Comic vs. The Written. Anyone do both?

Warofwinds · Post by **Warofwinds** » Fri Oct 29, 2004 8:11 pm

I'm just curious because my comic began as a story. I began to illustrate it much later, but what I find many of my favorite comic artists doing is writing the story AFTER drawing it. Thoughts?

-Kez

Joel Fagin · Post by **Joel Fagin** » Fri Oct 29, 2004 8:28 pm

I write fantasy and sci-fi and I'm told I'm quite good but my comic was only ever meant to be a silly gag thing, there only to get me to practice my drawing. That's wrapping up now and if I do another comic, it will be based on a series of short-stories/novellas I wrote which added up to be a reasonable novel. In fact, I'd rather get them published but as what you sell to publishers is first-publication rights and since I've already "published" them on the internet, that's not possible.

- Joel Fagin

Stucifer_the_maligned · Fri Oct 29, 2004 9:11 pm

hey joel, where is your comic? there isn't a convenient linkie do-dad in your signature.

Collapse · Post by **Collapse** » Fri Oct 29, 2004 9:46 pm

I also want to see Joel's comic.

I write and comic. I started writing, then when I discovered a method by which I could create comic-y artwork, I started comicking. I decided to make my comic a prequel to something I'm writing. You can get to Collapse below, and here's the book-in-progress, Anarchy.

Joel Fagin · Post by **Joel Fagin** » Fri Oct 29, 2004 9:55 pm

Dearie me. I do seem to be doing this a lot. I should put it in a text file so I can copy and paste it quickly.

My alledged "comic" is a pure gag comic based on a series of computer games I expect very few here would have played and even less would be suitably fanatical about to actually remember enough to know what's going on. I have the entire possible fanbase already.

Really, you're better off waiting for my next one. However... *sigh*

Actually, I should apologise. Due to the infinite canvass nature of the most recent comic (and the fact I was unforgivably lazy) most of the navigation links - to archives, about page and so on - are currently not there.

- Joel Fagin

Glambourine · Post by **Glambourine** » Fri Oct 29, 2004 9:55 pm

I do both. But I never think about turning anything I've written into a comic; the storytelling styles are too different and I'm always too attached to the kind of tension you get out of a good story, that continuous sentence-by-sentence rise. With episodic comics the narrative needs breaking every few panels, which requires entirely different kinds of situations and an entirely different approach. It's like a series of tiny fragments of life rather than a continuous unfolding, like you're getting all the pieces of the puzzle one by one.

Usually when I want to write a comic I just think of some dumb joke or weird, enigmatic character that can be spun out for a few distinct situations, and then I figure out how to draw it in an "interesting" way. I still think of comicery as essentially storytelling, though, and drawing the comic first and then plotting (or just drawing panel by panel) seems so weird and heretical to me. That may generally be the case with people who both write and do comics: thinking of the work as writing cool, fascinating things, rather than as drawing cool, fascinating things.

How did you decide to turn your story into a comic?

Rolenthegreat · Post by **Rolenthegreat** » Fri Oct 29, 2004 10:34 pm

My comic started as a short story too. I drew a lot of comics and wanted to try a 24-hour comic and it kinda morphed itself into the short story I was working on.
I'm also one of those people who like to draw their characters all the time, so it was inevitable that I would start a comic with them.
I don't write as many short stories and more, a little poetry and maybe a cheesy fan fic when I get really bored.

Joel Fagin · Post by **Joel Fagin** » Fri Oct 29, 2004 10:59 pm

glambourine wrote:How did you decide to turn your story into a comic?

Well, I already said some of it. I can't publish it any other way. It's also the right target demographic for a webcomic (teenagers to mid-twenties group) while still being original* and avoiding all the webcomic cliches.** With my current comic unable to help me improve my drawing any further due to its limited scope, a new one was required. Finally, the story has been tested in prose format and was liked.

- Joel Fagin

* Compared to most mainstream webcomics.

** While liberally dipping into various cliches from other genres.

Underbelly · Post by **Underbelly** » Fri Oct 29, 2004 11:10 pm

Terry Moore of Starngers in Paradise does both. There are whole pages of SiP that are written in prose form. It's an interesting idea, but in my opinion it's handled poorly; it's kinda clunky and awkward when it switches.

I sometimes find myself writing prose about the characters from my comics, simply because there are things that can be expressed through the clever turn of a phrase that just doesn't work in a comic. I may add them later, but I don't really plan on making them a necessary part of the story.

I guess the halfway point would be the classic internal monologue favored by super-hero comics, but I tend to think of that as an easy cheat in writing; ie, anything you could plainly say in a thought bubble could be more realistically conveyed through character development and good facial expressions.

Collapse · Post by **Collapse** » Fri Oct 29, 2004 11:15 pm

I use the internal monologue thing in my comic, but I've quickly discovered I don't usually need it, because the main character's thoughts and feelings show up in his words and actions.

