Musings of a Graphic Novelist

Today I have a guest post for you. 

I’ve been reading, and thoroughly enjoying, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series of graphic novels recently, reading them on my Samsung tablet. A while back, I tried reading the print editions, but couldn’t read the small text. Reading on the tablet lets me either zoom in on a page or switch to panel-by-panel mode in which I view the panels sequentially in a magnified view. From a reader’s perspective, the experience is quite different from reading a book; it’s rather like watching a movie in slow motion. 

This led me to wonder what writing a comic or graphic novel is like from the writer’s perspective. It just happens that I know an author who has written several graphic novels: Derek McCulloch, author of Stagger Lee, T. Runt, Gone to Amerikay, and Displaced Persons. So I asked him: “When you are writing a graphic novel, do you see it textually like a book or script, or do you see it cinematically, like a movie?” 

Derek responded to me on Facebook with a long and very interesting answer that was far more detailed than I expected. He’s kindly let me republish it here. I hope you’ll find it as interesting as I did. And once you’ve finished it, go buy his books. You won’t regret it. 

Derek said:

So, yes this is something I’ve thought about a time or two. And I’ll add another element to the question…somebody once said to me that writing a comics script is really more like writing a stage play than a screenplay. Having done all three with varying claims to professionalism, I don’t think that’s true. But I’ll get to that later.

My unhelpful overall answer to the original question is “Neither and both.” I’ll say I don’t see ANYTHING textually when I’m writing. More than anything else, I HEAR it. Dialogue, prose, stage directions, lyrics, panel descriptions, the whole megillah—this crap I’m writing right now—all of it mediates through my internal narrator/character voices, which determines, well, everything about the words I set down. It’s where the rhythm comes from, and it’s how I arrive at my eccentric punctuation choices. And when I’m writing anything narrative—comics, plays, short stories, screenplays, sometimes but not always songs—what I’m thinking about is who the people are I’m writing about, and where they are emotionally in the moment at hand.

Mechanically, all three kinds of scripts (comics, screenplays, and stage plays) have a lot in common. They consist of dialogue and stage directions and that’s it—and only the dialogue makes it onto the page as written (if you’re lucky). And assuming you’re, like me, a writer only—not an artist or a director or an actor or whatever—the magic is in watching your collaborators take those non-dialogue parts of the script, filter them through their own understanding and experience and creative process—and make them live and breathe as something that isn’t at all what you had in mind. If you’re really really lucky—and I often have been in this regard—it retains your truth but is richer and stronger and more powerful for having added someone else’s.

So, yes, mechanically they’re similar. But a writer has to understand that each of these three kinds of scripts bears a different relationship to the final product for which it stands as a blueprint. All three media (comics, stage, screen) combine words and images to tell a story. But the “image” part of the experience is vastly different between the three, the key differences falling under the categories of “point of view” and “motion.”

In a play, obviously, the point of view (for each audience member) is fixed. A stage is a flexible tool and can be moved and transformed in a vast variety of ways…and there are just as many ways to pull the theatrical experience out of the stage, into the audience, behind the audience, up in the rafters, whatever. I once saw a play in San Francisco where the actors were in rooms in a hotel and the audience was across the street on steps, watching them through binoculars and listening to them with headsets. But the essential default is that you’re in a seat in a theatre, and however far from the stage you are, from whatever angle you’re viewing it, that’s what you see. You have a single frame, the action moves within it, and though your eye can be directed by lighting and blocking and various elements of stagecraft, the creators’ control over what you do and don’t see in a given moment is comparatively limited.

In film (or television), control is consistently exerted over what you see and how you see it. Your scope of vision, your perspective and point of view, the length of time you dwell on any one sight, all of it is determined according to the choices of the director and the cinematographer and the film editor. Film is rife with visual storytelling tools unavailable on stage; zooms and pans and juxtapositions and cuts and transitions of different kinds propel and focus the story in ways unique to that medium.

The visual language of comics draws from both these traditions. The individual panel is a fixed tableau, just like a stage set…but it’s only a single element on a page designed using a visual grammar that in many ways draws on that developed for film. Every artist in the history of comic books (though not necessarily the history of comics) was influenced by film, but it’s Will Eisner who is often considered the one who brought “cinematic storytelling” to the medium. That’s wrong, I think…it’s more accurate to say that Eisner revolutionized the way cinematic storytelling is used in comics. It’s kind of interesting…to me, anyway…that Will Eisner started The Spirit at roughly the same time Orson Welles made Citizen Kane. Both took visual tools and techniques that had long existed and set about joyously expanding the limits of what could be made from them. What they could be made to do.

I think what makes film and comics sibling media, though…and what makes them more like one another than either is like the stage…is that both depend, in some sense, on the illusion of persistence of vision. In film, the illusion is invisible, the 24 frames per second viewed as separate images only in the editing room or the film school class. In comics, the illusion’s right there on the page for all to see…there are only three or four or five or six (or if I’m writing it, seven or eight or nine or ten) panels on a page, and you can see each one individually at a glance…but once immersed in reading the story, the reader’s mind will join those panels together into a continuous sequence.

It’s that tension between the macro design of the page and the micro design of the individual panel that is the unique storytelling tool of the comics medium, and the ways an artist can use that tension to implicate a reader in the telling of a story are endless. Film has jump cuts and smash cuts and so on…comics the heady gap between panels—and the even headier gap that comes with the turn of a page—which can moments or centuries, inches or light years. And there’s a duality that can be done in comics and only comics—a page designed by a master of the form can be viewed in its totality as a single organic entity, and in its component pieces (the panels) as a linked series of separate images.

Oh, I remembered another thing I meant to talk about, which is how writers for all three media absolutely must have actors who can deliver performances that sell the character and the story and the words. In stage and screen, obviously, the actors are the actors. In comics, the actors are the artist, the director, the cinematographer, the film editor, the lighting crew, hair, makeup, costumes, everything but craft service. Really, you should send them food. But for me, for the kind of thing I write and the concerns I have about telling my story, what I worry about most is the actors. There are comics artists who have entire careers without ever learning anything approaching subtlety in the art of acting on paper…whose single and consistent mode is to play not just to the balcony, but to the balcony of a whole other theatre on the other side of town…everything BEYOND BIG, whether called for by the scene or not. What I want is an artist who can deliver the small moments as clearly and as truthfully as the big ones…who can communicate visually that a character is, say, kind of disappointed in something they’ve just heard but doesn’t want to rock the boat by letting on.

And again, I’ve been pretty lucky in this regard. Colleen* in particular can tell stories with body language and a look in the eyes…and can also deliver on the more customary operatic scale. That’s pretty rare, in my experience. *(Collen Doran was the artist for Gone to Amerikay)

And now I’ve wandered so far afield chasing a train of thought that I’ve forgotten the original question. But maybe some people with greater knowledge and different perspectives will have something to say.

Note: If you're interested in a more thorough (and infinitely more informed) look at the nuts and bolts of how the medium works, get yourself a copy of Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. It uses comics to explain comics in a very lucid way.

Derek's portion of this post is copyright © Derek McCulloch 2020.