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Post by nolan on Jun 26, 2006 22:27:27 GMT -5
Guys,
I'm going to write an essay to try and get people to consider writing/drawing comics. Its going to go up on MySpace and DA and sites like that so I have something I can link people to or something they can find.
What do you think I should put in it?
I'm going to have sections for playwrights, novelists, screenwriters, etc.
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Post by jayvee on Jun 26, 2006 22:56:51 GMT -5
You might mention the modern market's taste for all things not superhero.
It's never been a better time to be creatively different.
I mean... MY INNER BIMBO? Success!
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Post by davidaccampo on Jun 29, 2006 17:11:38 GMT -5
Two of my favorite reasons:
It's got the ability to merge some fo the best elements of literature and of film -- Wild, spectacular action and poetic prose can clash on a page. For anyone who loves, say, Dave Eggers AND The Matrix...only a comic could successfully marry the two (that's just a crazy example thrown out there -- you can come up with something better, I'm sure).
Comics are still fairly on the fringe of culture. The benefit of this? True creativity. True experimentation. Only comics could blend genres as crazily as they have in recent years. Zombie Western with ninjas? You'll never see it in a movie...but in comics...it could be in the next Previews.
Those are some of my favorite reasons, anyway.
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Post by nolan on Jul 1, 2006 4:18:15 GMT -5
I've read both McCloud's books and Eisner's Graphic Storytelling one. I've read his other one as well but it was more then a year ago.
The shocking thing has been the response to this.
Mostly its been ignored but...
One person (a fellow comic creator) asked why I would want to get more people in to doing comics.
A LOT of comic fans I asked about this were quite offended by the idea, saying stuff like, "the last thing we needed are more people to do comics when they have the time."
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Post by jayvee on Jul 1, 2006 8:23:03 GMT -5
More people into comics means more people buying comics which means more people making comics which means variant covers which means holographic inserts which means less people into comics which means less people buying comics which means less people making comics which means everybody who got into the business because it was accessible is suddenly making no money and needs to find a second and third jobs.
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Post by nolan on Jul 1, 2006 16:24:48 GMT -5
More people into comics means more people buying comics which means more people making comics which means variant covers which means holographic inserts which means less people into comics which means less people buying comics which means less people making comics which means everybody who got into the business because it was accessible is suddenly making no money and needs to find a second and third jobs. Unless we do it right this time. If we can bypass the speculator/collector/fanboy market and get high quality material in to the mainstream zeitgeist then. More people in to comics means more comics means more diverse comics means more reason to stay in comics means a healthy industry with ample work. |
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Post by davidaccampo on Jul 2, 2006 1:37:41 GMT -5
Amen --
The ultimate goal is really just to get people to see comics in the same light as movie and books. "Separate but equal," so to speak.
The speculator market may seem to boost things, but it's still a fringe market. Catering to fanboys may seem necessary for current publishers to survive, but all it does is isolate.
Pushing this direction may seem suicidal to publishers. And it may even be.
The industry may indeed have to die off in order for hte MEDIUM to survive.
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Post by nolan on Jul 2, 2006 23:18:41 GMT -5
Okay, I've written a beginning to my essay.
Unfortunatley, I did it by hand so bear with me.
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Post by jayvee on Jul 3, 2006 0:03:19 GMT -5
By hand is the best way to write.
Gives you an extra editorial step when you're transferring it to digital media.
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Post by nolan on Jul 3, 2006 0:45:37 GMT -5
An Essay for Writers
By
Nolan J. Werner
When you think about writing comic books, what is the first thing that comes in to your mind?
Maybe its an image of an overweight, middle aged man writing vaguely homoerotic teenage power fantasies, and probably not writing it all that well. Maybe this isn’t your image but, honestly, I would bet that your image isn’t much better. Your image is probably of something that you wouldn’t consider working in, being the serious artist that you are.
I hope to change all of that. In this essay, I hope to show you the diverse works and the potential of the sequential medium (comic books and manga). By the end of this essay, I hope that some of you will give working in this medium an increased degree of consideration, or, at the very least, that you will have an increased appreciation of the sequential medium as one for both serious art and serious literature. When I was on the academic team in high school, I was supposedly the guy who was in charge of literature and humanities related things (really, my job was to know obscure stuff that the one really good guy on the team didn’t know) and the other members of the team made jokes all the time about how comic books weren’t real literature. I dedicate this essay to all of you, I’m going to show you how wrong you were.
Before I go any further, I would like to give credit to some of the books I am deeply indebted to. Without them, this essay would just have been an idea. The books are: Alan Moore’s Writing for Comics, Writing for Comics with Peter David, Graphic Storytelling by Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art by Will Eisner, Writers on Comic Scriptwriting Volumes 1 and 2, Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud and Reinventing Comics by Scott McCloud. If any of this essay has inspired you, the books I mentioned are all wonderful resources to begin with. And, many of the arguments in this essay come from these, though the purpose of convincing people to write comic books is markedly different.
Name three movies or television shows adapted from comic books.
