pretty spiffy. However, in TV and movies, we call that "pan and scan", and no one's fond of it. Because it's not how the writer and artist meant for you to experience the story.
This tied in to another discussion we were having, summarized by Mark in an email:
3.) "We live in a wide-screen world. Use it."
Most long-form story-telling comics on the web were essentially back-door physical world comics. The Blind Ferret guys (very smart humans), Warren Ellis' Freak Angels, all of them were laid out for easy reproduction in a classically formatted portrait alignment hard-copy publication. They used the screen to distribute, but they did not use the canvas of the screen. (This is all a pretentious way of complaining about scrolling down when reading each page of Freak Angels).
And sure, you want to be able to publish that hard-copy some day. But again, that weird-sized widescreen potential comics page is in almost every house and office in the Western World. There's no inherent advantage to portrait view. Shouldn't the more widely distributed canvas have the artistic advantage?
So we experimented with resolutions and orientations. Friends of mine, Geoff Thorne and Todd Harris, developed some sample art, 8 pages of a comic with chuffah dialogue, to lock down landscape presentation, art resolution, a bunch of the artist-y numbers. Web designer Gary Henderson developed our first story software models, trying to incorporate additional materials such as scripts and layouts into the primary presentation. At the same time Mark chatted with artist Jeremy Rock, who was experimenting with how to create image flow on landscape pages which then seamlessly joined into readable portrait pages for the hard-copy phase of the comic's life. While I screwed around with e-readers and grind-it-out bullshit, Mark had Jeremy re-draw one of his BOOM! stories, "Luther", experimenting with the ideas of information flow (the staggered captions, etc.) We then plugged it into the reader, and bob's your uncle, a creatively satisfying longform story made for the screen. Not the first, not the best, but a reproducible model, done as a layered pdf. (None of this was rocket science, but it was ... fiddly.)
About this time, Joe Quesada at Marvel decided to drive the company much more aggressively into digital comics, and Mark began working with those lads. Mark changed the way he developed and wrote comics to take advantage of the new style. Momentum shifted, and now you have the the great -- and I mean goddam GREAT -- Infinite Comics experiment at Marvel.
Meanwhile, I was screwing with distribution, trying to live up to one of my pet theories about media:
4.) Information should be dumb.
By dumb I mean "as platform independent as possible." Your comic should work well in a pdf reader on a tablet or laptop or desktop computer, on a website, in an app. Your workflow should allow you to easily slot your comic into as many different platforms as seamlessly as possible. As cool as that Infinite Comic Nova comic is, there's nothing in there you can't do with a bone-dumb pdf- reader. It's all about execution. A reconception of how you can tell stories graphically now that you can experiment with layers and time.
Also, there should be different ways to make a living at this -- you shouldn't have to be waiting around, gambling on prestige print collection, before you can make a living telling your story. That's the stuff we're still working at now, and will be the subject of future posts and some of Mark's future announcements.
So that's the rough version of how we got here. Mark's the one driving this, with the able Lori Matsumoto handling the technical stuff, while I'll continue to fiddle over here in the corner. We'll be referencing a lot of very smart humans who've been working on (and succeeding at) this for much longer than we've been playing at it. Some of this is going to work, some of it is going to fail miserably, but we'll show you all the spinning gears as we go.
Mark's been gracious enough to include one of my new webcomics on his site when it launches. Mine will be nowhere near as artistically mature as his work. It'll be a comic, written and formatted for widescreen, serialized for online delivery, but not as aggressive in playing with narrative flow. Frankly, I don't have the chops for what Mark's doing. But it'll be fun as hell. I hope we manage to work out enough of the kinks to help you make your comic someday, tell your story.
*New rule -- if your own model is based on selling books to an audience which numbers less than one-tench of Wil Wheaton's Twitter followers, you do not get to call anybody else "niche."
** I was a stand-up comic, the ultimate freelancer, hopping from club to club, booking my own gigs. That experience burned freelancer instinct into my DNA: how many gigs in how many weeks to make my nut? To pay the mortgage, to put a little away? I love metrics. What can be measured can be managed, etc. etc.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Waid Wednesdays #19: Covers, A Basic Primer
“Artist, please draw more attention to the severed head.”
Probably my favorite part of the editorial job--not co-plotting with writers, not copyediting scripts, not having the interns Google me all day--is working out covers. Part of that is because I’m a particularly visually minded editor, but mostly it’s because I still believe the cover is a key sales tool and sets the readers’ expectations for what’s actually inside the book in a way that nothing else can.
There was a time when the cover’s job was more important than it is today--back when all comics were basically an inexpensive impulse purchase from newsstands and from spinner racks, before fans began pre-ordering their comic books months in advance. Yes, most shops have new comics shelved so you can see the entire cover at once, which is a step up from newsstand displays that, at best, showed only the top third, but that doesn’t make cover art three times as important as it was--in the 21st century, most buyers have already committed to buying the newest issue of AVENGERS (or whatever) before they even walk into the store, regardless of what’s on the cover.
(And if you’ve ever wondered why so many modern covers are pin-up shots of characters rather than story-oriented illustrations, the answer’s generally twofold: pin-ups can be stockpiled in advance, and they can be repurposed for t-shirts and other merchandise at far less a cost than original material.)
That said--and feel free to call me Mr. Old-School--I still believe the cover’s primary job is to catch and hold the reader’s eye on the off-chance someone might actually be on the fence about picking it up. The cover’s not there to be a showcase for the artist, not to be lush or ornate just to show off, but to catch and hold attention amidst a sea of Wolverine comics.
The cover’s secondary job is to, with its frozen-moment single illustration, convey an idea. Extra points if the image makes me laugh out loud (like Nate Watson’s, shown above, even before I asked him to make the severed head bigger to help underscore the balance of comedy and horror of SCREAM QUEEN, about a serial killer who stalks a high school while dressed as its mascot).
When I commission a cover, I first ask for a couple of sketches--not because I feel the need to suggest a million “improvements,” but because I don’t want an artist to waste his time on anything that’s too close to a piece we’ve already done or that’s already in the works. Clever ideas outrank pin-ups, at least for me. A composition that tells me that the artist has a sense of design and isn’t just doodling kewl art onto the paper is critical. And (again, pointing to Nate Watson’s sketch here) the cover has to capture the feel of the series for new readers. Once the sketch has been approved, the artist turns it into a finished piece, remembering at all times (because I am a tyrant about them) my essential rules:
1. I REALLY, REALLY, REALLY HATE ILLUSTRATIONS THAT OBSCURE THE LOGO (a.k.a. the title of the magazine). You can get away with that more easily if, like Superman’s or Playboy’s, your logo is already instantly recognizable to a mass audience. “Cthulhu Tales” is not that logo. (A great logo is in and of itself a thing of beauty. And like most works of art, I can’t produce one myself but I know a good one when I see it. One of the all-time best logo designers is the multiple-award-winning letterer Todd Klein (Sandman, Swamp Thing), who regularly runs in-depth studies on what makes logo designs work or not work. I implore you to go visit his site to read the analysis of someone exponentially more qualified than I am to explain the do’s and don’ts.
2. LOGOS SHOULD BE IN ONE SINGLE COLOR THAT’S COMPLEMENTARY TO THE COLOR OF THE MAIN ILLUSTRATION. Sub-rule: Any drop-shadow behind the logo, conversely, should be in a contrasting color. That would seem to be common sense, but you’d be aghast at how often it’s ignored.
3. LEAVE ROOM NOT ONLY FOR THE LOGO BUT FOR THE "TRADE DRESS," a.k.a. the company insignia, the issue number and month, and (God help us all) that dreaded barcode that began destroying American magazine covers before you were born and that I dream every day to someday see banished--but which, for now, remains a necessary, stinking, zebra-striped evil and I’m off-topic, aren’t I? Sorry. It’s just that, to this day, I still remember the very first comic I ever bought that had a barcode on it--Daredevil 130--and I’m still traumatized to this day. I thought it was gaudy and distracting back then, and my opinion hasn’t changed in the intervening 33 (!) years. I’d love to see barcodes banished, but in an understandable but still vomitous victory of commerce over art, most comics distributors insist that they be on the front cover or else they won’t handle your book. The advantage it gives them in computer inventory-management overrules the fact that it’s a nauseating blight. If you’re a big enough publisher, you can sneak a back-cover UPC every great once in a while, but since no advertiser is keen on having it interfere with back cover ads they’ve paid for, it’s generally not an option. Onward....
4. FLOP IT. Even if you think a cover sketch is a home run, and especially if you don’t, always turn it over and hold it up to the light so you can see what it looks like in mirror-image. A surprising number of times, it makes the mediocre good and the good better.
5. GIVE ME SOMETHING I CAN SEE FROM ACROSS THE ROOM. Bold colors. And/or white space. And/or stark illustrations. Simple is always, always better.
In the comments, if you please: your favorite comic or magazine covers.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Waid Wednesdays #1/2: See You Next Week
Here's this week's column of advice for writers and creative folk: spend the sixty lousy bucks on Quicken and be done with it. Don't just throw all your receipts and 1099s into a big drawer and expect to be able to neatly and effortlessly organize them on the morning of April 15, because you will instead spend that entire day sifting through a gigantic mound of paper and keening for the help of an unattentive God. And you will miss any deadlines you had that day. Like this one. Are you listening, Mark Waid of April 16, 2008? I thought not. You jerk.
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
Waid Wednesdays #18: Don't Waste My Time
A sister post to last week's about how to energize your plots by letting the characters make unexpected choices. Fair warning--this post is (a) short and (b) generally more applicable to writers of serial fiction than of stand-alone stories, novels, screenplays, etc.--but maybe there's still something here for you.
One of the greatest sins in any story is false suspense. The kind of "suspense" that disintegrates the moment you give your reader one second to think about it. And it's an easy trap to fall into, so watch carefully for it. If your story hinges on the question, "Will Superman be pushed so far in his battle against Lex Luthor that he'll have to kill him?", or if your big cliffhanger moment is, "Wow, is Spider-Man really dead this time?", then I understand Food Lion is hiring. The only reader who might actually be fooled into wondering about the outcome of those questions is one who's never read a single piece of fiction before, and even then, fat chance. If you're going to have a character make a plot-driving choice between two and only two alternatives, at least have it be Sophie's Choice. Try making it a lose-lose, see what that gets you. Remember, the definition of "dilemma" is not "a tough spot," it's "having to choose between equally unsatisfactory options." Or, if you're dead-set on taking the reader down what seems to be an obvious-to-anyone road--"Will he choose the sandwich--or his mother's life?"--try one of these two tweaks, both of which have worked well for me in the past:
1) Follow the "dilemma that I'm not gonna buy" past the point of decision to show us the effect of having to make the choice. Best example: an idea I never got around to using in Fantastic Four but saved for a Flash story. At the story's climax, both of Flash's children were in danger, and even for the fastest man alive, there was time to save only one. Now, I was well aware that every single reader out there knew that, no matter how dire I painted the circumstance, I wasn't about to kill off one of the kids if for no other reason than the story was happening outside Flash's own book. So it was total false suspense. Plus, the solution was a cheat because he figured out a way to save both after all. But I thought it was worth hitting the note of choice because the real payoff, in the story's epilogue, was Flash's resultant emotional collapse. He revealed to us (as Sue Richards would have in FF) that for a second, in his mind, he actually had made that choice. He had picked which child to save, and while he'll never tell anyone (including his wife and including us) what that choice had been, just the nightmare of making it will haunt him forever.
2) Lean into the shallow expectations of false suspense and then immediately hit the readers with a moment of genuine suspense that spins directly out of it. Example, again from FF: I ended one story arc with the apparent death of Ben Grimm, the Thing, which is pretty much the textbook definition of false suspense--no reader would believe I was really killing off one of the Fantastic Four. So I did that with two pages left to go. Then, two pages later, I hit the readers with the real cliffhanger--that Reed Richards, superscientist, was so mentally distraught by Ben's death that he vowed to break into Heaven to get Ben's soul back. Continued next issue. WhaHuh? Presto. False suspense becomes real suspense. No one was supposed to even believe Ben was really dead; not my goal. They were supposed to wonder if Reed Richards had gone insane, which sounded a lot more intriguing.
Bottom line: don't waste my time by asking questions with obvious answers or posing "suspenseful" choices with only one real option. That's just marking time. People (and characters) (and situations) are only interesting when they surprise you.
