Writing Creative Writing: Essays from the Field - Rishma Dunlop, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Priscila Uppal 2016

The comics connection
Writing creative writing pedagogy

MARY SCHENDLINGER

Comics is a new art form in North America. It is only about a hundred years since the Yellow Kid, a cartoon boy from the other side of the tracks (created by Richard Outcault), debuted in a comic strip published in the New York World and became an instant hit with adults. The first book-length comic, a collection of short strips first published in newspapers, came along in 1933. As Jillian Tamaki, co-author of the graphic novel Skim, says, “Even how to read comics, even that basic, fundamental thing is something that a lot of people are still learning.”

In fact, the form is so new that we don’t yet know what to call it. Over the last twenty years there has been an explosion in the production of books, zines, booklets, and online series, with a spectacular variety of subject matter, style, and production values; but to most of us, “comic” still refers to a cheap, disposable, 6½ x 10 inch, twenty-four-page newsprint booklet with a thin, shiny cover and ads for sea monkeys in the back, about superheroes or talking animals. “Graphic novel” has caught on, but it leaves out everything that isn’t a novel; “graphic album,” “sequential art,” and “drawn book” are interesting but obscure; “graphica” sounds high-toned. And not all “comics” are comical, which is why Art Spiegelman, author of Maus, a graphic memoir of his parents’ years in Nazi concentration camps, prefers “comix.” The conversation about terminology is more speculative than contentious: makers, readers, buyers, sellers, and teachers of comics agree that we need a good portmanteau word, as French and Belgian comics have bédé, which comes from bande dessinée (literally, “drawn strip”).

By any name, the form has taken hold in North America. Readers, writers, artists, publishers, booksellers, and book buyers are taking it seriously. They are coming to understand comics as a medium rather than a genre, much as film and television are different media, and print publications are categorically different from online products, even when they have the same content. We comprehend comics in a different way than text, mainly because of the integral presence of images that must be “read” to understand the heart of the work, rather than experienced as accompanying illustrations. Because film and television require the same kind of “reading,” the transition of comics from page to screen tends to be less arduous than the transition of written text to screen, and adaptations for film and TV have ranged from Batman (starting in 1943), Wonder Woman, and Justice League of America, to Archie and Richie Rich, to Bryan Lee O’Malley’s teen-angst story Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Daniel Clowes’s cerebral Ghost World, and to The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik-Yak.

The graphic novel is one of the few areas of book publishing whose market is expanding. In Europe, Central and South America, some Asian countries and other parts of the world, comics have long been a respected cultural form. Europeans treat well-produced book-length comics as works of art and literature, to be kept (and kept in print), rather than as cheap, low-art ephemera to be consumed and thrown away. In Japan, there is a long, rich tradition of manga (comics) in many categories, from genre fiction to be read on the train and tossed, to expensive, beautifully rendered volumes with hand-painted silk covers, to instruction manuals that come in the box with your new smartphone.

North American comics started as funny papers, and in the public imagination they stayed there — fun, but trivial. Superhero comics roared into popularity during the war years of the 1940s. These were followed, in the Cold War years, by science fiction and horror comics (Tales from the Crypt), romance (Young Love), and humour and satire (Mad, Cracked). Comics in general were attacked in the 1950s by right-wing politicians, doctors, and scholars, who claimed they would induce violence, suicide, and juvenile delinquency in children. Then, in the 1960s and 70s, came “underground comics,” in which nothing was taboo — sex, drugs, crime, violence, explicit everything. The comics of the next wave, in the 1980s, were also provocative, but more thoughtful than deliberately shocking. In the early 1990s, Art Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize for Maus, and Scott McCloud published Understanding Comics, becoming the first English-language comics semiotician. Thanks to new printing, publishing, and communication technologies, comics proliferated in print and online, and North American readers feasted on comics from Japan, Western Europe, and points in between. Teachers brought comics and manga into the classroom, because even “reluctant readers” like to read comics. Courses on reading and comprehending comics sprang up in secondary and post-secondary schools all across the continent.

Teaching people to write comics, though, is more recent. Resources were few and far between in 2008, when I developed Writing for Graphic Forms, a workshop course for the University of British Columbia’s Creative Writing Program. I knew the territory, though — I had been teaching writing and publishing courses for ten years. I had also been reading, writing, and drawing comics all my life as an avocation, had been publishing short comics in periodicals and anthologies for fifteen years (under the pseudonym Eve Corbel), and was underway with a book-length graphic novel. And I served as comics editor for Geist magazine, a literary quarterly co-founded in 1990 by my partner and me.