So what are they? Superman? Batman? Spider-Man? I bet that Road to Peridition, Sin City, American Splendor, A History of Violence, From Hell, Ghost World, Art School Confidential, Men in Black and V For Vendetta didn’t make the list. But all of those films were adapted from comics. Superheroes are not comics and comics are not superheroes. The superhero genre is but one genre within the larger medium of comics (the largest one in American comics but by no means the only one), the same way that romantic comedies are but one genre of film or horror is but one genre in the medium of prose. If the superhero genre doesn’t interest you then there are limitless other options, and, you might actually be able to go years without touching a superhero comic. Even within the superhero genre there is a great deal of diversity. And, outside the superhero genre, the diversity of projects is getting greater. Outside of the superhero genre, a market once dominated by them is opening up and books in new genres are slowly drifting in to both the comic mainstream and the mainstream of society with both critical and commercial success. Comics receive occasional coverage in places like National Public Radio, The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly (who has placed a number of comic creators on its coveted “It” List).
So what genres have been tackled besides superheroes? I’ll give you some examples of projects in other genres. Well, maybe you still want to stay in the speculative fiction umbrella but take it in other directions. You could try science fiction (Warren Ellis’s Orbiter), alternate history (Warren Ellis’s Ministry of Space), literary fantasy (Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman), swords and sorcery (Robert E. Howard’s Conan character has always been a popular comic character), alternate history with a fantasy twist (Arvid Nelson’s Rex Mundi) or horror (Alan Moore’ Swamp Thing).
What if you have no desire to do superheroes or anything vaguely related to science fiction or magic? You want to write stories grounded in the real world. Maybe something autobiographical (Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor), historical (Eric Shanower’s Age of Bronze), an intimate family story (Art Spiegelman’s Maus) or a story about a writer trying to write (Steven Seagle’s It’s a Bird). Maybe you want to tell a story from the perspective of a group that hasn’t always been included in the literary canon, you can do that in comics too. Stories have been told from the Black perspective (Ho Che Anderson’s King), the perspective of Iranian women (Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis), Gay men (Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby), Lesbians (Roberta Gregory’s Bitchy Bitch), Hispanics (Los Bros. Hernandez’s Love and Rockets) and Jews (Will Eisner’s To The Heart of the Storm), among countless others.
If you’re still reading at this point, maybe you think I have some sort of legitimate point. But your next question is, what can writing comics do for me? Well, the first answer to this is that, with the success of some of the movies listed above, movie studios are picking up the rights to adapt just about every comic series they can. That might not interest you though. The medium is far from a creative ghetto, in fact a number of creators cross back and forth from comics to other things. In fact, here are fourteen people who have done projects in comics and other media at least once in their careers.
1. Damon Lindelof (co-creator of Lost/Writer of Ultimate Hulk v. Wolverine for Marvel Comics)
2. Orson Scott Card (Hugo Award winning author of the Ender Saga and the Alvin Maker series/Writer of Ultimate Iron Man for Marvel Comics)
3. Joss Whedon (Creator of television series Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and writer/director of Serenity/Writer of Astonishing X-Men for Marvel Comics)
4. Michael Chabon (Pulitzer Prize Winner for the comic book related novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay/Contributor on and editor of Michael Chabon Presents The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist anthology for Dark Horse Comics)
5. Glan David Gold (Author of the acclaimed and bestselling Carter Beats the Devil/Contributing writer to Michael Chabon Presents The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist)
6. Alisa Kwitney (Author of Romance and Chick List novels like Sex as a Second Language and On the Couch/Writer of Destiny: A Chronicle of Deaths Foretold for DC Comics’s Vertigo, their Mature Readers line)
7. Allan Heinberg (Veteran television writer for shows like The OC and Gilmore Girls/Writer of Young Avengers for Marvel Comics)
8. Reginald Hudlin (Director of House Party and Boomerang, President of Entertainment for Black Entertainment Television/Writer of Black Panther for Marvel Comics)
9. Kevin Smith (Writer/Director of the acclaimed independent film Clerks/Writer of Green Arrow for DC Comics and writer of Daredevil for Marvel Comics)
10. Neil Gaiman (New York Times Bestselling Author of American Gods/Writer of The Sandman for Vertigo)
11. John Ridley (Screenwriter on the films Undercover Brother and Three Kings/Writer of Wildstorm’s The American Way)
12. Christos N. Gage (Writer for the television series Law and Order: SVU and Numb3rs/Writer of Deadshot for DC Comics and Arcana’s Paradox)
13. Douglas Rushkoff (Described by his website as an “Author, social theorist, journalist, and software developer”/writer for Vertigo’s Testament)
14. Rachel Pollack (Faculty member in the MDA program at Goddard College, tarot expert, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award for Unquenchable Fire and the World Fantasy Award for Godmother Night/Writer on Vertigo’s Doom Patrol and Brother Power, The Geek and New Gods for DC Comics)
From there, now that I've worked through some of the prejudices of readers, I'm going to talk about the things the comic medium can offer in terms of storytelling.
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raven
New Member
Posts: 13
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Post by raven on Jul 3, 2006 17:54:04 GMT -5
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Post by nolan on Jul 3, 2006 23:24:17 GMT -5
There are a lot of sites I could add.
But I think its useful to try and get other writers to consider this. I mean face it, to get the best comics, we need the best writers and artists (and I'd love someone to do an artist version of this), even if they only end up doing it part time.
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