One of the greatest sins in any story is false suspense. The kind of "suspense" that disintegrates the moment you give your reader one second to think about it. And it's an easy trap to fall into, so watch carefully for it. If your story hinges on the question, "Will Superman be pushed so far in his battle against Lex Luthor that he'll have to kill him?", or if your big cliffhanger moment is, "Wow, is Spider-Man really dead this time?", then I understand Food Lion is hiring. The only reader who might actually be fooled into wondering about the outcome of those questions is one who's never read a single piece of fiction before, and even then, fat chance. If you're going to have a character make a plot-driving choice between two and only two alternatives, at least have it be Sophie's Choice. Try making it a lose-lose, see what that gets you. Remember, the definition of "dilemma" is not "a tough spot," it's "having to choose between equally unsatisfactory options." Or, if you're dead-set on taking the reader down what seems to be an obvious-to-anyone road--"Will he choose the sandwich--or his mother's life?"--try one of these two tweaks, both of which have worked well for me in the past:
1) Follow the "dilemma that I'm not gonna buy" past the point of decision to show us the effect of having to make the choice. Best example: an idea I never got around to using in Fantastic Four but saved for a Flash story. At the story's climax, both of Flash's children were in danger, and even for the fastest man alive, there was time to save only one. Now, I was well aware that every single reader out there knew that, no matter how dire I painted the circumstance, I wasn't about to kill off one of the kids if for no other reason than the story was happening outside Flash's own book. So it was total false suspense. Plus, the solution was a cheat because he figured out a way to save both after all. But I thought it was worth hitting the note of choice because the real payoff, in the story's epilogue, was Flash's resultant emotional collapse. He revealed to us (as Sue Richards would have in FF) that for a second, in his mind, he actually had made that choice. He had picked which child to save, and while he'll never tell anyone (including his wife and including us) what that choice had been, just the nightmare of making it will haunt him forever.
2) Lean into the shallow expectations of false suspense and then immediately hit the readers with a moment of genuine suspense that spins directly out of it. Example, again from FF: I ended one story arc with the apparent death of Ben Grimm, the Thing, which is pretty much the textbook definition of false suspense--no reader would believe I was really killing off one of the Fantastic Four. So I did that with two pages left to go. Then, two pages later, I hit the readers with the real cliffhanger--that Reed Richards, superscientist, was so mentally distraught by Ben's death that he vowed to break into Heaven to get Ben's soul back. Continued next issue. WhaHuh? Presto. False suspense becomes real suspense. No one was supposed to even believe Ben was really dead; not my goal. They were supposed to wonder if Reed Richards had gone insane, which sounded a lot more intriguing.
Bottom line: don't waste my time by asking questions with obvious answers or posing "suspenseful" choices with only one real option. That's just marking time. People (and characters) (and situations) are only interesting when they surprise you.
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Waid Wednesdays #17: Wait, What?
Wherever you were yesterday at about 10:00 a.m. PST, if you heard the distant sound of a scream, that was me. I'd gone to bed the previous night having finished the most recent script for IRREDEEMABLE and feeling very good about it--
--and then I sat down the next morning to polish it and realized that it was crap, because I'd forgotten to deliver on one of my fundamental rules of storytelling. Structurally, the script was fine, and the dialogue was good. Everyone served the plot quite well, thank you, everyone acted consistent with his or her established personalities, and there were little moments of shock peppered throughout the story and at least one moment in there that feels like I turned over a rock to show you some squiggly things, so, yeah, check, check, check, but it still felt hollow...
...because, upon re-reading the script with a fresh eye, I found that no one in the story had surprised me.
It was easy to overlook in its absence. I mean, the plot moved, and people were doing interesting things. But overall, the story felt very binary, if you will; in every scene, the characters could have gone in one of two directions, but really only two--and the most arresting moments in stories, the ones that make them unforgettable, are the moments where someone makes an outrageous third choice that you never in a million years could have seen coming.
My all-time favorite example is from the excellent movie Se7en: up until the final few scenes, the plot's pretty much a straight-up police procedural. Yes, there are enough twists and turns throughout to maintain the suspense, but as with all procedurals, the only real question in the back of the audience's mind is "How will they catch the criminal?" because everyone's doing what they're supposed to be doing--the detectives are detecting, the murder is murdering, etc. And that's fine. Thousands of compelling, suspenseful stories have been woven around the simple question "How will they catch him?"
And then, near the end of Se7en, the murderer the detectives have been chasing all this time makes an amazing choice that seems to come out of absolutely nowhere. He simply walks into the station, confesses, and surrenders...and tells the cops he can take them to two final bodies if they'll just get in the car and let him navigate. And they just start driving.
Up to that moment, we in the audience kind of knew where the story was ultimately headed. We didn't know how it would happen, but we knew the cops would eventually catch and punish the criminal, the end, because that's what happens in a procedural. And, suddenly, boom, one character kicks the game board over, and now, for the first time since the opening credits, no one in the audience has the slightest clue where this story is going.
That's what you want as a writer. At least once in your story, maybe more, just when you think the readers might be getting a little too comfortable, you want a character to zig where they were expected to zag--to make a surprising, unexpected choice, the more out-of-the-blue the better. (See also The Frighteners, the most criminally underrated screenplay of all time, for a thousand other examples.) As long as it's a choice that's ultimately in character, then the more shocking, the more it works. I can think of no better way to maintain suspense and keep the story energized, and it's one of my favorite tricks. Try it at least once per script. Make a point of having either your protagonist or your antagonist make a hard, hard left at some juncture where convention and tradition would dictate they turn right, and see where that takes you; you can always undo it. But in my experience, you probably won't want to.
Next: the sister post--the trap of False Suspense and how to avoid it.
--and then I sat down the next morning to polish it and realized that it was crap, because I'd forgotten to deliver on one of my fundamental rules of storytelling. Structurally, the script was fine, and the dialogue was good. Everyone served the plot quite well, thank you, everyone acted consistent with his or her established personalities, and there were little moments of shock peppered throughout the story and at least one moment in there that feels like I turned over a rock to show you some squiggly things, so, yeah, check, check, check, but it still felt hollow...
...because, upon re-reading the script with a fresh eye, I found that no one in the story had surprised me.
It was easy to overlook in its absence. I mean, the plot moved, and people were doing interesting things. But overall, the story felt very binary, if you will; in every scene, the characters could have gone in one of two directions, but really only two--and the most arresting moments in stories, the ones that make them unforgettable, are the moments where someone makes an outrageous third choice that you never in a million years could have seen coming.
My all-time favorite example is from the excellent movie Se7en: up until the final few scenes, the plot's pretty much a straight-up police procedural. Yes, there are enough twists and turns throughout to maintain the suspense, but as with all procedurals, the only real question in the back of the audience's mind is "How will they catch the criminal?" because everyone's doing what they're supposed to be doing--the detectives are detecting, the murder is murdering, etc. And that's fine. Thousands of compelling, suspenseful stories have been woven around the simple question "How will they catch him?"
And then, near the end of Se7en, the murderer the detectives have been chasing all this time makes an amazing choice that seems to come out of absolutely nowhere. He simply walks into the station, confesses, and surrenders...and tells the cops he can take them to two final bodies if they'll just get in the car and let him navigate. And they just start driving.
Up to that moment, we in the audience kind of knew where the story was ultimately headed. We didn't know how it would happen, but we knew the cops would eventually catch and punish the criminal, the end, because that's what happens in a procedural. And, suddenly, boom, one character kicks the game board over, and now, for the first time since the opening credits, no one in the audience has the slightest clue where this story is going.
That's what you want as a writer. At least once in your story, maybe more, just when you think the readers might be getting a little too comfortable, you want a character to zig where they were expected to zag--to make a surprising, unexpected choice, the more out-of-the-blue the better. (See also The Frighteners, the most criminally underrated screenplay of all time, for a thousand other examples.) As long as it's a choice that's ultimately in character, then the more shocking, the more it works. I can think of no better way to maintain suspense and keep the story energized, and it's one of my favorite tricks. Try it at least once per script. Make a point of having either your protagonist or your antagonist make a hard, hard left at some juncture where convention and tradition would dictate they turn right, and see where that takes you; you can always undo it. But in my experience, you probably won't want to.
Next: the sister post--the trap of False Suspense and how to avoid it.
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Waid Wednesdays #15: What Matters
There used to be a Triangle Rule in comics. I first heard it from one of my mentors, the brilliant writer/cartoonist William Messner-Loebs. I've repeated it many times since, and God only knows who first articulated it, but it supposed this:
There were three qualifications for making good in comics--talent, personality, and the ability to hit a deadline. That was your triangle. The theory was that very few comics professionals were gifted with all three of these super-powers, but as long as s/he possessed any two of these traits, steady work was all but a lock. If you were insanely talented and likeable, you could probably skate by for a while on the punctuality hurdle; there was a point where Neil Gaiman was so overwhelmed that he was faxing Sandman scripts in one page at a time, which he could get away with 'cause he was Neil Gaiman. Likewise, comics was crammed to the rafters with C-level-talent drinking buddies who were unbelievably reliable about getting their scripts or art in on time, and clockwork geniuses who had the social skills of a filing cabinet, and they all got by--maybe not on the A-list assignments, but they put food on their table.
Before you whoop up and down that you've just snagged a career because you're two for three--you're always punctual and your friends tell you you're a hoot--I warn you that the 21st Century has not been kind to the Triangle Rule. First off, FTPs and e-mail have become such a part of the work-delivery process that human interaction and visits to the office to get face-time with your editor are rarer than ever, so your winning personality counts less. Secondly, yes, we're still in the periodical business--even with one-off graphic novels, someone somewhere is depending on you to make an eventual deadline, even if it's just your landlord--so missing a deadline is never, ever cool, but so long as you stay in contact with your editor and keep the lines of communication open rather than ignore phone calls or e-mails, you can probably work something out. (Just remember, it is a thousand times more forgiveable to blow a deadline if you alert the editor ahead of time that you're having trouble than it is to drop off the radar and leave the editor hanging.)
But most importantly, there are very few places in comics these days to build your career and quietly hone your skills, so it's not enough to be talented. You have to be talented right now, out of the gate. Part of that's because a bunch of jerks like Grant Morrison, Darwyn Cooke and Ed Brubaker went and drastically raised the bar on the definition of the word "talented." Part of that's because readers expect way more from a comic that costs twice what it cost six years ago. Part of that is because, chances are, your work will be collected in a trade paperback that will stay in print a long, long time. And part of that is because there now are far, far more comics reviews sites online than there are people who actually love comics and are not willing to snark your reputation to a bloody pulp just because snark is easier to write than actual criticism.
Wait, it gets worse. You have to be talented right now, and you have to sustain that talent. Not only is competition for the gig is at an all-time high, but the economy isn't exactly encouraging readers to be patient with comics they might grow to love. Sorry to add to the pressure, but one or two bad jobs can take a fast toll on your career.
Mark Waid the BOOM! Editor-In-Chief just wrote 400 words on how meeting deadlines was your most important reputation-builder, and he wants to scream bloody murder at Mark Waid the Freelancer for throwing them out in lieu of what I'm about to say--because no one else says it, ever--but while you don't want to be a prima donna with your attitude and you don't want to get fired for never delivering on time, the God's honest truth is that, in the long run, the quality of your work is all that matters.
Long, long ago, when I was a Boy Editor at DC, I once asked my boss, Dick Giordano, about what it was like to work with Neal Adams, who he'd long been partners with and who had a legendary reputation (earned or not) for never, ever, ever, ever meeting a deadline. "Didn't editors lose their minds when Neal would do his disappearing act?", I asked. Dick just chuckled and said, "Yes. Yes, they did. And they'd be furious with him, and they'd swear never to hire him again. But six months later, they wouldn't remember how late his work was. All they'd remember was how good it was."
This was, frankly, kind of a dangerously stupid thing to tell an impressionable young editor working in the periodical business...but (a) Dick's gift for candor was one of the qualities that made him the best and most valuable mentor I ever had, and (b) he was right. And he's just gotten more right in the intervening two decades. I cannot name names without embarrassing them, but I can just off the top of my head think of at least a dozen freelancers who hit every deadline ever asked of them, even if that deadline was changed on them without fair warning... who were pleasant to work with and always professional even if their editor was a jerk...and who always did exactly what their editors asked them to do, even if it was obvious to a blind man that the quality of the finished work was lessened, because they were trained to believe that their first priority was to serve their editor and do so in a timely manner.
