A friend of Amanda Donahue, one of my co-creators on THE MARGINS, asked me some questions, and they were so good I felt it was worth dusting off Tumblr to answer. Thanks, Nick, and I hope these rambles give you something worth your while! 

Below are Nick’s two questions and my VERY long answers.

Sooo, my first question would just be how you got into it. Is it your primary form of writing?

Great question. So, is it my primary form of writing? Hmmm. I just finished a commitment to a set of 4 interactive mobile game scripts that took up quite a chunk of the last few months. In that time frame I also released a one-shot licensed 22-page comic and a 12-page digital creator-owned comic. So, on balance, I don’t think it’s currently my primary form of writing, but it’s definitely my favorite form, and it’s a medium and industry that I’m both very familiar with and passionate about, so whenever I’m given the chance to write comics, I take it.

However, comics as an industry is a difficult one to navigate. With the two biggest publishers owning incredibly popular franchises, the prime means for writers to make a living on comics is to essentially write super-heroes that you don’t own. And that, in itself, is neither good nor bad. It’s just worth noting that if you want to make comics your primary form of income, then DC and Marvel are going to come into your orbit in some shape. And that type of writing will come with its own set of thrills and challenges.

On the flip side, creator-owned comics and graphic novels can be an extremely fulfilling creative experience, if financially tricky to produce and sell. But the comics industry is still intimate enough that you can find ways to make and sell your comics. There’s a lot more to talk about there with regards to distribution and comics retail, but that’s another conversation.

It’s also worth noting that while the prevailing understanding is that digital comics sell only a fraction of the numbers of printed comics, it’s also a very accessible platform. With time and effort, you can put a comic book out to a global audience.

I may have veered slightly off topic here, but I think the point I’m trying to make is: if you want comics to be your primary form of writing, they most certainly can be. And you can and will make comics passionately and whole-heartedly, and you’ll put them into the world.

But making a living off of them is much more complicated scenario and every creator out there will have different advice for you, but be prepared for an equation that’s pretty familiar to any who has ever freelanced: less control = more money. Generally speaking, of course. There’s always a Walking Dead situation, if all the stars align.

Oh, and I never answered the first part of that question — how did I get into it? I’ll try to bullet point my personal path, which is super wonky, but probably not much stranger than most writers.

It kinda went like this:

Dave’s Writing Career: A Timeline

• I always loved comics. In high school, I even wrote and drew 80 pages of a comic that was a horrible pastiche of Marvel/Epic’s Elektra: Assassin by Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz and DC’s The Question by Denny O’Neil, Denys Cowan, and Rick Magyar. However, in my 20s, I’d attend conventions and discover that I had no idea how to move from fandom into professional writing.

• I went on to study English and Creative Writing, thinking I’d write prose novels.

• Then I moved to LA and fell in with a crowd of Hollywood screenwriter types. I wrote a few screenplays with a writing partner, Jeremy Rogers, but when nothing really came from it, we decided to make our own short films.

• We made 3 short films that went into film festivals.  At this point, I was tired of spending so much time and money making 10-30 minute films that didn’t result in much. We hatched a new plan: what if we availed ourselves of the iTunes platform and released an audio drama as a podcast?

• Wormwood: A Serialized Mystery was the result. It allowed us to tell long, serialized stories, much like my first love: comic books.

• Toward the end of the Wormwood run, an illustrator named Jared Souza contacted us. He’d adapted scenes from Wormwood into sequential art, and  was curious if we ever thought about turning it into a comic book. We jumped at the chance, and with Jared we wrote and drew an 12-page mini-comic that we printed and took to the San Diego Comic-Con. Hermes Press was interested in our book, and they offered us a deal shortly after the show was over.

• From there, I kept thinking about what else I could do with comics. I partnered with Chris Anderson for Lost Angels, and we made another 12-page mini-comic as a sales pitch, and we were offered a digital-first deal with a new publisher, Comicker.

And it keeps going from there, but that is the long and windy road telling stories in a LOT of different formats, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Learning the strengths of one format does help you to understand the strengths of another. For example, for Wormwood we could really lean into long, twisty passages of monologue because it was all about the actors’ voices. However, as soon as you bring that to comics, you realize the amount of word balloons those monologues would take would utterly cover up any artwork on the page. And so you adjust.

Which is a nice segue to your other question…

Secondly, I’d love to hear how you work things out. As far as layout in regards to story. The most challenging aspect for me is to convert my thinking from imagining in film to now these static images. Do you put a lot of thought into that area, or do you focus mostly on the story and then sort of work that out as you are getting it down?

My initial thought is: “I do both.” But let’s break those up.