In a way, teaching comics writing is like teaching any other kind of writing. In comics, as in other forms, there are genres that come with their own formulas or conventions. In comics, as in written forms, the work must have a shape. In comics, as in film and other visual forms, the writer writes with images, or with images and words combined. When comics are done well, the words and images work together symbiotically, although there is friction between them: if either one is taken away, the piece is meaningless.

Exploring the Comics Landscape

Writing for Graphic Forms, the workshop course at the University of British Columbia, runs for one term and consists of fourteen weekly meetings, each two hours long. About half the students are skilled, confident, new writers. Three or four people have well-developed visual art skills. Everyone in the room has, or remembers having, a great fondness for comics of some kind, and a residual sense of guilty pleasure (more evidence of the lowbrow reputation of comics).

Teaching time is precious, especially when most of the students are new to the comics medium as a writing form. Our first two sessions are devoted to a concentrated introduction to writing comics, with copious examples by outstanding comics writers and artists, and informal discussion.

I start the course by saying that you don’t have to be an accomplished visual artist to write wonderful comics, just as you don’t have to be a cinematographer to write a wonderful film. Students are awed (not always in a good way) by the work of their artistically proficient colleagues — work that can seem much more realized than theirs whether or not the writing is solid. Gorgeous artwork is a great asset in comics, but it doesn’t make a good comic, any more than proper spelling, punctuation, and grammar makes good writing. The American comics writer Joe Matt (Peepshow), for instance, is a talented visual artist whose exhibitionism, self-absorption, and addiction to pornography are his shtick, as well as the subjects of his work. He has his fans, but his daily self-loathing and “procrasturbation,” regardless of how well drawn, can also be described as simply boring. Susceptible, by Geneviève Castrée, tells the story (apparently based on her own) of a gothic childhood in a family for whom “dysfunctional” is an understatement. Her drawings and page composition are sensitive and exquisite, but the protagonist is two-dimensional in her endless victimization (“a cartoon character,” as some would say). A comic with strong writing and less technically proficient artwork is much more successful than the reverse. For example, the kindest word for the artwork in Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person, a memoir by the late Miriam Engelberg, is “naive,” but the simple drawings are wonderfully expressive, actually enhancing her laconic, unsentimental text. Longshot Comics by Shane Simmons, which consists of 3,840 tiny panels in which two dots converse, is as vivid and clear as “real” artwork.

We go on to talk about the possibilities of the comics medium. As with other forms, a comic can be narrative (Unterzakhn, a memoir by Leela Corman), persuasive writing (Palestine by Joe Sacco), expository/how-to (Drawing Comics Is Easy! Except When It’s Hard by Alexa Kitchen), personal essay (Where I’m Coming From by Barbara Brandon-Croft), or a combination (the short comic “Milgaard and Me” in Portraits from Life by David Collier). It can be any genre: superhero (Watchmen by Alan Moore), romance (Blankets by Craig Thompson), humour/satire (The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel), children’s (Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney), science fiction/fantasy (Boston Metaphysical Society, a steampunk Web comic by Madeleine Holly-Rosing), detective/noir (City of Glass by Paul Auster, Paul Karasik, and David Mazzucchelli), thriller/horror (Vampirella by Warren Ellis), true crime (The Borden Tragedy by Rick Geary), classics (Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust and Stéphane Heuet), history/politics (Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan), or biography/autobiography (Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi). And a comic can be presented in just about any format: zine, classic comic book, folded slip of paper, tiny book, oversize book, or even in multiple formats. Building Stories, a comic by Chris Ware, is a box containing pamphlets, bound books, broadsheets, accordion-folded strips, and a game board. A comic can be digital or hybrid, an app, a comics/gaming combination, an all-digital pastiche of cheesy clip art or personal photographs (fumetti or a photo-roman), and so on.

Images in comics can be more or less “cartoony” or “arty,” ranging from simple black-and-white line drawings to miniature works of art, but all employ the conventions of cartooning:

· Simple lines: In cartooning, less is more — a very few lines convey a lot of information. The simpler and more iconic the drawing, the greater the impact.