All of those people have been unemployed for years.
In the long run, the quality of your work is all that matters. That is your only resumé. Be professional. Make sure your editor or publisher can always reach you. Do what's asked of you if your conscience can bear it. But know that, five years from now, as fans or prospective employers are looking over your published pages, no one will care that this story sucks because the publisher moved the deadline up or because the editor made you work an android cow into the story. All they will care about is what they see in front of them, and they will hold you responsible for it, no one else.
Don't be defiant. Don't be difficult. But the Triangle Rule no longer holds, so most of all, don't think that if you simply jump through enough hoops and fetch enough drinks, that'll still buy you a career. Be good at this above all else. Stand up for your work, and never, ever let anything get in the way of you doing your very best. You may end up crossing swords with an editor and leave him or her thinking you're difficult or unhireable. That editor may even be me. But if you never listen to another thing I ever say, listen to this: the Career Graveyard is fence-to-fence full and three deep with freelancers who believed that making a positive impression with their editors was more important than making a permanent impression with their work.
******
End of lecture. A couple of other bits of business:
(1) If you like what's said here, I refer you to my daily blog over at markwaid.com, where these essays (reposted a day or two later) are accompanied with podcasts, videoblogging, and other various bits of commentary. Come for the funny pictures, stay for the sense of moral outrage.
(2) I'm all over the comics shops in the next few weeks if you're inclined to pick up one of my books to see if I'm really even remotely qualified to pen how-to's like these. Potter's Field: Stone Cold (a detective story with artist Paul Azaceta) hits today; The Incredibles #1 (with art by Marcio Takara) hits next Wednesday; and Irredeemable #1 (with artist Pete Krause), the story of how the world's greatest superhero became the world's greatest supervillain, debuts two weeks from today. There'll be more coming. You can get 'em at your favorite comics shop or order them directly from BOOM! Studios.
There were three qualifications for making good in comics--talent, personality, and the ability to hit a deadline. That was your triangle. The theory was that very few comics professionals were gifted with all three of these super-powers, but as long as s/he possessed any two of these traits, steady work was all but a lock. If you were insanely talented and likeable, you could probably skate by for a while on the punctuality hurdle; there was a point where Neil Gaiman was so overwhelmed that he was faxing Sandman scripts in one page at a time, which he could get away with 'cause he was Neil Gaiman. Likewise, comics was crammed to the rafters with C-level-talent drinking buddies who were unbelievably reliable about getting their scripts or art in on time, and clockwork geniuses who had the social skills of a filing cabinet, and they all got by--maybe not on the A-list assignments, but they put food on their table.
Before you whoop up and down that you've just snagged a career because you're two for three--you're always punctual and your friends tell you you're a hoot--I warn you that the 21st Century has not been kind to the Triangle Rule. First off, FTPs and e-mail have become such a part of the work-delivery process that human interaction and visits to the office to get face-time with your editor are rarer than ever, so your winning personality counts less. Secondly, yes, we're still in the periodical business--even with one-off graphic novels, someone somewhere is depending on you to make an eventual deadline, even if it's just your landlord--so missing a deadline is never, ever cool, but so long as you stay in contact with your editor and keep the lines of communication open rather than ignore phone calls or e-mails, you can probably work something out. (Just remember, it is a thousand times more forgiveable to blow a deadline if you alert the editor ahead of time that you're having trouble than it is to drop off the radar and leave the editor hanging.)
But most importantly, there are very few places in comics these days to build your career and quietly hone your skills, so it's not enough to be talented. You have to be talented right now, out of the gate. Part of that's because a bunch of jerks like Grant Morrison, Darwyn Cooke and Ed Brubaker went and drastically raised the bar on the definition of the word "talented." Part of that's because readers expect way more from a comic that costs twice what it cost six years ago. Part of that is because, chances are, your work will be collected in a trade paperback that will stay in print a long, long time. And part of that is because there now are far, far more comics reviews sites online than there are people who actually love comics and are not willing to snark your reputation to a bloody pulp just because snark is easier to write than actual criticism.
Wait, it gets worse. You have to be talented right now, and you have to sustain that talent. Not only is competition for the gig is at an all-time high, but the economy isn't exactly encouraging readers to be patient with comics they might grow to love. Sorry to add to the pressure, but one or two bad jobs can take a fast toll on your career.
Mark Waid the BOOM! Editor-In-Chief just wrote 400 words on how meeting deadlines was your most important reputation-builder, and he wants to scream bloody murder at Mark Waid the Freelancer for throwing them out in lieu of what I'm about to say--because no one else says it, ever--but while you don't want to be a prima donna with your attitude and you don't want to get fired for never delivering on time, the God's honest truth is that, in the long run, the quality of your work is all that matters.
Long, long ago, when I was a Boy Editor at DC, I once asked my boss, Dick Giordano, about what it was like to work with Neal Adams, who he'd long been partners with and who had a legendary reputation (earned or not) for never, ever, ever, ever meeting a deadline. "Didn't editors lose their minds when Neal would do his disappearing act?", I asked. Dick just chuckled and said, "Yes. Yes, they did. And they'd be furious with him, and they'd swear never to hire him again. But six months later, they wouldn't remember how late his work was. All they'd remember was how good it was."
This was, frankly, kind of a dangerously stupid thing to tell an impressionable young editor working in the periodical business...but (a) Dick's gift for candor was one of the qualities that made him the best and most valuable mentor I ever had, and (b) he was right. And he's just gotten more right in the intervening two decades. I cannot name names without embarrassing them, but I can just off the top of my head think of at least a dozen freelancers who hit every deadline ever asked of them, even if that deadline was changed on them without fair warning... who were pleasant to work with and always professional even if their editor was a jerk...and who always did exactly what their editors asked them to do, even if it was obvious to a blind man that the quality of the finished work was lessened, because they were trained to believe that their first priority was to serve their editor and do so in a timely manner.
All of those people have been unemployed for years.
In the long run, the quality of your work is all that matters. That is your only resumé. Be professional. Make sure your editor or publisher can always reach you. Do what's asked of you if your conscience can bear it. But know that, five years from now, as fans or prospective employers are looking over your published pages, no one will care that this story sucks because the publisher moved the deadline up or because the editor made you work an android cow into the story. All they will care about is what they see in front of them, and they will hold you responsible for it, no one else.
Don't be defiant. Don't be difficult. But the Triangle Rule no longer holds, so most of all, don't think that if you simply jump through enough hoops and fetch enough drinks, that'll still buy you a career. Be good at this above all else. Stand up for your work, and never, ever let anything get in the way of you doing your very best. You may end up crossing swords with an editor and leave him or her thinking you're difficult or unhireable. That editor may even be me. But if you never listen to another thing I ever say, listen to this: the Career Graveyard is fence-to-fence full and three deep with freelancers who believed that making a positive impression with their editors was more important than making a permanent impression with their work.
******
End of lecture. A couple of other bits of business:
(1) If you like what's said here, I refer you to my daily blog over at markwaid.com, where these essays (reposted a day or two later) are accompanied with podcasts, videoblogging, and other various bits of commentary. Come for the funny pictures, stay for the sense of moral outrage.
(2) I'm all over the comics shops in the next few weeks if you're inclined to pick up one of my books to see if I'm really even remotely qualified to pen how-to's like these. Potter's Field: Stone Cold (a detective story with artist Paul Azaceta) hits today; The Incredibles #1 (with art by Marcio Takara) hits next Wednesday; and Irredeemable #1 (with artist Pete Krause), the story of how the world's greatest superhero became the world's greatest supervillain, debuts two weeks from today. There'll be more coming. You can get 'em at your favorite comics shop or order them directly from BOOM! Studios.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Waid Wednesdays #14: The Splash Page
Straight up, I will tell you that with the craptacularly unproductive week I have just had, I don't feel qualified today to give anyone advice on how to count to ten, much less how to do comics. Still, I will soldier on, however briefly.
The old school of thought was that having an eye-catching, dynamic cover was the single most important factor in comics production, because (duh) that's the first thing an impulse buyer sees. I still think there's lots of truth to that, but since our audience is now made up predominantly of hardcore, informed buyers who have already largely decided sight-unseen what they're gonna buy on Wednesdays, it's no longer a truism. Still a good rule of thumb (and a future blogpost), but not as critical as it was back in the day when your great-great grandfather and I used to buy comics for a nickel down at the trolley stop.
The second most important graphic element of a comic, I was taught, was Page One. This theory was likewise predicated on the impulse-buyer idea, that purchasers who were lured by the cover but were still on the fence could be sold with a strong initial page--a "splash page" (to use industry jargon) that was a single, bold image, almost a second cover. This is a guideline that I think outlived its usefulness as a hard-and-fast rule a long time back. In fact, I'm not totally sure it was ever really true. For one thing, I never met anyone who, if they needed additional selling past the cover, wouldn't just flip through the whole book. And for another thing, one of the very best-selling comics series of all time was Captain Marvel Adventures, and here's what for the entire decade of the 1940s you'd see every month on page one:
Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Or, to put it in contemporary terms, the most acclaimed comic of all time, Watchmen, starts every issue on a nine-panel grid. So my advice is, don't let anyone tell you that your first page has to be a splash page.
HOWEVER.
Your first page, like the first paragraph of a prose story or the first image on a movie screen, must be arresting. It doesn't absolutely have to be a full-page shot--but if it's not, it does absolutely have to make you want to turn the page to find out what happens next (or learn how you got to this interesting place). Really, truly, I can't say this strongly enough: if there's not something remarkable happening on that first page, something we've never seen before, then rethink it. Be honest with yourself: nothing on Earth is gonna want to make you wanna read past page one if page one is a sequence of a guy going to work in the morning. I don't care that the sequence might be integral to your story, I don't care that it's drawn nicely, I don't care that it sets up his situation. If we don't get to the end of the page and find out that the place he works makes suits out of human skin, there is nothing there to make you not wonder why you just spent four bucks on this. I'm overstating for emphasis--I'm not really saying your only option is to be shocking, and Chris Ware, for one, whose genius eclipses my meager talent like the moon eclipses my driveway, gets by just fine by drawing us in slowly and without sensationalism--but I'm serious when I say you cannot underestimate the patience of a potential reader, not with only about 22 pages to spend on your story.
Comics are not film. Don't think you have to begin with an establishing shot of the city, then slowly pan in on the deli where your main character works. Just start your damn story, and the faster you can get to the unfamiliar, the better.
Personally, I like the page one splash, particularly if it could serve as a second cover. I'm not adamant about it--there are plenty of comics I've written that start with slow, dramatic builds and sort of explode around page two or three--but there's something really satisfying to me about being able to grab you on page one. By way of example, here--thanks to artist Ron Garney, who nailed what I described perfectly, as he always does--is, of the eighty majillion page ones I've written, my hands-down favorite one ever, from Captain America #4, 1998:
That, if I do say so myself, is a damn good Page One.
The old school of thought was that having an eye-catching, dynamic cover was the single most important factor in comics production, because (duh) that's the first thing an impulse buyer sees. I still think there's lots of truth to that, but since our audience is now made up predominantly of hardcore, informed buyers who have already largely decided sight-unseen what they're gonna buy on Wednesdays, it's no longer a truism. Still a good rule of thumb (and a future blogpost), but not as critical as it was back in the day when your great-great grandfather and I used to buy comics for a nickel down at the trolley stop.
The second most important graphic element of a comic, I was taught, was Page One. This theory was likewise predicated on the impulse-buyer idea, that purchasers who were lured by the cover but were still on the fence could be sold with a strong initial page--a "splash page" (to use industry jargon) that was a single, bold image, almost a second cover. This is a guideline that I think outlived its usefulness as a hard-and-fast rule a long time back. In fact, I'm not totally sure it was ever really true. For one thing, I never met anyone who, if they needed additional selling past the cover, wouldn't just flip through the whole book. And for another thing, one of the very best-selling comics series of all time was Captain Marvel Adventures, and here's what for the entire decade of the 1940s you'd see every month on page one:
Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Or, to put it in contemporary terms, the most acclaimed comic of all time, Watchmen, starts every issue on a nine-panel grid. So my advice is, don't let anyone tell you that your first page has to be a splash page.
HOWEVER.
