Making Comics (Scott McCloud)

I finally(!) got around to reading 'Making Comics' by Scott McCloud, one of three books of his that really examine comics as a storytelling style. I love books like this - ones that are less 'how to' and more of an examination of the art itself - what makes comics unique? How can we get the most out of the medium? What are the avenues of new ideas we can walk down as we explore the format?

Something every good article on recording music tells you is 'if you want to make great records, you need to listen to (and then compare your audio to those) great records'.  Strive for perfection of the art, and even if you get 'only close' you've probably made something pretty cool.  So is the same with comics - you want to study the best to influence what your original thoughts, put lots of work into it and see what happens. This book encourages that sort of thinking.

Each of these books that make me want to try new things as I forge ahead with the Kodoja story... which is the point of the whole thing right? It's all part of making your own story as 'your own' as it can be. The book seems intended more for the 'Writer + Artist' person who makes comics, but even being 'just a writer' (I have a hard time succesfully executing a stick figure) it's awesome. Having a thorough vocabulary in terms of how we process things as a reader can only help me as a writer.

The book takes the general tone of 'I can't say how you should tell your story, but here are a bunch of ideas that might inspire you as you walk your path', which is very zen. The examples are great - they show a technique and then really break it down and talk about it. You don't just see the difference between, say a borderless low-perspective panel and an eye-level perspective panel with a border, you talk about every difference and how it makes you feel as a reader.

The first thought when I read a book like this was 'well hold on, I write a Giant Monster Comic. I'm not playing with format like Acme Novelty Library and I'm sure as sh*t not writing The Sandman here, so what does it matter?' And anyone else who reads it might think the same thing - oh I just write a superhero comic / zombie comic / etc. But in a way, that makes a book like this more essential - the more well-defined the genre is that you're a part of, the more beneficial it is to understand different paths to new angles at that genre. As the book points out, Jack Kirby did a lot of things that refreshed a 20-year old superhero genre (at the time) and broke new ground with waves and waves of ideas on visual storytelling.  The superhero genre was quite mature at the time, yet new ideas propelled new directions.

Or, take the NBA Slam Dunk Contest - it spent most of the 90s in a stagnant place where a lot of the criticism centered around 'all of the dunks being done' or there being 'nothing new'... until Vince Carter showed up in 2000, shook the whole contest up with an array of never-seen-before dunks and set it on a course of continued innovation tat hasn't stopped yet (with some aids like automobiles, glow-in-the-dark basketballs and teddy bears hanging from the rim, admittedly). Only a few of us will ever create something so revolutionary it turns the storytelling world in a new direction, but the point is to experiment and continue to work new angles - you never know what's going to work until every angle gets explored.

One other nugget is in the picture above - I've long been a proponent of this concept but this is a great way to put it. Just because you've decided to sell out, that doesn't mean anyone's going to buy! Stay true to you and create what you want to create.

The Art of Balance

If you're reading this then you probably know I write a kaiju story in comic form called Kodoja.

But no story out there is just one type of story, you know? More so, what makes everyone's story unique are the little things that make that story *yours*. Individual stories within the same franchise have individual flavors because of the storytellers: Godzilla (the original) is entirely different than Godzilla vs Hedorah to fans of the genre.

To that extent, every story you tell is more than a story: it's a balancing act of all the individual stories you're weaving into the whole.

Kodoja is of course mainly a Giant Monster story, but for me it's a balancing act: there's a political element, a character interaction element and a Lovecraftian element (I say this to anyone who will listen at conventions - it's not all the way there yet, but it'll reveal itself a bit more as we go along). Maybe this isn't the case for other people, but for me it can be a struggle to get the balance and the calibration of the parts right. I might write for a little bit and really get into the Lovecraft angle and before you know it I've written a mini-Lovecraft story.  Which is super-cool (tentacles and sh*t!), except this is a story that's centered around giant monsters! The goal is to keep the Giant Monster as the main driver of the story and if I veer off too much in one direction I may change the flavor of the story entirely.

I view stories as one of those carpenter levels you use for Home improvement tasks: you have to balance things on three different angles, and only when you do it are things on the level. There are times when I think that balancing act is harder than any amount of smarts or detail you can put in a story (similar to how I think it's harder to write a tight, incredible pop song than it is to endlessly noodle around on an instrument for 4 minutes). I don't want a political story, I don't want a Lovecraft story, and I don't want a character interaction story: I want a Kaiju story that incorporates those three elements equally. And I'll devote tons of energy (and rewrites) to get that balance right.