#comic writing

[and-corn]

if there's a condition called impulsive anthropomorphizing then I have it

[ameeraljinn]

🖤🤍 Careem "Khalil" Kanaan by our talented collaborator @jesncin for the @sonofalkhalilzine 💚❤️

hard to summarize 150+ pages of worldbuilding in one post, but here’s the core of my Superman reinterpretation:

this is not just “Superman but in Palestine.”

the project exists to re-center what Superman actually means by placing him somewhere where oppression is not abstract, neutrality is not an option and doing good has real consequences

if Superman is supposed to represent hope, protection, and moral clarity, then i wanted to ask:

what happens when those ideals exist inside systems built around occupation, surveillance, displacement, and narrative control?

“The Last Son of Krypton is also the son of the holiest of lands.”

Khalil is Palestinian–Kryptonian and raised in Al-Khalil, Palestine. He was raised by a Palestinian family after the Ibrahimi Mosque massacre, grew up through the Second Intifada and the partition of Al-Khalil, and first became Superboy in response to the intensifying blockade on Gaza.

his relationship to Palestine isn’t symbolic. it’s lived.

the core contradiction of the story is that he has the power to save people in moments, but not the power to dismantle the systems hurting them overnight.

every intervention has consequences. every act of protection creates escalation. visibility itself becomes dangerous.

so the story stops being: “is Superman good?”

and becomes: how does someone stay good in a world that punishes people for protecting others?

a huge part of the project is also about belonging.

Khalil belongs through love, language, memory, and lived experience. His relationship to homeland is emotional, cultural, and lived.

Mama Mariam tells him: “Resistance, habibi. It’s fertile. Like the soil of your homeland.”

a lot of the emotional core of the project comes from the fact that Khalil was not raised by people who taught him power mattered more than humanity.

he was raised by people who taught him dignity, care, homeland, and responsibility.

the project is heavily focused on:

protection vs consequences

truth vs narrative control

survival vs dignity

resistance vs assimilation

hope as an active choice rather than passive optimism

another major character is Layla Loai, a Lebanese-American investigative journalist who moves to Al-Khalil as a correspondent.

where Khalil’s conflict is: “how do i protect people without making things worse?”

Layla’s conflict is: “what happens if the truth stays hidden?”

she believes silence protects systems more than people.

one of my favorite things about Layla is that she isn’t written as “the journalist love interest.” she’s someone whose worldview is built around the belief that if truth is buried, harm continues unchecked.

she lost her sense of permanence very young, grew up Arab in post-9/11 America, and became someone who refuses imposed narratives even when the truth isolates her from others.

where Khalil fears the consequences of visibility, Layla fears what happens when people look away.

a lot of her storyline deals with visibility vs safety, diaspora and belonging, as well as grief and disconnection

truth as responsibility rather than neutrality

one of the things i care about most in this project is that the people around Khalil are not props for his story. they embody different responses to systems of control, survival, fear, and resistance.

i also spent a ridiculous amount of time building the systems, symbolism, relationship architecture, and political logic of the world because i wanted it to feel structurally coherent rather than aesthetic.

[genericpuff]

Puff!! Do you have any advice on comic pacing? I'm tryna start short and coming from a novel/animation background where there's all the space in the world for little nuances means I am Suffering with panels. I feel like I go too slow but then when I combine panels I worry about readbility and being too fast

It ultimately depends on the type of comic you're writing - the genre, mood, etc. - and how you're planning on releasing it. If the visuals are a vehicle for storytelling within comics, then your GPS navigator is the pacing - it's up to you, the driver (i.e. writer), whether you want to take the scenic route or direct.

That said, here are some general 'rules' I like to follow when plotting out my own work!

DISCLAIMER: I am not a professionally trained writer, much of what I know has been picked up along the past 15 years of making comics, for better and for worse. Because of this, it's kinda hard for me to put exactly into words what 'works' for me, because so much of what I do relies purely on instinct and my own tastes. With all that in mind, do NOT take the following advice as a one-size-fits-all solution for your own writing - what works for me might not work for you!