Your first page, like the first paragraph of a prose story or the first image on a movie screen, must be arresting. It doesn't absolutely have to be a full-page shot--but if it's not, it does absolutely have to make you want to turn the page to find out what happens next (or learn how you got to this interesting place). Really, truly, I can't say this strongly enough: if there's not something remarkable happening on that first page, something we've never seen before, then rethink it. Be honest with yourself: nothing on Earth is gonna want to make you wanna read past page one if page one is a sequence of a guy going to work in the morning. I don't care that the sequence might be integral to your story, I don't care that it's drawn nicely, I don't care that it sets up his situation. If we don't get to the end of the page and find out that the place he works makes suits out of human skin, there is nothing there to make you not wonder why you just spent four bucks on this. I'm overstating for emphasis--I'm not really saying your only option is to be shocking, and Chris Ware, for one, whose genius eclipses my meager talent like the moon eclipses my driveway, gets by just fine by drawing us in slowly and without sensationalism--but I'm serious when I say you cannot underestimate the patience of a potential reader, not with only about 22 pages to spend on your story.
Comics are not film. Don't think you have to begin with an establishing shot of the city, then slowly pan in on the deli where your main character works. Just start your damn story, and the faster you can get to the unfamiliar, the better.
Personally, I like the page one splash, particularly if it could serve as a second cover. I'm not adamant about it--there are plenty of comics I've written that start with slow, dramatic builds and sort of explode around page two or three--but there's something really satisfying to me about being able to grab you on page one. By way of example, here--thanks to artist Ron Garney, who nailed what I described perfectly, as he always does--is, of the eighty majillion page ones I've written, my hands-down favorite one ever, from Captain America #4, 1998:
That, if I do say so myself, is a damn good Page One.
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Waid Wednesdays #13: You'd Better Be In There Somewhere
When I was working at a company called Crossgen back in 2001, I was stuck writing a book called Sigil. I didn’t start it; it was inherited. It was about a two-fisted, ex-military, blue-collar guy named Sam who traveled the galaxy and fought aliens. I forget why. I do remember it wasn’t a very compelling or convincing reason. I specifically remember that the alien empire he was up against had conquered interstellar travel but still had not invented the wheel, which is probably the single stupidest science-fiction conceit I’ve ever heard.
There was nothing about this setup that was particularly easy for me to wrap my head around. Sam was the kind of guy I couldn’t in real life relate to on any level, and he was fighting an eons-old humanoid empire that had somehow never seen a rock roll downhill. So finding my “in” was extra-challenging--but that’s the job. If you’re going to write a character convincingly, you have to find something in him, however small, that resonates with you.
After much studying and much drinking, I hit upon the one commonality Sam and I had: we were both vagabonds with no family ties. I got that, and something clicked. That suggested that there was some backstory with his parents. That there might be a reason he felt estranged from friends and family. That there might be some nugget of masked insecurity inside him that made him feel uncomfortable with close relationships. THAT, I got. (The book, though brilliantly drawn by Scot Eaton, was still a mediocre adventure, but I got it.)
Marvel Comics’ characters have been exceedingly popular since the 1960s because they’re especially relatable. The X-Men are about facing prejudice. The Hulk is about the power of anger and how to deal with it. The Fantastic Four is about family. Thor is about...
...about...
...this one stumped me for years. The Mighty Thor chronicles the ongoing, modern-day adventures of the Norse god of thunder, who divides his time between punching supervillains in Manhattan and fighting Frost Giants with a giant hammer to protect his home of Asgard and his cranky dad, Odin. I never got Thor. I have absolutely no interest in mythology, Thor’s trademark “thee-thou-thine” faux-Medieval dialogue feels corny to me, and Thor is traditionally about as bright as a week-old glowstick. And yet...and yet...he’s been one of comics’ mainstay heroes for nearly a half-century, which means there had to be something in the concept that the audience can identify with. I just couldn’t find it. And, worse, a few years back when I was doing a handful of Marvel books, I had to write Thor from time to time.
So I finally broke it down, and once I did, it was embarrassingly obvious:
Thor is about a rebellious son who can’t please his father no matter what he does.
Odin’s a jerk. He claims to have a very clear vision of Thor’s destiny, one that doesn’t involve wasting time with Earthlings, but like many fathers, he’s much better at articulating what Thor isn’t supposed to do than what he is supposed to do. There’s poor Thor, just trying to follow his heart, while Odin--time and again with all the compassion of a hurricane--punishes Thor for breaking specious rules that were never very clear to begin with.
THAT, I got. THAT, hundreds of thousands of teenage readers have been getting since 1962.
Characters, if they’re to have any longevity, have to speak to universal concerns. The Golden Age of pop culture is lousy with the tens of thousands of forgotten characters who weren’t really about anything definable. A few have adapted by becoming corporate icons--the Wonder Woman of 1942 is only barely recognizable as the safely sexless Wonder Woman of today--but, by and large, time is much kinder to the Spider-Mans of pop culture than it is the Betty Boops and Great Gildersleeves. Whether it’s a character you inherited or one of your own invention, you have to find in him or her the truths that will mean something to today’s audience and, hopefully, tomorrow’s.
There was nothing about this setup that was particularly easy for me to wrap my head around. Sam was the kind of guy I couldn’t in real life relate to on any level, and he was fighting an eons-old humanoid empire that had somehow never seen a rock roll downhill. So finding my “in” was extra-challenging--but that’s the job. If you’re going to write a character convincingly, you have to find something in him, however small, that resonates with you.
After much studying and much drinking, I hit upon the one commonality Sam and I had: we were both vagabonds with no family ties. I got that, and something clicked. That suggested that there was some backstory with his parents. That there might be a reason he felt estranged from friends and family. That there might be some nugget of masked insecurity inside him that made him feel uncomfortable with close relationships. THAT, I got. (The book, though brilliantly drawn by Scot Eaton, was still a mediocre adventure, but I got it.)
Marvel Comics’ characters have been exceedingly popular since the 1960s because they’re especially relatable. The X-Men are about facing prejudice. The Hulk is about the power of anger and how to deal with it. The Fantastic Four is about family. Thor is about...
...about...
...this one stumped me for years. The Mighty Thor chronicles the ongoing, modern-day adventures of the Norse god of thunder, who divides his time between punching supervillains in Manhattan and fighting Frost Giants with a giant hammer to protect his home of Asgard and his cranky dad, Odin. I never got Thor. I have absolutely no interest in mythology, Thor’s trademark “thee-thou-thine” faux-Medieval dialogue feels corny to me, and Thor is traditionally about as bright as a week-old glowstick. And yet...and yet...he’s been one of comics’ mainstay heroes for nearly a half-century, which means there had to be something in the concept that the audience can identify with. I just couldn’t find it. And, worse, a few years back when I was doing a handful of Marvel books, I had to write Thor from time to time.
So I finally broke it down, and once I did, it was embarrassingly obvious:
Thor is about a rebellious son who can’t please his father no matter what he does.
Odin’s a jerk. He claims to have a very clear vision of Thor’s destiny, one that doesn’t involve wasting time with Earthlings, but like many fathers, he’s much better at articulating what Thor isn’t supposed to do than what he is supposed to do. There’s poor Thor, just trying to follow his heart, while Odin--time and again with all the compassion of a hurricane--punishes Thor for breaking specious rules that were never very clear to begin with.
THAT, I got. THAT, hundreds of thousands of teenage readers have been getting since 1962.
Characters, if they’re to have any longevity, have to speak to universal concerns. The Golden Age of pop culture is lousy with the tens of thousands of forgotten characters who weren’t really about anything definable. A few have adapted by becoming corporate icons--the Wonder Woman of 1942 is only barely recognizable as the safely sexless Wonder Woman of today--but, by and large, time is much kinder to the Spider-Mans of pop culture than it is the Betty Boops and Great Gildersleeves. Whether it’s a character you inherited or one of your own invention, you have to find in him or her the truths that will mean something to today’s audience and, hopefully, tomorrow’s.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Waid Wednesdays #12: Characters Are Not Furniture
Losing two of the next five days to cross-country flights, but no complaints from me. I’m on my way to the Orlando MegaCon this week, and while (like most of you) I’ve come to hate flying, it’s worth it: MegaCon has become one of the largest and best-run comics/anime/sf conventions in this country, and whatever fannish subgenre floats your boat, attending this show is worth the trip.
The casualty, of course, is that this post will be a bit shorter than the norm—but still valuable, I trust. It’s a bit of beginners’ comics-writing advice I don’t hear discussed much:
Everybody wants something. Or, to put it another way, characters are not furniture.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Waid Wednesdays #11: More on the Comic Book Editor
Following up on some of last week's post about The Job of a Comic Book Editor....
I made several big presumptions and (at least) one ill-phrased comment, all of which sparked worthwhile discussion not only here but also on the forums over at boom-studios.com and in person over drinks. These points are well worth addressing here.
Presumption One: You can follow my Inviolable Rules because you, the editor, are working with writers and artists who have some degree of talent and are not, in fact, illiterate or anatomy-carefree hacks who you inherited because they bought drinks and/or hookers and/or drunken hookers for someone higher than you on the corporate roster who seems oblivious to their lack of talent.
That's a bigger gimme than it oughta be. Luckily, lack of talent will generally bury the unworthy, but it's an absolute fact that all comics editors and publishers, myself included, rely on at least one creator who they believe to be sublimely talented but who everyone else rightly knows should be cleaning pools for living. I don't know why this one blind spot exists so relentlessly, but it's so absolutely true that I've come to accept it as some sort of weird Necessary Impurity built into the editorial desk.
Consequently, if you have any sort of editorial workload at all--at DC, editors and their assistants handle anywhere from four to eight monthly books; at Marvel, they handle twice that; and at Boom!, it's somewhere in the middle--you're probably stuck with at least one writer or artist you yourself would not have willfully hired. If you're lucky, there's enough talent there whereby stories are being produced that, even if they're not 100% to your taste, are good stories. If you're unlucky, you're shackled to a writer who's clueless. Good luck with that. All I can tell you is, in my experience and in the long run, you'll be able to sleep better at night knowing you've argued with the guy and served the story than you will if you cave in on your instincts to follow the path of least resistance.
Presumption Two: The writer you're trying to edit is a good guy who understands concepts like "company standards," "style guide," and "Just because Grant Morrison once had Batman shoot someone with a gun doesn't mean you can do it." A lot of companies, BOOM! included, are skittish about the word "goddamn," for instance, because as unbelievable as this is to me, there are still people out there who are more offended by one word of language than they are by the entirety of Dane Cook's existence. This presumption is directly entwined with....
Presumption Two-A: Your freelancers give a rat's ass what you say and are not arrogant prima donnas who bristle every time you suggest to them that "Spider-Man" does, in fact, have a hyphen in it. It's easy for me to sit here and say "Don't pose problems without offering solutions," but there are always going to be a few writers and artists who are so sensitive/insecure/gun-shy that they're going to perceive any suggestion you make as horning in on their job. Basically, not that you needed to hear this from me, that's their problem, not yours, but your life will be easier if you learn how to handle and massage those egos on a case-by-case basis. If you're calm and level-headed with your freelancers, I promise that they will eventually learn not to flinch every time you open your mouth.
And, finally, the rule "Never point out a problem unless you have a solution to offer" was clunkily phrased and, in retrospect, should have read as "If you're gonna point out a problem with the story, have a solution to offer." I didn't mean to suggest you should ever fear pointing out problems; I was instead heavily underscoring the point that if you think in terms of solutions, that tends to turn your kneejerk reactions into articulate statements with some thought behind them.
*****
As an editor, you're certainly well within your rights and your job description to enforce whatever editorial guidelines have been laid down by your bosses, and I kinda thought that was understood, but I apologize for not making that point more explicitly. It's easy for Writer Me to forget that not everyone in comics has an "I've Read 50,000 Comics In My Lifetime" inbred understanding of basically what material is and isn't considered problematic in American mainstream comic books.
I think the toughest, most stressful part of the editor's job is that serving the material and serving the creators don't always go hand-in-hand. If you're editing someone else's creator-owned book, it's an easier gig; ultimately, you can advocate for whatever you like, but the creator generally has final say so long as the publisher's still willing to publish his or her work. If you're working at Marvel or DC or Dark Horse or wherever on corporate-owned properties, you're expected by your corporate overlords to know where to draw the line between letting these crazy freelancers have their heads and protecting these corporate assets from stories or art that might "damage" them. Worse, the placement of that line changes from hour to hour and depends not only on the ephemeral definition of "damage" but also on (a) the clout of the freelancer, (b) your clout in the company, (c) however corporate might be overrreacting on some mail they got from an aggrieved crank, (d) whether your editor in chief had a fight with his wife this morning and wants to exert some power, (e) how seriously your boss takes the comments on message boards, and (f through z) any number of other random factors.