Alaina · Post by **Alaina** » Fri Oct 29, 2004 11:23 pm

I did art, then started writing, then found out I really sucked, so I went into comics, thinking it would get me out of it. WRITING STILL MATTERS THOUGH

Dalis · Post by **Dalis** » Fri Oct 29, 2004 11:27 pm

My story started as several novels that I ended up losing due to a computer virus that killed the system... 400+pages all down the drain...

In this case, story first... then the illustration.

Joel Fagin · Post by **Joel Fagin** » Fri Oct 29, 2004 11:30 pm

Internal monologue is just a tool. It can certainly be mis- or over-used but it's also sometimes required. I can't think of another way of doing this (which is a sample comic from my tutorials). Apart from the gentle ribbing of comics that start off with "My name is...", this is self-talk, the character trying to convince herself of something, and it's entirely in her mind. After all, if it was working, it would not show on her face at all. That's the point of it.

- Joel Fagin

Ruxen · Post by **Ruxen** » Fri Oct 29, 2004 11:33 pm

First I wrote, and people kept telling me that my writing made no sense and that it was really bad. So then I started drawing and that's about the same time people started telling me I stunk at that and that my artwork was vapid and trivial. So I combined the two to form one giant collective of stink that I now use to defeat evil during night.

Collapse · Post by **Collapse** » Fri Oct 29, 2004 11:34 pm

You could do it through dialogue (answering routine questions with a security person), but that works better.

Paul.Power · Post by **Paul.Power** » Sat Oct 30, 2004 12:20 am

I did a lot of writing while younger, but most of the stuff I did came out either too short or it didn't come out how I wanted it (I tried to make it funny and it came out deadly serious). I used to be very poor at drawing (now I'm just poor, with occasional patches of okay), so writing, along with the odd mess about with drama and music, was the only real creative medium I could work with. I've always loved books.

So yes, I was definitely into writing before drawing.

SuperSnob · Post by **SuperSnob** » Sat Oct 30, 2004 8:04 am

People always told me that I was good at writing dialogue, but nothing else. So, I figured maybe comics would be okay for me to do, since they are nothing BUT dialogue. Hahaha...not exactly. Now I can come up with the beginnings of lots of stories, but with no ends in mind and no idea of how to get there...

McDuffies · Post by **McDuffies** » Sat Oct 30, 2004 9:50 am

Last prose I wrote was in high school, for language classes. I think I suck in writing, bad style, somehow mechanical and rarely descriptive. I'd probably be able to write only pulp detective novels. On the other hand, people say I'm much better in writing critiques.

Glambourine · Post by **Glambourine** » Sat Oct 30, 2004 2:19 pm

Whether internal monlogue works or not may just come down to taste. I don't mind reading comics with parallel internal monologues to the action, though the pitfalls are the same as with any first-person story: your view is necessarily skewed to whatever internal narrator you pick.

When I think of doing comics I think of them as being essentially like photos, or like a series of observations of people in some public place--you're sitting somewhere, behind the frame, watching ridiculous events unfold. And so I try to write my comics so that they engage that same kind of thought process--everything in the comic that isn't actually spoken dialogue should be implicit in the body language and the gestures, things that you'd wonder about if you were actually there observing.

The problem with this approach, beyond the fact that it makes it harder to get information across, is that my main character is the kind of bastard who likes to soliloquize and be really tormented about everything he does. Usually I can get away with him just delivering soliloquies to whoever's around, allowing me to keep that "observed" feel and adding some bonus humor due to the rampant social inappropriateness of soliloquies. Recently, though, I did a comic where publically berating oneself wasn't an option, and I had to resort to internal monologue. For days after this I lay in bed with the shutters drawn, flask of wine clutched in cold and pallid hand, liver seething at this aesthetic betrayal. But internal monologue is hella cool; no doubt

(Cool idea, possibly: a comic with multiple internal monologues running all at once. There would be twenty or thirty boxes running all over the page in different colors or different fonts or whatever, interfering with one another, commenting on one another--oh man, it'd be cool. Now that I'm thinking about it, I remember that Jason Lutes actually does this in "Berlin", which should really be read by everyone: all sorts of Weimar Republic train passengers speculating about sex and death and BLOOD SAUSAGE)

Warofwinds · Post by **Warofwinds** » Sat Oct 30, 2004 7:25 pm

It's rare for me to do much with internal monologue other than a sentence or two every couple of comics, but I can see how they could really lead to an interesting story line. Mweh heh heh.

The only reason I started to illustrate my story was to get people to read it. People still read it, but no one cares to look at the perty pictures. Eh, so long as I have fun

.

Oh, Joel, are you sure you can't publish stuff after it's been up on the internet? I've had to 2 friends publish their written works after they were already up, and know of a comic artist who has also. I think as long as it's not professionally published, someone else will just so someone gets money (usually not that artist

).