1.) Match the pacing of your scene to the intent of what you want your readers to feel. If you're trying to build tension, then slow the scene down. If you're trying to create thrills, speed up. Compare action comics to horror - the former is fast-paced so the reader can 'get to the action', whereas the latter often takes its time so that readers have no choice but to 'sit' with the horror.

If I can use one of my own episodes as an example, consider Episode 81 : SPLIT. It starts off building tension in both the story and the reader by showing Minthe's expressions changing slowly with each panel, many of which are repeated to really 'sit' with the scene. We see her eyes shift, her hands fidget, her eyebrows crease, while Hades flips open a chequebook.

And then when she finally explodes, the speed of the storytelling picks up to reflect that emotion. No more biding our time, this is the action-packed payoff to the slowburn occupying the first half of the episode ;3

2.) Treat every episode like its own story. Yes, your episodes are just separate parts of a wider story, but every episode can still have its own beginning, middle, and end. Though this will depend on how much you release per episode / chapter, you should pay attention to ways you can establish the 'theme' of a chapter within a few panels, and then deliver on that theme by the end in some way. It doesn't have to be the final word on that theme's meaning/intent, as there's still more story to tell, but it should still feel concluded to leave the reader feeling satisfied with what they got while also still yearning for more.

Ex. In Episode 78 - Lover's Quarrel, the episode starts from Kore's perspective, with a flashback of her relationship origin with Apollo. This transitions to her contemplating if she really loves Apollo. Her 'arc' converges with Minthe's in that very same episode, who's currently subconsciously competing for Hades' love with Kore. They have a spat, and afterwards, the perspective shifts to Minthe and her own relationship issues. While not much actual plot moved, we did move the individual parts of several different characters forward, including Kore, Minthe, and Apollo, all in the span of about ~45 panels. And of course, the end of that episode even gets a cliffhanger, setting up for the Fates in Episode 82 !

3.) If you have a background in animation, then try and view comics less like a novel and more like an animated film. With comics, you don't get to 'peek' into the mind of the narrator as easily as you can with novels. As you said, there isn't as much 'room' in the text for nuance (and that applies to animation as well). So instead of thinking it as novel > comic, think of it instead as novel > screenplay > comic. If you're unsure of how a paragraph would translate into a comic, think first about how it would translate into a movie. How would the characters - now your actors - convey the emotions that are written on the page to an audience watching them onscreen? Which scenes can be conveyed in a matter of seconds, and which need minutes?

4.) Remember that conveying information is often more ideal than realism. Yes, real people do tend to repeat information, say the same thing in different ways, etc. but that's not entertaining in fiction. Watch out for redundancy in your dialogue and visual information.

5.) Have a rough outline for your story. This does not have to be a fully detailed, completed manuscript, but it should be enough to give you a general idea of where your story is going. Start with the bigger beats and gradually hone in on the smaller beats in between. Having a general plan will keep you moving forward in the right direction; if you don't have a plan, you run the risk of spinning your wheels while you try to think of where to go next, which can result in poor pacing. I might even dare say that going in without a plan is often the primary culprit in most cases where a story has been murdered by bad pacing.

6.) Sprinkle, don't dump. Figure out ways to convey information that don't require outright dumping information on your reader to the point of slowing down the story's flow. Pinch your story details into the narrative like salt - gently as you go along, not all at once. You're telling a story, not delivering a lecture.

7.) Read comics that are written in the same genre as yours. Pay attention to how they pace their stories, how they use their characters, how they do their panelling, and learn from them.

8.) Find beta-readers. Not your friends or family. You need readers who have no personal attachment to you who will actually be objective in their analysis and reviews.

9.) Adjust your pacing to your release schedule. This is one that's harder to really give advice for, but I feel like it's something that's often overlooked by a lot of comic creators. If you have a comic that updates slowly or in small amounts, pick up your pacing. If you have a comic that updates regularly and/or in large amounts, then you can slow it down. From a reader's perspective, there's nothing more frustrating and disappointing than reading a comic that updates slowly / sporadically and never manages to get to the point because it's spending all its time on scenes that would only work in a comic that updates regularly and/or with more content per update.