Comics Editorial really is a complex job on a corporate level, and as I have often said, I'm lucky that I'm the E-I-C and don't have to answer to anyone who isn't in tune with my own tastes and standards of craft. If I had to get screamed at by corporate overlords who were overruling my story instincts on a regular basis, I'd be in jail now. That gives me the luxury of never really having to worry about anything other than answering the question "Does this make the story better?", but I promise you, no matter how lenient or strict your own bosses are, when you carve everything else out of the way, that remains the only important question and must always remain your North Star.
I made several big presumptions and (at least) one ill-phrased comment, all of which sparked worthwhile discussion not only here but also on the forums over at boom-studios.com and in person over drinks. These points are well worth addressing here.
Presumption One: You can follow my Inviolable Rules because you, the editor, are working with writers and artists who have some degree of talent and are not, in fact, illiterate or anatomy-carefree hacks who you inherited because they bought drinks and/or hookers and/or drunken hookers for someone higher than you on the corporate roster who seems oblivious to their lack of talent.
That's a bigger gimme than it oughta be. Luckily, lack of talent will generally bury the unworthy, but it's an absolute fact that all comics editors and publishers, myself included, rely on at least one creator who they believe to be sublimely talented but who everyone else rightly knows should be cleaning pools for living. I don't know why this one blind spot exists so relentlessly, but it's so absolutely true that I've come to accept it as some sort of weird Necessary Impurity built into the editorial desk.
Consequently, if you have any sort of editorial workload at all--at DC, editors and their assistants handle anywhere from four to eight monthly books; at Marvel, they handle twice that; and at Boom!, it's somewhere in the middle--you're probably stuck with at least one writer or artist you yourself would not have willfully hired. If you're lucky, there's enough talent there whereby stories are being produced that, even if they're not 100% to your taste, are good stories. If you're unlucky, you're shackled to a writer who's clueless. Good luck with that. All I can tell you is, in my experience and in the long run, you'll be able to sleep better at night knowing you've argued with the guy and served the story than you will if you cave in on your instincts to follow the path of least resistance.
Presumption Two: The writer you're trying to edit is a good guy who understands concepts like "company standards," "style guide," and "Just because Grant Morrison once had Batman shoot someone with a gun doesn't mean you can do it." A lot of companies, BOOM! included, are skittish about the word "goddamn," for instance, because as unbelievable as this is to me, there are still people out there who are more offended by one word of language than they are by the entirety of Dane Cook's existence. This presumption is directly entwined with....
Presumption Two-A: Your freelancers give a rat's ass what you say and are not arrogant prima donnas who bristle every time you suggest to them that "Spider-Man" does, in fact, have a hyphen in it. It's easy for me to sit here and say "Don't pose problems without offering solutions," but there are always going to be a few writers and artists who are so sensitive/insecure/gun-shy that they're going to perceive any suggestion you make as horning in on their job. Basically, not that you needed to hear this from me, that's their problem, not yours, but your life will be easier if you learn how to handle and massage those egos on a case-by-case basis. If you're calm and level-headed with your freelancers, I promise that they will eventually learn not to flinch every time you open your mouth.
And, finally, the rule "Never point out a problem unless you have a solution to offer" was clunkily phrased and, in retrospect, should have read as "If you're gonna point out a problem with the story, have a solution to offer." I didn't mean to suggest you should ever fear pointing out problems; I was instead heavily underscoring the point that if you think in terms of solutions, that tends to turn your kneejerk reactions into articulate statements with some thought behind them.
*****
As an editor, you're certainly well within your rights and your job description to enforce whatever editorial guidelines have been laid down by your bosses, and I kinda thought that was understood, but I apologize for not making that point more explicitly. It's easy for Writer Me to forget that not everyone in comics has an "I've Read 50,000 Comics In My Lifetime" inbred understanding of basically what material is and isn't considered problematic in American mainstream comic books.
I think the toughest, most stressful part of the editor's job is that serving the material and serving the creators don't always go hand-in-hand. If you're editing someone else's creator-owned book, it's an easier gig; ultimately, you can advocate for whatever you like, but the creator generally has final say so long as the publisher's still willing to publish his or her work. If you're working at Marvel or DC or Dark Horse or wherever on corporate-owned properties, you're expected by your corporate overlords to know where to draw the line between letting these crazy freelancers have their heads and protecting these corporate assets from stories or art that might "damage" them. Worse, the placement of that line changes from hour to hour and depends not only on the ephemeral definition of "damage" but also on (a) the clout of the freelancer, (b) your clout in the company, (c) however corporate might be overrreacting on some mail they got from an aggrieved crank, (d) whether your editor in chief had a fight with his wife this morning and wants to exert some power, (e) how seriously your boss takes the comments on message boards, and (f through z) any number of other random factors.
Comics Editorial really is a complex job on a corporate level, and as I have often said, I'm lucky that I'm the E-I-C and don't have to answer to anyone who isn't in tune with my own tastes and standards of craft. If I had to get screamed at by corporate overlords who were overruling my story instincts on a regular basis, I'd be in jail now. That gives me the luxury of never really having to worry about anything other than answering the question "Does this make the story better?", but I promise you, no matter how lenient or strict your own bosses are, when you carve everything else out of the way, that remains the only important question and must always remain your North Star.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
And may I add...
...how honored I am that at last I can hear what my essays would sound like if they were read aloud by the dwarf from Twin Peaks. Thanks, Rogers! That gum you like is going to come back in style.
Waid Wednesdays #10: The Job of the Comic Book Editor
Look, SOMEONE's got to get this stuff out of the hands of the writers and artists and to press.
Comics editors, rumors to the contrary, are some of my favorite people, and I've always admired the good ones. In fact, when I broke into comics in the mid-'80s, I did so as an editor, at DC; I had little if any interest in being a comic book writer because I honestly thought I'd never be any good at it. That wasn't my career goal at all. I just wanted to help steer my favorite characters and work with my favorite creators. I'd read a kabillion comics, I was organized, I was excellent at punctuation and spelling, and so I thought that would be enough to conquer the job.
Oh ho ho.
I lasted just over two years that first go-around and helped produce some really good and fondly remembered comics. I found some new talent like that James Robinson kid, and I enjoyed the gig. But I also, in my youthful arrogance, made a thousand dumb mistakes (like inadvertently pissing off Will Eisner--that was a red-letter day) and was eventually thrown out into the snowy New York streets. (Luckily, I seem to have recovered reasonably well.)
As I found out when I took the Editor In Chief gig at BOOM! in 2007, the job has transformed immensely in the intervening two decades because of digital delivery. During my first tour of duty, artists and writers worked via FedEx, colorists still slapped colored dyes on paper, hot dogs were a nickel, and everything was basically hard-copy. Now, scripts are e-mailed, art is scanned and uploaded to the FTP, lettering's done with Adobe Illustrator, and in the entire time I've been at BOOM!, I've yet to have an actual, physical piece of art cross my desk.
That said, the core of the Comic Book Editor's job is essentially the same as it ever was. The editor is the supervisor. The manager. The coordinator. S/he, when the system is running smoothly:
* sets the deadlines;
* makes the initial assignment to the writer (if work-for-hire--or coordinates delivery with the writer or writer/artist if it's their property);
* reminds the writer a few weeks later that the script is running late;
* receives the script, reads it for content and continuity, and asks for rewrites if necessary, see below;
* ultimately copy-edits the accepted, final script and sends it to the artist;
* pokes a late artist about HIS deadline;
* receives the art via FTP;
* checks the art against the script to make sure they mesh and that the storytelling is clear, asking for redrawing if necessary, see also below;
* forwards the script and art FTP info to a colorist, sets a deadline, and provides him any necessary reference;
* indicates, on copies of the art, where the balloons, captions and sound effects should be placed (though if the script breaks all that down panel-by-panel well enough, most letterers today can handle that on their own);
* sends the script and the art FTP info to the letterer and sets a deadline;
* reviews the coloring for obvious errors (inconsistencies in characters or locales) and storytelling blunders (accidentally coloring night scenes as day, for instance);
* proofreads the whole project once again after the lettering's done, checking the lettering placement and reading the whole book to make sure it all works now that it's all of a piece;
* sends it out in this stage to the writer and artist for their review in case they want to tweak anything or may catch something you've missed;
* somewhere in the middle of all this, figures out what the hell the cover illustration should be;
* solicits a cover sketch (or several) from an artist to ensure that there's room for trade dress and that the illustration's not too similar to anything else in the pipeline;
* makes a final idiot check to make certain that, say, any two-page spreads fall on even-odd pages not odd-even or that the creative credits are included and accurate;
* notifies the publishing coordinator that the book's ready to be sent to the printer;
* and, finally, checks the proofs when they come in a few weeks later to make dead certain that everything's where it's supposed to be.
Rinse, repeat.
On top of all this, editors have to process and stay on top of vouchers from the creative team, write up solicitation information for the sales catalog and try to work far enough ahead so they're not having to guess or make stuff up, stay in constant phone and e-mail communication with the creative team to keep spirits up, assuage egos, manage deadlines, and more. I'm sure there're a dozen other things I and other editors have to do every day that I've overlooked, but those are the big bullet points. In some ways, I think I've made it sound harder than it is, and in other ways, I can't believe I or anyone could go through all those steps on nine or ten separate projects a month and not be driven insane.
And--AND--that's just the nuts and bolts of it all. That's a peek behind the curtain for those of you who have no inside knowledge already but are curious. Any orangutan who follows the above recipe can be an editor, but it won't make him a good editor, because what makes a good editor is nowhere on that list.
What makes a good editor is staying the hell out of the way as much as possible.
As an editor, you're there to facilitate the creative process, not impose on it. Yes, any time the writers or artists or colorists or letterers or anyone else wants to ask your advice or get a ruling on something, or anytime you feel like someone could be encouraged to do better, you have to be there for them. Have to be. That's the job, whether the project is, say, BATMAN and creative types are serving as work-for-hire, or something the creators own and you're serving them as a hired editor (as with, say, Steve Niles's 30 DAYS OF NIGHT).
That's much easier to do if the project is creator-owned and you're just there essentially to keep the trains running on time. If, on the other hand, you're a DC or Marvel or Dark Horse or BOOM! editor who's assigning work, then if you did your job properly to begin with, then the people you've hired can be trusted to do what they do without excessive meddling. The less work you have to do, the more energy you can put into the million other things you have to do that day. The ideal situation you're shooting for as an editor is to groom a collaborative creative team to the point where their work sails effortlessly through production and the most you have to do is fix the spelling and the commas.
If something bugs you at any point along the way--dialogue's not clear to you, or that girl's head looks too big, or whatever--yes, absolutely, speak up. But for the love of all that is holy, remember that the editor's primary role is to help the creative team tell their story, NOT make them tell YOUR story. The best comics editors have the smallest egos. The worst ones feel like they have to justify their salaries by making changes just so they can leave their fingerprints. Every creative medium has those guys, and they're all loathsome. If the creators don't have a clear idea of what you've commissioned them to do, that's your fault. And if they can't do it to your satisfaction, then you've hired poorly and should fish the talent pool anew. It's rare that, as an editor, you never have to step in at all to request some changes or clarifications, and that's absolutely your right to do so, but know what you're doing before you do it.
Here's Mark Waid's First Inviolable Rule For Editors, Including Himself: Never point out a problem unless you have a solution to offer. "This isn't quite working for me, try again" is insanely unhelpful. Your solution doesn't have to be "the" solution; you're gonna talk it over with your writer or artist, you're going to clearly articulate why something's not working in your eyes, and then you're going to listen to how they respond, negotiate the best fix if theirs is different, politic it out if they don't acknowledge a problem, and be ready to dismiss your concern if they make a good case that they're right and you're wrong, because if you're working with talented folks, that will happen. For years, I had a very good editor with one infamous trait: his bomb sights were off by about five pages. Without fail, every single time he'd call me up to talk about something in a script that bothered him, the problem was never exactly where he thought it was. The first few times we worked together, I'd listen to his criticisms and they wouldn't make much sense to me, but every time we'd talk it out, we'd eventually realize that the problem was with an earlier or later scene. I got used to his rhythms, I'd hear "this scene seems off," I'd think "actually, that scene's fine, but if he's bothered, that definitely means something's wrong somewhere," I'd figure out the appropriate fix, we'd both be happy. But the important point was that even though his sights were off, he was trying to articulate the problem, and that helped me zero in on it. "Eh, I don't know what's not working, take another swing" would not have been nearly as helpful.