· Exaggeration: People, things, and effects are drawn so that they seem larger, louder, more extreme, or more intense than in real life. A crying cartoon baby has an enormous open mouth with a prominent uvula; a man’s eyes pop out of their sockets when he gets a big surprise.

· Cartoon language: Simple but evocative symbols convey a sight, a sound, a feeling, a movement, and more — things that we experience but cannot actually see: a light bulb over the head of a character with an idea, short lines radiating from the sun to indicate heat, a talk bubble full of words hanging over a character’s head.

We then talk about process and craft. In comics, as in other forms, the writer uses tools, techniques, and literary devices to tell a story, give information, make an argument, ponder a subject, or some combination. But there are two ways in which comics and other forms are very different — the rendering of space and time:

· Space: In comics, there is a “grammar” of space as well as a grammar of language. Working with a series of still images, or a series of symbiotically linked images and words (talking, thinking, “voice-over” narration, sound), the writer arranges the elements on a page or screen so that the order and placement itself becomes another visual component. When a comic is well composed, these combined elements are experienced as one unit by the reader, who (unlike a film viewer) is in control of what she sees, in what order, and at what speed. It is up to the writer to direct the reader’s eye where she wants it to go.

· Time: In comics, the past and the present (and sometimes the future as well) coexist as they do in life, in the territory of hopes, fears, dreams, and memories. Readers feel a pace and infer time whether or not the writer intends it. As Scott McCloud points out, much of the actual motion in a comic occurs between panels. In a process he calls “closure,” the reader subconsciously fills in all of the moments that are not pictured.

Drafting and Composing

Each student completes four major assignments during the term: a draft of a short comic (two pages or equivalent), a draft of a longer comic (four pages or equivalent), and a substantial revision of each comic. “Or equivalent” refers to the depth of the writing as well as the volume of visual material. Most comics are arranged in a series of panels, placed side by side in tiers that stack up to make a page, conforming to a pattern or grid; but a page can also consist of a single image without panel borders that incorporates the content of multiple panels. Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis, a memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution, works with a grid of rectangular panels and tiers of consistent size and shape, with the occasional splash panel (larger frame) for emphasis or dramatic impact. Joe Sacco, who writes “comics journalism” set in Palestine, Bosnia, and other volatile places, composes many pages with swirling lines rather than window-like panels, so that one image comprises multiple scenes, subtly separated by a stretch of barbed wire, a machine gun, or a woman’s long skirt.

For either assignment, a student may submit an original comic that runs to the required length, or a sequence from a longer work-in-progress, as long as its content and shape can be comprehended and critiqued without explanation. Some students who are underway with long projects in some other form — poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, children’s literature — continue their work in the comics course. One student will write the next chapter or stanza as a comic, another will find a new entrance to a problematic passage by adapting it to the comics form, another might discover that her written novella works better as a digital graphic narrative with some gaming twists.

As soon as we finish the introductory talk (two sessions), students begin drafting their comics. Like the experts, they work with some combination of the following drafting stages, any of which may be done on paper or onscreen:

· Script: a written script, similar to a screenplay, with dialogue, narration, and notes on what will be pictured.

· Thumbnails: small, rough drawings or schematics showing the basic composition of panels and pages.

· Pencils: a first draft of the comic with drawings and text pencilled in.

· Revised pencils (as many as needed).

· Inks: drawings and words rendered in ink.

· Finished colour: all text and visuals with colour added.

Some writers draft the comic in words, writing a script that looks like a screenplay. Then they work on images and page composition, and redistribute the workload of words, images, and composition as the three elements coalesce. (In large companies that specialize in superhero comics and other products for a mass audience, a writer writes a script, an editor refines the script, an artist pencils the drawings, another inks the pencil drawings, a letterer pencils in the written text, another letterer inks the text, yet another technician adds colour, and so on.)

Other writers begin with images. David Collier’s book Chimo, his memoir of re-enlisting in the army at age forty, incorporates a lot of text, but he began this book as he begins any comic, by sketching images and waiting to “hear” the words. Chris Ware describes his realization that “I was relying way too much on words and using words as a way of accounting for the deficits in my drawing, and vice versa, illustrating my words rather than actually telling stories in words and pictures.”

