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Writing for Comics
Sep. 18th, 2003 09:37 pmSKETCH issued 20 has an interesting interview with J. Michael Straczynski. I'm not going to discuss it here, but I do want to talk, however briefly, about how JMS, specifically how Babylon 5, has affected my writing for my strip.
My strip couldn't be farther from the Babylon 5 universe in terms of genre. The seed of my strip was "what if cats went to grad school?" A fun enough premise, possibly good for a gag strip, but I wasn't interested in doing a gag strip. My partner and I played with the idea, layering "what if?" and "what about?" until I noticed that we were building a world. And of course, since she and I are both foodies, most of our questions were about food consumption and production. Now I was onto something. I had a metastory which I could use as a backdrop for some life in grad school gags, while telling a larger story. A narrative had emerged which, however unlikely and surreal it may be, I hope to be able to use as a fable. And the more I contemplate the strip's future, the more this narrative figures into it.
But that narrative is the backdrop. In the foreground, it's important to gain the reader's interest within a strip or two, and so I have been using strips with a final-panel payoff to build storylines comprising two or three strips, through which metastory subtly suggests itself. So far, only one of my storylines actually puts it in the foreground. The way I figure it, if an individual strip does not stand alone, then it is as inaccessible to the new reader as Mark Trail or Judge Parker, and they have no motivation to explore the rest of my world.
This is a strategy that JMS employed in Babylon 5. Each episode told its own story. Conflicts crucial to that story were resolved within it. However, other, almost inscrutable events would launch conflicts that would span all 5 years. This was an ingenious approach to the problem of telling a Big Story in a medium as flighty and episodic television. And it works in any sequential episodic medium, including the comic strip.
My strip couldn't be farther from the Babylon 5 universe in terms of genre. The seed of my strip was "what if cats went to grad school?" A fun enough premise, possibly good for a gag strip, but I wasn't interested in doing a gag strip. My partner and I played with the idea, layering "what if?" and "what about?" until I noticed that we were building a world. And of course, since she and I are both foodies, most of our questions were about food consumption and production. Now I was onto something. I had a metastory which I could use as a backdrop for some life in grad school gags, while telling a larger story. A narrative had emerged which, however unlikely and surreal it may be, I hope to be able to use as a fable. And the more I contemplate the strip's future, the more this narrative figures into it.
But that narrative is the backdrop. In the foreground, it's important to gain the reader's interest within a strip or two, and so I have been using strips with a final-panel payoff to build storylines comprising two or three strips, through which metastory subtly suggests itself. So far, only one of my storylines actually puts it in the foreground. The way I figure it, if an individual strip does not stand alone, then it is as inaccessible to the new reader as Mark Trail or Judge Parker, and they have no motivation to explore the rest of my world.
This is a strategy that JMS employed in Babylon 5. Each episode told its own story. Conflicts crucial to that story were resolved within it. However, other, almost inscrutable events would launch conflicts that would span all 5 years. This was an ingenious approach to the problem of telling a Big Story in a medium as flighty and episodic television. And it works in any sequential episodic medium, including the comic strip.