Here's Mark Waid's Second Inviolable Rule For Editors, Including Himself: if you want something changed, it had damn well better make the story better, or else shut the hell up. "Wouldn't it be cool if...?" are five words that are almost always more destructive than they are helpful. "Wouldn't it be cool if this whole story were a flashback?" "Wouldn't it be cool if you gave him a robot dog?" "Wouldn't it be cool if you cut away in the middle of this Superman story to show Wonder Woman making a sandwich?" "Wouldn't it be cool if you made this scene more like my favorite scene from Star Wars?" Answer: no. (Sub-answer: yes, all these things, and worse, have been said to me. Okay, not the sandwich, but the actual request was even stupider.) If you're asking for changes without really, seriously understanding how those changes might affect the overall story, then stop talking. Also, if you're in that twenty percent of comics editors who didn't understand what I just said there, then please find another job. I'm not insisting that every script, every line, every drawing, every splash of color is somehow some perfect gem that can't be meddled with; everyone creative in this field needs someone looking over his or her shoulder to make sure they're not fumbling the ball, as we all do sometimes, and creators have to be willing to work collaboratively. But a good editor knows that the only changes worth championing are the ones that make the story better. If you're an editor unable to defend your editing in detail, on those grounds, then you're in the wrong line of work.
Whether they're working on something that's ultimately theirs or ultimately Time-Warner's or Marvel's, no one wants to feel like a typist or an art robot. Let them be creative; that's their job. The editor's job is to get their best work out of them or, if necessary, replace them if they're not meeting the standards of the publisher. The first, last and only question is always: does this make the story better?
Comics editors, rumors to the contrary, are some of my favorite people, and I've always admired the good ones. In fact, when I broke into comics in the mid-'80s, I did so as an editor, at DC; I had little if any interest in being a comic book writer because I honestly thought I'd never be any good at it. That wasn't my career goal at all. I just wanted to help steer my favorite characters and work with my favorite creators. I'd read a kabillion comics, I was organized, I was excellent at punctuation and spelling, and so I thought that would be enough to conquer the job.
Oh ho ho.
I lasted just over two years that first go-around and helped produce some really good and fondly remembered comics. I found some new talent like that James Robinson kid, and I enjoyed the gig. But I also, in my youthful arrogance, made a thousand dumb mistakes (like inadvertently pissing off Will Eisner--that was a red-letter day) and was eventually thrown out into the snowy New York streets. (Luckily, I seem to have recovered reasonably well.)
As I found out when I took the Editor In Chief gig at BOOM! in 2007, the job has transformed immensely in the intervening two decades because of digital delivery. During my first tour of duty, artists and writers worked via FedEx, colorists still slapped colored dyes on paper, hot dogs were a nickel, and everything was basically hard-copy. Now, scripts are e-mailed, art is scanned and uploaded to the FTP, lettering's done with Adobe Illustrator, and in the entire time I've been at BOOM!, I've yet to have an actual, physical piece of art cross my desk.
That said, the core of the Comic Book Editor's job is essentially the same as it ever was. The editor is the supervisor. The manager. The coordinator. S/he, when the system is running smoothly:
* sets the deadlines;
* makes the initial assignment to the writer (if work-for-hire--or coordinates delivery with the writer or writer/artist if it's their property);
* reminds the writer a few weeks later that the script is running late;
* receives the script, reads it for content and continuity, and asks for rewrites if necessary, see below;
* ultimately copy-edits the accepted, final script and sends it to the artist;
* pokes a late artist about HIS deadline;
* receives the art via FTP;
* checks the art against the script to make sure they mesh and that the storytelling is clear, asking for redrawing if necessary, see also below;
* forwards the script and art FTP info to a colorist, sets a deadline, and provides him any necessary reference;
* indicates, on copies of the art, where the balloons, captions and sound effects should be placed (though if the script breaks all that down panel-by-panel well enough, most letterers today can handle that on their own);
* sends the script and the art FTP info to the letterer and sets a deadline;
* reviews the coloring for obvious errors (inconsistencies in characters or locales) and storytelling blunders (accidentally coloring night scenes as day, for instance);
* proofreads the whole project once again after the lettering's done, checking the lettering placement and reading the whole book to make sure it all works now that it's all of a piece;
* sends it out in this stage to the writer and artist for their review in case they want to tweak anything or may catch something you've missed;
* somewhere in the middle of all this, figures out what the hell the cover illustration should be;
* solicits a cover sketch (or several) from an artist to ensure that there's room for trade dress and that the illustration's not too similar to anything else in the pipeline;
* makes a final idiot check to make certain that, say, any two-page spreads fall on even-odd pages not odd-even or that the creative credits are included and accurate;
* notifies the publishing coordinator that the book's ready to be sent to the printer;
* and, finally, checks the proofs when they come in a few weeks later to make dead certain that everything's where it's supposed to be.
Rinse, repeat.
On top of all this, editors have to process and stay on top of vouchers from the creative team, write up solicitation information for the sales catalog and try to work far enough ahead so they're not having to guess or make stuff up, stay in constant phone and e-mail communication with the creative team to keep spirits up, assuage egos, manage deadlines, and more. I'm sure there're a dozen other things I and other editors have to do every day that I've overlooked, but those are the big bullet points. In some ways, I think I've made it sound harder than it is, and in other ways, I can't believe I or anyone could go through all those steps on nine or ten separate projects a month and not be driven insane.
And--AND--that's just the nuts and bolts of it all. That's a peek behind the curtain for those of you who have no inside knowledge already but are curious. Any orangutan who follows the above recipe can be an editor, but it won't make him a good editor, because what makes a good editor is nowhere on that list.
What makes a good editor is staying the hell out of the way as much as possible.
As an editor, you're there to facilitate the creative process, not impose on it. Yes, any time the writers or artists or colorists or letterers or anyone else wants to ask your advice or get a ruling on something, or anytime you feel like someone could be encouraged to do better, you have to be there for them. Have to be. That's the job, whether the project is, say, BATMAN and creative types are serving as work-for-hire, or something the creators own and you're serving them as a hired editor (as with, say, Steve Niles's 30 DAYS OF NIGHT).
That's much easier to do if the project is creator-owned and you're just there essentially to keep the trains running on time. If, on the other hand, you're a DC or Marvel or Dark Horse or BOOM! editor who's assigning work, then if you did your job properly to begin with, then the people you've hired can be trusted to do what they do without excessive meddling. The less work you have to do, the more energy you can put into the million other things you have to do that day. The ideal situation you're shooting for as an editor is to groom a collaborative creative team to the point where their work sails effortlessly through production and the most you have to do is fix the spelling and the commas.
If something bugs you at any point along the way--dialogue's not clear to you, or that girl's head looks too big, or whatever--yes, absolutely, speak up. But for the love of all that is holy, remember that the editor's primary role is to help the creative team tell their story, NOT make them tell YOUR story. The best comics editors have the smallest egos. The worst ones feel like they have to justify their salaries by making changes just so they can leave their fingerprints. Every creative medium has those guys, and they're all loathsome. If the creators don't have a clear idea of what you've commissioned them to do, that's your fault. And if they can't do it to your satisfaction, then you've hired poorly and should fish the talent pool anew. It's rare that, as an editor, you never have to step in at all to request some changes or clarifications, and that's absolutely your right to do so, but know what you're doing before you do it.
Here's Mark Waid's First Inviolable Rule For Editors, Including Himself: Never point out a problem unless you have a solution to offer. "This isn't quite working for me, try again" is insanely unhelpful. Your solution doesn't have to be "the" solution; you're gonna talk it over with your writer or artist, you're going to clearly articulate why something's not working in your eyes, and then you're going to listen to how they respond, negotiate the best fix if theirs is different, politic it out if they don't acknowledge a problem, and be ready to dismiss your concern if they make a good case that they're right and you're wrong, because if you're working with talented folks, that will happen. For years, I had a very good editor with one infamous trait: his bomb sights were off by about five pages. Without fail, every single time he'd call me up to talk about something in a script that bothered him, the problem was never exactly where he thought it was. The first few times we worked together, I'd listen to his criticisms and they wouldn't make much sense to me, but every time we'd talk it out, we'd eventually realize that the problem was with an earlier or later scene. I got used to his rhythms, I'd hear "this scene seems off," I'd think "actually, that scene's fine, but if he's bothered, that definitely means something's wrong somewhere," I'd figure out the appropriate fix, we'd both be happy. But the important point was that even though his sights were off, he was trying to articulate the problem, and that helped me zero in on it. "Eh, I don't know what's not working, take another swing" would not have been nearly as helpful.
Here's Mark Waid's Second Inviolable Rule For Editors, Including Himself: if you want something changed, it had damn well better make the story better, or else shut the hell up. "Wouldn't it be cool if...?" are five words that are almost always more destructive than they are helpful. "Wouldn't it be cool if this whole story were a flashback?" "Wouldn't it be cool if you gave him a robot dog?" "Wouldn't it be cool if you cut away in the middle of this Superman story to show Wonder Woman making a sandwich?" "Wouldn't it be cool if you made this scene more like my favorite scene from Star Wars?" Answer: no. (Sub-answer: yes, all these things, and worse, have been said to me. Okay, not the sandwich, but the actual request was even stupider.) If you're asking for changes without really, seriously understanding how those changes might affect the overall story, then stop talking. Also, if you're in that twenty percent of comics editors who didn't understand what I just said there, then please find another job. I'm not insisting that every script, every line, every drawing, every splash of color is somehow some perfect gem that can't be meddled with; everyone creative in this field needs someone looking over his or her shoulder to make sure they're not fumbling the ball, as we all do sometimes, and creators have to be willing to work collaboratively. But a good editor knows that the only changes worth championing are the ones that make the story better. If you're an editor unable to defend your editing in detail, on those grounds, then you're in the wrong line of work.
Whether they're working on something that's ultimately theirs or ultimately Time-Warner's or Marvel's, no one wants to feel like a typist or an art robot. Let them be creative; that's their job. The editor's job is to get their best work out of them or, if necessary, replace them if they're not meeting the standards of the publisher. The first, last and only question is always: does this make the story better?
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Waid Wednesday #9: The Proposal, Part Two
Continuing the sample proposal from last week....
THE SERIES
ISSUE ONE: We introduce Samantha, Wolf, the concept of the Hunter-Killer squad and the Ultra-Sapiens. We OPEN with the home life of Ellis and introduce him and his kindly parents as people we genuinely like and care about. But when Ellis begins to exhibit weird powers, his parents freak. Not at him; at the realization that this is a warning, that powered Ultra-Sapiens are approaching and Ellis is inadvertently “mirroring” their powers.
Ellis is freaking, too—he has no idea what’s going on or that his parents are anything other than what they’ve always seemed. The parents quickly smuggle Ellis out of the house and order him to run as far and as fast as he can...then, in order to cover his escape, they make a stand against a marauding band of Hunter-Killers, led by Samantha, who hit the house like a tornado.
Turns out Mom and Dad are long-escaped Ultra-Sapiens who have been keeping their background secret from their son—and they won’t go down without a fight. Mom sacrifices herself, Dad goes down in battle, much action, much mayhem—and then it’s complicated by the reveal that Ellis refused to abandon his folks and doubled back to the battleground.
Ellis’ mirroring powers kick in hard, he thinks he’s saving his father—but then Dad turns on him. Better Ellis is dead, he says, than kidnapped and dissected by these monsters. Ellis is forced to kill his father in self-defense, and Samantha and her team scoops Ellis up. Issue one ends with Ellis’ parents dead after having been revealed to Ellis as Not At All What He Thought They Were; Ellis’s home and life utterly obliterated; Samantha taking him into the H-K program; and Wolf on their trail.
ISSUE TWO: More background on the Ultra Sapiens program is revealed in this issue—a little more “origin material” without giving away too much or revealing too many allegiances.