The next step is composing, consistent with the spatial “grammar” of comics. A panel can be compared to a phrase or clause, a tier to a sentence, a page (or a spread — two facing pages) to a paragraph, and so on. So, like the lines and stanzas of a poem, these elements have deliberate starts, ends, and intersections, not arbitrary ones. The student presents the content graphically, on paper or screen, starting with thumbnails or going right to a full-size page, roughly sketching images and text into panels, tiers, and pages. The post-thumbnail draft, called “pencils,” is usually done in pencil, so that it can be continually revised. “This is where your page takes on a composition,” says Jessica Abel, author of La Perdida, “where you enrich the words with deeper meaning in the images, where you make what you’re doing into comics.”

Words, like everything else in a comic, are visual elements consistent with all the other visual elements. So the writer decides on the appearance of the lettering for text blocks — narration and dialogue “bubbles” (also called “balloons”): it may be loose, handwritten, and deliberately eccentric; or precisely calligraphed, letter by letter; or typeset in a “comics” font and added digitally later. Students are encouraged to try things, and also to let things happen. A student may find, upon drafting a comic, that no text at all is needed, or that it is best to place the text in separate, strategically located panels rather than combining it with images in panels — much the way text was presented in the silent films. A writer may also respond to a pragmatic prompt. When an interviewer asked Posy Simmonds about her decision to combine handwritten and typeset text in her book Gemma Bovery, she said, “I was going to handwrite it, and I began to and I thought, ’God, you’re bonkers doing this hand-lettering.’”

We also look at the elements of visual composition: how to use panel size for emphasis or pauses; how to speed up the pace (as for a swordfight) or slow it down (as for a rising sun); how to establish point of view, foreground, middle ground, and background in a panel; how to use light, shadow, and texture to create a focal point or a sense of depth; and so on. We also look at special effects unique to the comics medium, such as an episode of “Little Sammy Sneeze,” by Winsor McCay (1869—1934), in which Sammy sneezes so hard that the panel falls into shards as if it were a sheet of breaking glass.

Strengthening the Infrastructure

The required text for the course is Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels by Scott McCloud (author of Understanding Comics). McCloud’s text identifies the building blocks of comics and gives practical advice on choosing what to put in, what to leave out, and how to present it — all with vivid explanations and examples.

McCloud lists five basic types of choices to be made in creating comics:

· Choice of moment: Of all the moments that occur when a being takes a step, which will be shown?

· Choice of frame: For each panel or view, will the being be shown from a point far away or close by? From above the head or from the ground near the feet? Straight up, or at an angle?

· Choice of image: What characters, objects, and surroundings will be shown?

· Choice of word: In each panel, what word(s) will work best to convey talking and/or thinking in the panel or off-panel, as well as sound and text in the environment (signs, brand names, etc.)?

· Choice of flow: How will elements be arranged so that the reader’s eye moves along where, when, and at what pace the writer wants it to?

These five choices are invaluable for comics writers (and readers) in many respects, but I am cautious in recommending a study of them. No writer should embark on a draft by following instructions. Nevertheless, McCloud’s five choices are effective tools for comprehending the special demands of the comics form.

Throughout the course, we study exemplary work by established comics writers and artists. I use a data projector to show sample pages of finished work, as well as draft scripts, thumbnails, rough pencils, refined pencils, and any other in-progress examples I can find. These invaluable process documents are reproduced in various books and webpages on how to make comics (The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creating a Graphic Novel by Nat Gertler and Steve Lieber; Comics and Sequential Art by Will Eisner; You Can Do a Graphic Novel by Barbara Slate; or Jessica Abel and Matt Madden’s Drawing Words and Writing Pictures). Students can even watch a professional comics artist create a set of roughs on video (Drawing Roughs for Comics by Troy Roberts). As we look at finished comics or work-in-progress, I ask the students pointed questions: Why did the writer use three panels to convey this moment instead of one? What is the effect of the extreme closeup, the size and style of the sound word ch-ch-ch-ch, the character’s hand breaking through the “fourth wall”? To the extent that it is possible when studying short excerpts, I ask students to explore larger questions: How would you describe the tone or mood of the work? What is the compelling theme or story at its heart?

