Hello! So in my last post, we had a look at how I received the story – in the instance of Juno’s story, we chatted over dinner (in Chinatown, naturally). After the cleaning up the recording back home, I transcribe the lot and try to find some structure in it all, whittling away the huge tree trunk into select words and scenes for the comic. As so often happens, there might be a few holes in the details and we back and forth over the phone and email to sort out the little bits I need.
You’d think that given all the space in comics – with the few, deliberate lines, the select words, the gutters between the panels and the leaps in time over a sequence of images – that gaps wouldn’t threaten the making of a comic, but knowing everything comprehensively empowers the creator to showcase selectively without losing authenticity. Whilst the lines and words included on the page leave a lot of room for the audience to project and fill in the gaps, everything that is chosen to be included plays an important role in holding the reader’s hand and leading them the right way. It is vital that the reader projects, but it’s not a free-for-all, the spaces don’t represent anything and everything and the creator has an influence over the architecture of this intangible imagination space in this early editing and composition process.
From here, I’ll spend some time marrying all the raw emails and conversations and getting to know all the material together. With it all before me, I can start making a few passes at structuring the story and dialogue. This is a balance of maintaining and celebrating the idiosyncratic and expressive nuance in how my contributor communicates – the way they speak for example, or their energy or personality – and also the naturalistic way that we remember past events, with the tight structures, arcs and rules of formal writing that allow the communication to reach readers clearly.
Above are a few passes at the writing – from left to right, the story gets tighter and slimmer, and I start breaking down the prose into something resembling instructions for a script – page breakdowns, panel layouts, dialogue, captions and descriptions of visuals and transitions.
OK, enough with all the words already, next time let’s take a look at where the visuals come from and how all these elements coalesce into art’s favourite layer cake, comics!