On their way back to headquarters, Ellis begins to manifest a new power. The agents assume he’s trying to escape and they move into attack-ready mode despite his protests, but it’s Samantha who realizes the significance of his power flare-up. Ellis isn’t trying to escape—what this means is that there’s another Ultra-Sapien in proximity! Sam gets a sitrep and realizes the Ultra-Sapien is way high atop their Most Wanted (and Best Hidden) List and that he’s a clear and imminent danger to his surroundings. Sam makes the hard call that there’s no time to ease Ellis into this world or “train” him—even if they’ve got a read on the rogue Ultra, by the time they get Ellis to HQ and double back without him, the trail will be cold. No, they’ve got to bring Ellis into this and hope he lives.
With Wolf still secretly trailing them (staying far enough back not to have his powers replicated by Ellis, a sure tell of his presence), the team finds the rogue Ultra. By issue’s end, Ellis has been separated from Sam and the others and is facing this guy alone—or, rather, with Wolf now reluctantly at his side (Wolf still can’t risk Ellis being captured or killed, not until he knows more about the kid.)
Note also: this issue will detail Samantha’s predicament—that the power in her weapons is actually bio-energy she herself radiates, energy for which the weapons allow safe release.
ISSUE THREE: Ellis and Wolf against the Ultra in a battle that will form the foundation of their future friendship. On the one hand, Ellis is distrustful of Wolf since he still doesn’t quite know what Wolf had to do with his parents’ deaths; on the other hand, through the action of battle, both Ellis and Wolf inadvertently demonstrate to one another how unshakeable their moral codes are, which will be a huge point of commonality between them.
Once Sam and her crew reunite with Ellis (Wolf having vanished again), they take him to Headquarters and we see the operation in action. More secrets of the Hunter-Killer program revealed: first, the headquarters doesn’t technically “exist” geographically—it’s a locale imagined by and carved out of dimensional space by The Architect, one of the Ultras who’s been co-opted by the H-K program. It’s oversimple to say that the HQ exists “in his head”; it’s more that the Architect is a quirky but insanely powerful telekinetic who can link you to a dimension in which nothing exists except what he creates mentally out of thin air. So long as the Architect is on our side, it’s the safest place for the H-K program to house itself since it cannot be accessed or even located by potential enemies. One of the drawbacks of the place is that the look and details of it tend to shift and change whenever the Architect gets a new notion or idea (meaning everyone on-site hates the day each month when his subscription copy of Better Homes & Gardens shows up).
Others introduced are Stalker, who (up until Ellis’s arrival) has been the H-Ks’ primary Ultra Sapiens tracker, and Cloaker, the single most important field agent in any mission because he has the mental power to fool observers into seeing the agents however he wants them to be seen—as Asian tourists, as a visiting swim team, as anything but Threatening Guys With Guns. Cloaker’s weird and a bit slimy—Steve Buscemi-ish—but everyone’s always nicest to him because he has the power to make bystanders “see” you in your underwear.
Ellis—who, remember, is still reeling in shock from everything that went down in issue one—gets the tour but is uneasy. He pretends to go along with Sam and the program for now, but by issue’s end, we realize that he’s keeping to himself some serious reservations and suspicions about this whole operation. He trusts no one except, potentially, Wolf—who has proven to be the only one in Ellis’s world now who is straight up and is exactly who he says he is, something not even Ellis’s parents could have claimed.
ISSUE FOUR: Take the recent “Iraq/Haliburton/oil field contracts” scandal-scenario and replaced “oil fields” with “superhumans.” The U.S. Government has uncovered the existence of a small band of Ultra-Sapiens in a war-torn, third-world country, and a high-level administration official has “arranged” for his corporation to secretly take “possession” of them for the corporation’s own ends. Ellis and Cole must get into the war zone and deal these Ultra-Sapiens out somehow before this happens.
ISSUE FIVE: An Ultra-Sapien who’s a “telemech”—able to read thoughts and transmit them as electrical impulses—is on the loose, and Ellis and Cole are dispatched to deal with him. Once they confront him, they realize he’s not a hardass criminal; he’s a poor bastard whose life was ruined by the Project, and he wants revenge. He’s gathered enough information to blow the Hunter-Killer program wide open and is about to feed it through every fax machine and modem line on Earth in one big burst of information. Do Ellis and Wolf take him down with extreme prejudice for the greater good?
ISSUE SIX: Ellis and Wolf have to shut down a full-scale riot at a prison nicknamed “Area 52”—a virtually unknown Guantanamo Bay-style facility where captured Ultra-Sapiens believed to be “hostile to the U.S.” are held and tortured in utter violation of anything resembling civil rights.
Further adventures will continue in this vein. Every mission will have a hard, character-revelatory moral choice at its center. And as we barrel into the back half of the year, Morningfrost’s relationship with the Hunter-Killers will become more antagonistic, leading to an all-out war between the H-Ks and their leader.
*************
There. A little wordy, maybe, and we changed a lot of the details as I wrote the actual series, but in answer to numerous requests--a sample Proposal.
Next: The Job of an Editor
THE SERIES
ISSUE ONE: We introduce Samantha, Wolf, the concept of the Hunter-Killer squad and the Ultra-Sapiens. We OPEN with the home life of Ellis and introduce him and his kindly parents as people we genuinely like and care about. But when Ellis begins to exhibit weird powers, his parents freak. Not at him; at the realization that this is a warning, that powered Ultra-Sapiens are approaching and Ellis is inadvertently “mirroring” their powers.
Ellis is freaking, too—he has no idea what’s going on or that his parents are anything other than what they’ve always seemed. The parents quickly smuggle Ellis out of the house and order him to run as far and as fast as he can...then, in order to cover his escape, they make a stand against a marauding band of Hunter-Killers, led by Samantha, who hit the house like a tornado.
Turns out Mom and Dad are long-escaped Ultra-Sapiens who have been keeping their background secret from their son—and they won’t go down without a fight. Mom sacrifices herself, Dad goes down in battle, much action, much mayhem—and then it’s complicated by the reveal that Ellis refused to abandon his folks and doubled back to the battleground.
Ellis’ mirroring powers kick in hard, he thinks he’s saving his father—but then Dad turns on him. Better Ellis is dead, he says, than kidnapped and dissected by these monsters. Ellis is forced to kill his father in self-defense, and Samantha and her team scoops Ellis up. Issue one ends with Ellis’ parents dead after having been revealed to Ellis as Not At All What He Thought They Were; Ellis’s home and life utterly obliterated; Samantha taking him into the H-K program; and Wolf on their trail.
ISSUE TWO: More background on the Ultra Sapiens program is revealed in this issue—a little more “origin material” without giving away too much or revealing too many allegiances.
On their way back to headquarters, Ellis begins to manifest a new power. The agents assume he’s trying to escape and they move into attack-ready mode despite his protests, but it’s Samantha who realizes the significance of his power flare-up. Ellis isn’t trying to escape—what this means is that there’s another Ultra-Sapien in proximity! Sam gets a sitrep and realizes the Ultra-Sapien is way high atop their Most Wanted (and Best Hidden) List and that he’s a clear and imminent danger to his surroundings. Sam makes the hard call that there’s no time to ease Ellis into this world or “train” him—even if they’ve got a read on the rogue Ultra, by the time they get Ellis to HQ and double back without him, the trail will be cold. No, they’ve got to bring Ellis into this and hope he lives.
With Wolf still secretly trailing them (staying far enough back not to have his powers replicated by Ellis, a sure tell of his presence), the team finds the rogue Ultra. By issue’s end, Ellis has been separated from Sam and the others and is facing this guy alone—or, rather, with Wolf now reluctantly at his side (Wolf still can’t risk Ellis being captured or killed, not until he knows more about the kid.)
Note also: this issue will detail Samantha’s predicament—that the power in her weapons is actually bio-energy she herself radiates, energy for which the weapons allow safe release.
ISSUE THREE: Ellis and Wolf against the Ultra in a battle that will form the foundation of their future friendship. On the one hand, Ellis is distrustful of Wolf since he still doesn’t quite know what Wolf had to do with his parents’ deaths; on the other hand, through the action of battle, both Ellis and Wolf inadvertently demonstrate to one another how unshakeable their moral codes are, which will be a huge point of commonality between them.
Once Sam and her crew reunite with Ellis (Wolf having vanished again), they take him to Headquarters and we see the operation in action. More secrets of the Hunter-Killer program revealed: first, the headquarters doesn’t technically “exist” geographically—it’s a locale imagined by and carved out of dimensional space by The Architect, one of the Ultras who’s been co-opted by the H-K program. It’s oversimple to say that the HQ exists “in his head”; it’s more that the Architect is a quirky but insanely powerful telekinetic who can link you to a dimension in which nothing exists except what he creates mentally out of thin air. So long as the Architect is on our side, it’s the safest place for the H-K program to house itself since it cannot be accessed or even located by potential enemies. One of the drawbacks of the place is that the look and details of it tend to shift and change whenever the Architect gets a new notion or idea (meaning everyone on-site hates the day each month when his subscription copy of Better Homes & Gardens shows up).
Others introduced are Stalker, who (up until Ellis’s arrival) has been the H-Ks’ primary Ultra Sapiens tracker, and Cloaker, the single most important field agent in any mission because he has the mental power to fool observers into seeing the agents however he wants them to be seen—as Asian tourists, as a visiting swim team, as anything but Threatening Guys With Guns. Cloaker’s weird and a bit slimy—Steve Buscemi-ish—but everyone’s always nicest to him because he has the power to make bystanders “see” you in your underwear.
Ellis—who, remember, is still reeling in shock from everything that went down in issue one—gets the tour but is uneasy. He pretends to go along with Sam and the program for now, but by issue’s end, we realize that he’s keeping to himself some serious reservations and suspicions about this whole operation. He trusts no one except, potentially, Wolf—who has proven to be the only one in Ellis’s world now who is straight up and is exactly who he says he is, something not even Ellis’s parents could have claimed.
ISSUE FOUR: Take the recent “Iraq/Haliburton/oil field contracts” scandal-scenario and replaced “oil fields” with “superhumans.” The U.S. Government has uncovered the existence of a small band of Ultra-Sapiens in a war-torn, third-world country, and a high-level administration official has “arranged” for his corporation to secretly take “possession” of them for the corporation’s own ends. Ellis and Cole must get into the war zone and deal these Ultra-Sapiens out somehow before this happens.
ISSUE FIVE: An Ultra-Sapien who’s a “telemech”—able to read thoughts and transmit them as electrical impulses—is on the loose, and Ellis and Cole are dispatched to deal with him. Once they confront him, they realize he’s not a hardass criminal; he’s a poor bastard whose life was ruined by the Project, and he wants revenge. He’s gathered enough information to blow the Hunter-Killer program wide open and is about to feed it through every fax machine and modem line on Earth in one big burst of information. Do Ellis and Wolf take him down with extreme prejudice for the greater good?
ISSUE SIX: Ellis and Wolf have to shut down a full-scale riot at a prison nicknamed “Area 52”—a virtually unknown Guantanamo Bay-style facility where captured Ultra-Sapiens believed to be “hostile to the U.S.” are held and tortured in utter violation of anything resembling civil rights.
Further adventures will continue in this vein. Every mission will have a hard, character-revelatory moral choice at its center. And as we barrel into the back half of the year, Morningfrost’s relationship with the Hunter-Killers will become more antagonistic, leading to an all-out war between the H-Ks and their leader.
*************
There. A little wordy, maybe, and we changed a lot of the details as I wrote the actual series, but in answer to numerous requests--a sample Proposal.
Next: The Job of an Editor
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Waid Wednesday #8: The Proposal, Part One
The difference between a pitch and the next stage of the development process—a proposal—is story. A proposal must demonstrate that your pitch has “legs” by providing a more specific outline of events, additional background on the characters, and some sample plots.
