WonderCon: “Comic writers Unite!” began very, very small. It was like three panels and ending the fourth panel with a joke and then into a graphic novel and then into much longer stories. So at the end of it I say I guess I’m doing the same exact thing, it’s always been about the storytelling, I just didn’t know where it was going to take me. Gail Simone: I don’t know . . . I was a hairdresser for a certain period of time before I became a comic book writer. And I always wanted to be a writer. I always spun crazy stories from a young age. I learned to talk, the story is, at six months, but my family convinced me that I would never make a living as a writer. And I knew I was creative and that I couldn’t do a normal job, so I went to hairdressing school and became a hairdresser. At least that was creative and I did that for a while and it was a good job and I made really good money. But I just came to a point in my life where I wanted to do something creative that was different than that, and really the only option for me was writing because I can’t draw, I can’t sew, I can’t do all these other things that would have been a creative choice. So I just started goofing around doing parodies, which led to a column on the Internet, which eventually led to writing for Simpsons Comics and then working at Marvel Comics and then to Birds of Prey at DC. I think I’ve written about 300 comics now. So I guess I’m a comic book writer. Robinson: I went to film school in England and I came out of film school and didn’t immediately get work. And I was editing at Titan Books for a very short period of time, and in that window of time was when Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean came in with Violent Cases. And so I, in my arrogant young man’s way, said I can do that. And I found this artist— and I always tell people if they want to break into comics, find an artist and do a self-publishing thing to show editors that you can actually tell a story, as opposed to an outline, which really tells them very little. I did this book London’s Dark, that was the first thing I did, and that got the attention of Matt Wagner and Archie Goodwin, and between them they kind of got me started. And Mark Waid, too. I got to be fair. He gave me my first job at DC, which was the “Secret Origin of Dinosaur Island” that was never published. So my next question to all of you is, what are the differences between writing comics and just writing: writing a short story, writing screenplays, writing anything else. All of us have done things other than comic books. Johns: I actually think writing comics is a lot harder than screenplays. I’ve written for TV and film. Writing Smallville was super easy because you had a certain page count, but you could do the dialogue and the characters could go places.
Robinson: Well, I actually feel that in a way it’s like you’re storyboarding a film and editing the film at the same time. Johns: Yeah, when you’re writing a comic you have to do the angles, a panel count, you’ve got limited space. It’s really, you’re directing, you’re literally directing, cutting everything at once and producing. Robinson: And really as a rule of thumb, obviously you can go smaller than this, but the nine-panel page is sort of about as small as you want to go, and within that I would say 40 to 44 words and that’s really talk,y but you could probably get away with that. But even if every page is nine panels and every panel has 44 words, it’s still a finite amount of words that you can possibly put into a comic book. Simone: Yeah and I think it becomes about pacing, don’t you too? If you’ve got a section of your story that’s wordy, then you’ve got to have other things to balance it out, and for me the pacing and the timing and saying as much as you can in as few words as possible is the trick in writing a comic script compared to some of the other things that I’ve written. Palmiotti: With Jonah Hex I look at the artist working with us at the time. I know what they can and what they can’t do and I have 22 pages for beginning, middle, and end. You have to be conscious of how it’s going to end, if it’s going to deliver, is it going to be satisfying, and you only have a certain amount of film, so to say, on it. And I think the thing that’s the most satisfying for me about comics is just that every time we write something we get to actually see this artwork come back, and most of the time it’s so much better or bigger than you imagined. It’s just the discovery of that. Johns: You don’t have a budget in comics. On Smallville, I had this huge JSA fight that got cut probably about 50 percent because of budget. And also out of all the comics I’ve written, I think maybe two have never gotten published, while with what I’ve written for film and TV it’s more like 10 percent got made. Rucka: One of the things I like about comics is that compression of form. I like that you have 22 pages, that’s it. And to me it always feels like a game of chess. You put your first panel down and you are now limited. Every step you make when scripting a comic is like an inverted triangle. You are going to a final panel, and with each panel you pick you have less options if you’re doing it well. It becomes self-guided. If the story is done properly, you will end inevitably where you need to end. Winick: There’s that expression “killing babies,” and it means killing good moments, killing really choice moments, and in comics you do it a lot because it’s
so finite. And oh I got this really great scene, it should end here, but I really need to take care of business over here and this should happen. I have to cut four pages. I’ve just cut four pages and those are really good pages. I think we’re always aware of that but I think more so in talking about things like length and fitting the form and what not. Comics are the only visual medium that the user—the reader, the consumer—controls the pace of. Movies, television, video games, there’s someone else there sort of controlling the pace and how it goes, and you have to move through it. We know you guys are holding these in your hands and you do the page turns and you’re there. Reading is an intimate, intimate act. And when doing comics we always sort of think on those levels. much texture. And then when it all goes together with the text and the visuals, there’s really nothing else like it, and that’s one reason why I love to do it—you can add so much more and still get it all on 22 pages. Robinson: I wanted to talk a little bit about the Internet and downloadable comics and the future. We talked a moment ago about the language of storytelling and reading a comic book. For those people that choose to download their comics in the future or are illegally doing it now, it’s changed, it will change how we write comics— it has to some degree affected the way we structure pages and page turns and the way we put a comic together. Does anyone have any thoughts on that? Rucka: It’s going to be a different set of tools. When we were doing 52, one of the things we discovered very quickly was that we had removed a fair number of the comic trope storytelling devices from our toolbox because we were involved in a conceit that said each issue takes place over the course of a year. You couldn’t do a cliffhanger ending. I mean we couldn’t do it. I think that just in terms of writing for online content the tools are going to be different. I can’t do a double page spread because I don’t have a page in the same sense. I can’t write to the reveal. And you know we’re still experimenting with the form. Winick: I think that’s the key is that we’re in the dark ages. We just started. We’re living in the moment here to the birth of not a new medium but a new way of transferring storytelling. Are people in 20 years not going to be holding pieces of paper with a staple in between them? A lot of us say like yeah absolutely. We still have books out there, but yes you have Kindle and whatnot. We’re in the middle of it. We have no idea. Continued in the Comic-Con 2010 Souvenir Book, available only at Comic-Con International!
MArk your calendar NOW: WONDERCON 2011 IS APRIL 1–3 AT MOSCONE CENTER SOUTH IN SAN FRANCISCO! Online Edition Spring/Summer 2010 • Comic-Con Magazine 14