Now obviously this isn't an entirely foolproof plan as, in hindsight, your comic will read differently compared to how it reads updating in real time, but it's something important to consider because I've seen it happen all too often that creators struggle to cut scenes that were entirely unnecessary or could have been shortened, simply because they came up with them years ago and got too emotionally attached to them. Sure, in the far-off future when that comic is done, no one's gonna notice that it took you 3 years to finish that one chapter, but you're making this comic now for your audience who exists today and they're the ones who are gonna remember when your comic loses its momentum from poor consideration for pacing and how it relates to update scheduling.

At the very least, consider the fact that comics take a LONG time to make, ESPECIALLY if you're doing it all on your own, so don't put yourself through the hell of drawing the same scene over the course of a year or more. Your readers will thank you, as will your drawing arm and sanity.

I hope all that helps!!! Good luck!

[shyjusticewarrior]

"Fear is the most powerful force on Earth."

~ Jason Todd, Batman/Catwoman: The Gotham War

"But you, more than anyone on Earth, understand the importance of putting a good scare into people."

~ Jason Todd, Batman: Under The Red Hood

[munasnook]

While daydreaming about my story: Wow. This is so long, so deep, and so fantastical. How am I going to remember to write all this down? How could I ever possibly fit this into a few pages? This arc will take me months to write!

Vs. when I sit down to write it: It was only….. 3 paragraphs…?

[fruitlicense]

it’s gotta be so interesting being a professional writer for the big comic book companies, because like. by the demands of the genre, every comic you write for DC or Marvel or whatever has to tell a good story without giving the characters too much growth.

that’s a crazy fucking way to write! you want to tell a story and put your character through things but then they can’t have changed fundamentally by the end?? sometimes you get lucky and write That One Run where some key shift is allowed to happen that defines the character moving forward, but for the most part, you have to walk this fine line of maintaining audience interest in a static character. and that’s fucking fascinating.

that’s not really a requirement you see in movies or TV, and it’s like the opposite of how most books work. even fanfic doesn’t have that limitation, because there’s no expectations of a shared continuity from author to author or even between one person’s works. every time you start writing you can restart from the template of the comic or even from scratch, and by the time you end your fic you’ll likely have a person who looks very different from the comic canon. only the people answering directly to DC/Marvel/[other companies I don’t know about because I need to diversify my reading] have to preserve the archetypes, because they have to make sure they can still sell comics.

one of the easy, obvious examples is the way that Gotham never gets better no matter how hard Batman works, because if his methods got more successful or the villains left or reformed or died, you wouldn’t have the same conditions to perpetuate the Batman archetype. it’s also why we get a slew of origin story retellings, because those are the only places where you really can write permanent character growth, even if it’s sort of working backwards from the character everyone recognizes.

I’m not necessarily saying this is a bad thing about comics! I think it’s how their media niche is defined, actually. you can read a comic book to return to familiar characters who always stay the same and then go read a novel or watch a movie to follow new characters’ growth over time. I just think it’s an interesting demand to make of writers because of how paradoxical it feels.

[kazoosolo]

Check out these new and exciting Batman comics that will change the history of comics forever!

We’ve got:

⁃ Robin dies (again)

⁃ Joker and Batman’s final confrontation for real this time, we promise someone will die

⁃ Joker is back from the dead and worse than ever! Who could have seen this coming??

⁃ Batman is back from the dead

⁃ Thomas Wayne was secretly a horrible person

⁃ Thomas Wayne is still alive and a terrible person

⁃ Robin(s) die again

⁃ Some villain has enacted a full takeover of Gotham City! This will never be brought up again after it’s over

⁃ Batman is insane (again)

⁃ Batman fights the people with superpowers! (Again)

⁃ Batman is invincible because he’s so smart

⁃ Batman’s smartness backfired and now everyone hates him

⁃ Batman is going to get married for real this time

- Someone killed Batman’s fiancé (again)

⁃ The location of the Batcave was discovered and someone blew it up! (Again)