As with most every document in comics, there is no “right” way to format a proposal, but I’ve found through years of experience that this is what works best for me:
Lead with the high concept, a brief but dynamic one- or two-sentence description of the idea—
—follow that with a little more detail on the bigger picture, clarifying the who, what, where, when, how and why of it all—
—next, give brief bios of the main characters—no more than a short paragraph for each, but enough about them so that whoever’s reading your proposal can have a good handle on them by the time they get to—
—the outline, a more detailed version of “the bigger picture” that walks us gradually through the series an issue or two at a time. Provided it’s interesting to read, feel free to devote about a page to synopsizing issue one, a half-page or so to issue two, and gradually less detail for the next handful of installments. At this point, you’re still in the proposal stage, so you’re walking the fine line between showing you have confidence in your ideas and revealing that you’re so in love with them that you have every page of your opus worked out nine years in advance, which frightens every editor ever. If, as you’re writing your proposal, you’re not sure of the difference, imagine buying a car. Imagine buying it from a confident, knowledgeable salesman who demonstrates its most attractive features and then lets the merchandise do the talking. Then imagine buying it from a salesman who won’t let you leave the showroom until he explains in excruciating detail exactly how the high-performance fuel injection system interfaces with the 1.6L 4cyl VTEC-E engine and insists on giving you the 82-year history of the factory that tooled the camshaft. My point is, don’t overwhelm.
Then end your document with a fitting summary/conclusion.
To give you a more concrete example of what works, here’s my proposal—broken up over two posts—for a series I did a few years ago for Top Cow called HUNTER-KILLER (and which I’m relaunching this summer as a HUNTER-KILLER VS. CYBERFORCE mini with artist Kenneth Rocafort). Yes, technically, at this point, I wasn’t “selling” anything—since the very basic concept came from Marc Silvestri, the publisher (and artist), the book was already green-lit, and I probably didn’t have to go into this much detail—but simply for my own peace of mind, I chose not to break format. Having to write a formal proposal would, I knew, push me to think through every aspect of the series.
*******
HUNTER-KILLER PROPOSAL
First draft/September, 2004
THE HIGH CONCEPT: Genetically engineered beings hunt rogue agents from their own secret program, desperately scrambling to keep these “Ultra-Sapiens” from becoming Weapons of Mass Destruction in the hands of the world’s superpowers, power brokers, and madmen.
THE BIGGER PICTURE: What ordinary citizens don’t know is that the Cold War wasn’t fought over nuclear détente. It was clandestinely fought over the Ultra-Sapiens race, a eugenically created strain of covert super-beings with various powers and abilities—some fairly mundane, some earth-shattering. In 1962, when the public thought ballistic missiles had been planted in the jungles of Cuba, the small communist country had in fact become the assembly point for an army of Russian Ultra-Sapiens. JFK was not weighing the consequences of nuclear retaliation as history has taught us, but of super-human retaliation. So fearful were the world's super powers the existence of their Frankenstein's monsters would become known, even the perceived threat of nuclear annihilation was preferable to the truth.
During the height of the Cold War, Russian and U.S. diplomats were not only tracking nuclear missiles but Ultra-Sapiens. Like some perverse real-life version of Pokemon, these altered humans were being counted and measured by their power, and secret treaties were struck in order to achieve a constant state of détente. If America had one who, for instance, could wipe out a small town with the poison in his sweat glands, Red China was allowed two that could become invisible.
In between the end of the Cold War and now, however, the vast majority of Ultra-Sapiens banded together and revolted against years of being treated as military property. After wiping out the agencies which tracked them and most records of their own existence, some retired, some went into hiding, and some put themselves on the open market.
TODAY
Now a new organization, the HUNTER-KILLERS, has been gathered to once and for all find—and decide the fates of—these rogue super-beings. Some are harmless, some are evil, but all of them must be accounted for. Moreover, those who are deemed to be a threat to the public safety, regardless of their moral leanings, must be “accounted for” with extreme prejudice.
A few Ultra-Sapiens have been assimilated into the Hunter-Killer organization, using their special abilities to help enforce its agenda and/or cloak its presence. Most field missions, in fact, are led by a female U-S named Samantha Argent (more on whom below).
The Ultra-Sapiens are each powered by and marked with a latticework of bioengineering visible just under the skin—“tattoos” in shapes and locations on the body that suggest their powers (near the eyes for vision powers, on the skull for mental powers, etc.).
THE CHARACTERS:
ELLIS (age 22) is our POV character, a second-generation Ultra-Sapien who has only recently learned of his power, which was kept from him by his parents until their death. Ellis can mirror/mimic the powers of other nearby Ultra-Sapiens, making him a perfect “dowsing rod” for the Hunter-Killers as they track rogues—the closer Ellis gets to them, the stronger the mirroring effect.
A man of action, Ellis is also very contemplative, an armchair philosopher who’s always looking for a greater meaning in the agency’s overall agenda. Ellis deals with regularly making hard life-and-death decisions by immersing himself in the writings of Empericus, Baier and other moralists and ethicists in his off-hours.
And when we say life-and-death decisions, we mean it. Every adventure should hinge on a completely unpredictable climax. Even the missions that seem like milk runs end up throwing some sort of surprising “can’t/must” dilemma in our boys’ laps, and we Ellis’s decisions will always be surprising. The harder and more unpredictable the choices he’s faced with, the richer and more interesting a hero he’ll be.
WOLF (age indeterminate—mid-thirties, at least) is the buddy in this buddy book, an Ultra-Sapien who sometimes works for Ellis’s agency and sometimes works solo. As his name suggests, he’s our tough guy, a super-assassin with great strength, speed, and reflexes. His is the most extensive “tattoo”—a full-body overlay that allows him to fade into near-invisibility.
SAMANTHA ARGENT (mid-twenties) is the coordinator of the Hunter-Killer project and often a field agent vying with headstrong Ellis for control of the missions. Samantha, also an Ultra-Sapien, has a tattoo and/or special clothing that allows her to manipulate the electromagnetic energy coursing though her veins and coalesce that energy into ammunition for her unique armaments. Samantha, in contrast to most action-heroines, actually has a warmth and a sense of humor to her; she’s tough and in charge, but she’s by no definition a bitch. She’s enough at ease with herself to successfully maintain a non-emotional but furniture-breaking physical relationship with one of the other members of the cast.
MORNINGFROST is the prime villain of our series. The head of the Hunter-Killer project, those under his command have no idea he’s manipulating them based on his own (accurate) visions of the future. Eventually, they will find out about his machinations and turn on him.
******
Breaking this long doc up into two posts; second half to follow next week.
As with most every document in comics, there is no “right” way to format a proposal, but I’ve found through years of experience that this is what works best for me:
Lead with the high concept, a brief but dynamic one- or two-sentence description of the idea—
—follow that with a little more detail on the bigger picture, clarifying the who, what, where, when, how and why of it all—
—next, give brief bios of the main characters—no more than a short paragraph for each, but enough about them so that whoever’s reading your proposal can have a good handle on them by the time they get to—
—the outline, a more detailed version of “the bigger picture” that walks us gradually through the series an issue or two at a time. Provided it’s interesting to read, feel free to devote about a page to synopsizing issue one, a half-page or so to issue two, and gradually less detail for the next handful of installments. At this point, you’re still in the proposal stage, so you’re walking the fine line between showing you have confidence in your ideas and revealing that you’re so in love with them that you have every page of your opus worked out nine years in advance, which frightens every editor ever. If, as you’re writing your proposal, you’re not sure of the difference, imagine buying a car. Imagine buying it from a confident, knowledgeable salesman who demonstrates its most attractive features and then lets the merchandise do the talking. Then imagine buying it from a salesman who won’t let you leave the showroom until he explains in excruciating detail exactly how the high-performance fuel injection system interfaces with the 1.6L 4cyl VTEC-E engine and insists on giving you the 82-year history of the factory that tooled the camshaft. My point is, don’t overwhelm.
Then end your document with a fitting summary/conclusion.
To give you a more concrete example of what works, here’s my proposal—broken up over two posts—for a series I did a few years ago for Top Cow called HUNTER-KILLER (and which I’m relaunching this summer as a HUNTER-KILLER VS. CYBERFORCE mini with artist Kenneth Rocafort). Yes, technically, at this point, I wasn’t “selling” anything—since the very basic concept came from Marc Silvestri, the publisher (and artist), the book was already green-lit, and I probably didn’t have to go into this much detail—but simply for my own peace of mind, I chose not to break format. Having to write a formal proposal would, I knew, push me to think through every aspect of the series.
*******
HUNTER-KILLER PROPOSAL
First draft/September, 2004
THE HIGH CONCEPT: Genetically engineered beings hunt rogue agents from their own secret program, desperately scrambling to keep these “Ultra-Sapiens” from becoming Weapons of Mass Destruction in the hands of the world’s superpowers, power brokers, and madmen.
THE BIGGER PICTURE: What ordinary citizens don’t know is that the Cold War wasn’t fought over nuclear détente. It was clandestinely fought over the Ultra-Sapiens race, a eugenically created strain of covert super-beings with various powers and abilities—some fairly mundane, some earth-shattering. In 1962, when the public thought ballistic missiles had been planted in the jungles of Cuba, the small communist country had in fact become the assembly point for an army of Russian Ultra-Sapiens. JFK was not weighing the consequences of nuclear retaliation as history has taught us, but of super-human retaliation. So fearful were the world's super powers the existence of their Frankenstein's monsters would become known, even the perceived threat of nuclear annihilation was preferable to the truth.
During the height of the Cold War, Russian and U.S. diplomats were not only tracking nuclear missiles but Ultra-Sapiens. Like some perverse real-life version of Pokemon, these altered humans were being counted and measured by their power, and secret treaties were struck in order to achieve a constant state of détente. If America had one who, for instance, could wipe out a small town with the poison in his sweat glands, Red China was allowed two that could become invisible.
In between the end of the Cold War and now, however, the vast majority of Ultra-Sapiens banded together and revolted against years of being treated as military property. After wiping out the agencies which tracked them and most records of their own existence, some retired, some went into hiding, and some put themselves on the open market.
TODAY
Now a new organization, the HUNTER-KILLERS, has been gathered to once and for all find—and decide the fates of—these rogue super-beings. Some are harmless, some are evil, but all of them must be accounted for. Moreover, those who are deemed to be a threat to the public safety, regardless of their moral leanings, must be “accounted for” with extreme prejudice.
A few Ultra-Sapiens have been assimilated into the Hunter-Killer organization, using their special abilities to help enforce its agenda and/or cloak its presence. Most field missions, in fact, are led by a female U-S named Samantha Argent (more on whom below).
The Ultra-Sapiens are each powered by and marked with a latticework of bioengineering visible just under the skin—“tattoos” in shapes and locations on the body that suggest their powers (near the eyes for vision powers, on the skull for mental powers, etc.).
THE CHARACTERS:
ELLIS (age 22) is our POV character, a second-generation Ultra-Sapien who has only recently learned of his power, which was kept from him by his parents until their death. Ellis can mirror/mimic the powers of other nearby Ultra-Sapiens, making him a perfect “dowsing rod” for the Hunter-Killers as they track rogues—the closer Ellis gets to them, the stronger the mirroring effect.
A man of action, Ellis is also very contemplative, an armchair philosopher who’s always looking for a greater meaning in the agency’s overall agenda. Ellis deals with regularly making hard life-and-death decisions by immersing himself in the writings of Empericus, Baier and other moralists and ethicists in his off-hours.
And when we say life-and-death decisions, we mean it. Every adventure should hinge on a completely unpredictable climax. Even the missions that seem like milk runs end up throwing some sort of surprising “can’t/must” dilemma in our boys’ laps, and we Ellis’s decisions will always be surprising. The harder and more unpredictable the choices he’s faced with, the richer and more interesting a hero he’ll be.
WOLF (age indeterminate—mid-thirties, at least) is the buddy in this buddy book, an Ultra-Sapien who sometimes works for Ellis’s agency and sometimes works solo. As his name suggests, he’s our tough guy, a super-assassin with great strength, speed, and reflexes. His is the most extensive “tattoo”—a full-body overlay that allows him to fade into near-invisibility.
SAMANTHA ARGENT (mid-twenties) is the coordinator of the Hunter-Killer project and often a field agent vying with headstrong Ellis for control of the missions. Samantha, also an Ultra-Sapien, has a tattoo and/or special clothing that allows her to manipulate the electromagnetic energy coursing though her veins and coalesce that energy into ammunition for her unique armaments. Samantha, in contrast to most action-heroines, actually has a warmth and a sense of humor to her; she’s tough and in charge, but she’s by no definition a bitch. She’s enough at ease with herself to successfully maintain a non-emotional but furniture-breaking physical relationship with one of the other members of the cast.
MORNINGFROST is the prime villain of our series. The head of the Hunter-Killer project, those under his command have no idea he’s manipulating them based on his own (accurate) visions of the future. Eventually, they will find out about his machinations and turn on him.
******
Breaking this long doc up into two posts; second half to follow next week.
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