by Melinda M. Snodgrass
So, I wrote a funny book… scratch that. A comic book. Nope, I wrote a graphic novel. Sounds so much more impressive. Bantam, our new publisher for Wild Cards, commissioned three graphic novels and I was honored to have my proposal be selected as one of the three.
I had written a very short piece about a couple of Mormons assigned to Jokertown for their mission, but it was only a few panels. Now I was looking at something that was going to be one hundred and twenty or one hundred and thirty pages.
My first thought was “piece of cake, that’s not a lot of pages,” but lawyer training required I do my research, so I purchased Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art but Scott McCloud, and Panel One: Comic book Scripts by Top Writers edited by Nat Gertler.
I was also spending a lot of time at my place in Los Angeles where I had the good fortune to know Len Wein, the creator of Wolverine and Swamp Thing and Storm and Nightcrawler, and… and… well, you get the idea. Upshot, I had a master of the form as a friend and advisor and lots of comics and graphic novels to read.
They were not something I’d been allowed to read as a child. My dad taught me to read before I started school, but he insisted I read “real books” and not “that junk.” The only exception were the Classics Illustrated comics where they would adapt literary classics – The Iliad, Moby Dick, Les Misérables, The Three Musketeers and so forth.
Since dialog is my thing, and brevity part of my skillset I thought this was not going to be all that challenging. When I write, it’s as if I’m unspooling a movie in my head. I watch the scenes play out and try to move what I am seeing that into evocative and moving prose… to greater or lesser success.
I had wanted to write a story about my nat (normal human) cop character learning the hard truth about the father he had never known but had been raised to idolize. I like to play with characters who have no superpowers, who must rely on cunning and brains to hold their own in a world where there are aces (people with metahuman abilities).
I had already written the outline that won me the assignment, now it was time to start writing. I did notice that many of the modern novels have an omniscient narrator so I was trying to figure out who that should be. I went to Len, told him about the main character, the premise of the story, and told him I was struggling with whom the narrator should be. Len gave me this Cheshire Cat smile and like the Jedi master he was he said, “You know who it is, trust yourself and tell me.” Meekly I said, “Franny’s dead father?” Len gave me a metaphorical pat on the head, and said, “Good job.” (I mentally added the young padawanto that).
There were no more excuses I could muster to delay, so I sat down to write. From reading all these different comic scripts it became clear that, unlike Hollywood where Final Draft is the industry standard, a comic writer could pretty much create their own format. I created one that was my own plus a bit of Neil Gaiman whisked into the mix.
And gods, it was fun. No budgetary restrictions as in film, but I also got to make like a director and lay out these scenes. One of the problems first time comic writers run into is trying to have movement of characters flowing between panels, but of course you can’t do that. I didn’t find it that difficult. I just pretended I was sitting in an editing room and looking at a film frame by frame.
I quickly discovered that the illusion of how this was a piece of cake because it was onlyone-hundred and thirty pages was just that, an illusion. When each page sometimes consisted of multiple panels this was a far more time consuming and daunting task. I found myself becoming so excited when I knew I was coming up on a splash page where it was all just one big panel.
Screenwriting did help me with the dialogue. I often tell students when I lecture that if a particular piece of dialogue is over four or five sentences long it better be the Gettysburg Address or the St. Crispin Day speech from Henry V. This is even more the case in comics because you are limited by panel size and keeping things comprehensible.
So, in addition to having to be a terse, get to-the-point screenwriter and a director creating evocative visuals I had to treat my artists as if they were my actors, telling them what these characters were feeling so they could create images that would help carry the words. In this I was assisted by two amazing artists, Michael Komarck and Elizabeth Leggett.
When the first images started to come in, I had a feeling akin to the one I felt the first time I heard actors deliver my dialogue on a soundstage. Mere words had been given life, breathed into them depth and emotion that mere alphabetic symbols couldn’t match. It was a real high.
I’ve always loved being in a Hollywood writer’s room. A good writer’s room is filled with comradery and laughter and collaboration that is hard to reproduce when you are a lonely novelist working alone in your office. Doing my graphic novel and getting to work with the artists gave me that same feeling, and I loved it.
I’m rather hoping that once Sins of the Father is released, I will have the opportunity to write more comics.
And Len, thank you for being so patient and wise with a newbie to the field. I miss you, my friend. I wish I could give you a copy of the book when it comes out.