There is always disagreement in the group, which gives us all fresh opportunities to examine and articulate our responses. Craig Thompson’s book Habibi, for example, tells the story of two child slaves, a girl and a boy, who become separated, grow up, and are reunited, in a fictitious, vaguely Middle Eastern world. Upon seeing passages from it, some students are drawn to the exoticism and suspense of the story, enhanced by Thompson’s fluid artwork and his references to Islamist and Christian art and thought; others are offended by what they feel is his “racist” representation of Muslim characters and his sexualization of rape. And, in response to a page or two of The Job Thing by Carol Tyler, whose style is loose and uninhibited, some students are inspired to emulate her uninhibited exuberance; others are confused by her inconsistent portrayal of characters and her unorthodox arrangement of panels.

Our work with the textbook and examples of finished comics by experts is complemented by other infrastructure activities, including guest presentations by published comics writers, in-class exercises, students’ analysis of comics they admire, workshop sessions in which they critique each other’s work, and hands-on experimentation with various drawing materials. By the end of the course, students comprehend the special demands of comics: how “writing” in still images for page or screen differs from other kinds of writing, and how images and words in comics are uniquely entangled, being neither illustrated text nor captioned images. They know how labour intensive the form is, even with the assistance of software to set up grids, streamline the lettering process, and manipulate images. They are aware of the growing interest in comics among teachers, librarians, and trade publishing companies; and they grasp the differences in audience and production process between independent book publishers and large, multinational manga and superhero comics producers. They also perceive the expanding market for short comics — for example, in mainstream and specialty magazines that have only recently begun to include comics, and on the Internet as a personal blog or series, or as part of a group or online periodical. Most of all, they understand the comics medium and its potential to enhance their writing work in any form, via reading comics, making comics, or both.

Works Cited

Abel, Jessica. La Perdida. New York: Pantheon, 2008. Print.

Abel, Jessica, and Matt Madden. Drawing Words and Writing Pictures. New York: First Second, 2008. Print.

Auster, Paul, Paul Karasik, and David Mazzucchelli. City of Glass. New York: Picador, 2004. Print.

Bechdel, Alison. The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008. Print.

Brandon-Croft, Barbara. Where I’m Coming From. Syndicated comic, 1991−2005. Print.

Castrée, Geneviève. Susceptible. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2013. Print.

Clowes, Daniel. Ghost World. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2004. Print.

Collier, David. Chimo. Wolfville, NS: Conundrum, 2011. Print.

. “Milgaard and Me.” Portraits from Life. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2002. Print.

Corman, Leela. Unterzakhn. New York: Schocken, 2012. Print.

Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1985. Print.

Ellis, Warren. Vampirella. Mt. Laurel, NJ: Dynamite Entertainment, 2010. Print.

Engelberg, Miriam. Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Print.

Geary, Rick. The Borden Tragedy. New York: NBM, 1997. Print.

Gertler, Nat, and Steve Lieber. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creating a Graphic Novel. New York: Penguin, 2004. Print.

Holly-Rosing, Madeleine. Boston Metaphysical Society. E-books, 2012−13. Web.

Kinney, Jeff. Diary of a Wimpy Kid. New York: Penguin, 2007. Print.

Kitchen, Alexa. Drawing Comics Is Easy! Except When It’s Hard. Amherst, MA: Denis Kitchen, 2006. Print.

Matt, Joe. Peepshow. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2003. Print.

McCay, Winsor. “Little Sammy Sneeze.” New York Herald, 1904−06. Print.

McCloud, Scott. Making Comics. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Print.

. Understanding Comics. New York: Avon/HarperCollins, 1994. Print.

Modan, Rutu. Exit Wounds. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2007. Print.

Moore, Alan. Watchmen. New York: DC Comics, 1987. Print.

O’Malley, Bryan Lee. Scott Pilgrim, vols. 1−6. Portland: Oni Press, 2004−10. Print.

Proust, Marcel, and Stéphane Heuet. Remembrance of Things Past. New York: NBM, 2001. Print.

Roberts, Troy. “Drawing Roughs for Comics.” Vimeo, 18 Feb. 2012. Web.

Sacco, Joe. Palestine Collection. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2001. Print.

. Safe Area Gorazde. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2002. Print.

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. New York: Pantheon, 2004. Print.

Writing Creative Writing: Essays from the Field - Rishma Dunlop, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Priscila Uppal 2016

The comics connectionWriting creative writing pedagogy

The comics connection
Writing creative writing pedagogy