In terms of static images: think about the key moments. The perfect still frame of film that sums up the core of a moment of story in your mind. You want to build out from there.

But almost more importantly: think about the gutters. The space between panels. The gutters are actually where all the magic in comics reside. I recommend reading Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. McCloud is great for understanding how a reader processes the information when we’re as absorbing art in a sequence. And the key is the gutters: The narrative “time” between panels can last a millisecond or a millennium. And the reader understands that from the context. So you’ve got to figure out how much you can get away with in between panels.

A panel exists in one moment in time. One action can occur. Imagine a father and son playing catch. What’s the most important part of that scene? The father throwing? The son catching? That’s two panels. Or, it could be a wide shot of the two, the ball in mid-air, but that wide shot probably should take up as much space on the page as two close angle shots of throwing and catching.

So, you ask yourself: what’s the emotional context of the scene? Is it important to show the father about to throw the ball (perhaps metaphorically teaching his son)? Is it important to show the son catching that ball (perhaps showing the son absorbing the lesson)? Is the activity itself the most important part (the wider shot might work best). It really depends upon the what you want to get out of the scene.

Another example: A man sits in his living room. There’s a knock at the door. He answers. It’s his landlord.

How many  panels is that? The only concrete answer I can give you is that it’s ”more than one” — because the of multiple actions involved.

It could be two panels: 1) the man sits reading a newspaper, but his head is cocked because he’s JUST heard the SFX of knocking on his door. 2) he’s standing at the open door and the landlord is asking him for a rent check.

It could be five panels: 1) the main sits reading a newspaper. 2) We show the front door, with knocking SFX. 3) The man opens the door, but we don’t show who it is, building suspense. The man is nervous. 4) we reveal it’s the landlord, standing there, arms crossed and angry. 5) The landlord asks for the rent check.

How important is that scene to your overall story? Five panels is roughly a whole page. Do you want to spend a whole page to show that the man is late with his rent?

That’s brings us to the next part of your question, and the other aspect that’s really important to comics: page count.

Page count is crucial because of the amount of time it takes an artist to draw a page, and also because of the printing costs. A standard issue of a comic is roughly 20-22 pages. So you’ve got to start by knowing how much space you’ve got (some writers will refer to this as “real estate”).

As a general standard, I’m going to assume that you’re looking at a mini-series or story arc that’s probably 5-6 issues, at 20-22 pages per issue. That works for comic book issue publishing, and it collects nicely into a graphic novel.

Even if I know I’m writing a graphic novel (as we did with The Margins), I tend to think in those general terms because it helps me break the story down.

So, I might start by assuming I have 5 chapters that are each 20 pages. Then I figure out — where is the best place to end Chapter One? It shouldn’t just be a moment of pivot — a cliffhanger, something that pushes the reader to start the next chapter as quickly as they can.

I’ll use the film THE MATRIX for this example, but I’m doing this from memory, so this may not be the best story breakdown.

At first thought, knowing I have 5 chapters of 20 pages each, it seems to me a great end to the first chapter might be Neo waking up in his pod in the real world. I mean, you have to read Issue #2 if that’s where Issue #1 ends, right?

If that’s page 20, you now have 19 pages to get there. And you have to get through: Trinity and the agents, Neo following the white rabbit, Neo meeting Trinity, Neo getting a call phone from Morpheus, Neo taken by the agents and getting the tracker put in him. Neo getting the tracker removed. Neo taking the red pill.

That’s a LOT! (It’s probably more than 20 pages, but please bear in my I’m just using this as an example.)

Next I’d think about: how much real estate do I give to Trinity vs. The Agents. Maybe four pages. The first two are the fighting and running across the rooftops. The second two could be a DOUBLE-PAGE SPLASH (two pages that make up one giant image) of Agent Smith ramming his truck into the phone booth. That’d also make for a good title/credits page.

I can probably script that, but I first have to think if I can get though the rest of it with 15 more pages. Ack!

Luckily, the next bits contain a lot of conversations, so we can probably get away with 5-9 panels per page, lots of back and forth conversation, condensed onto fewer pages. And that’s key because we’re going to have to go to larger panels for key action sequences like Neo climbing out on the building ledge. Neo getting the tracker put into his belly.

To be honest, at this point, I’d probably have to rethink some of this — this feels like too much for 20 pages. But hopefully that example shows you how I approach the process. It’s basically taking the whole story and then breaking it into issue-sized chunks, then pages, then finally panels.

And as you think about panels, you do want to make sure you have a mix. Some kind of big splash page is important — it allows you to focus on the biggest moments, and it also gives the reader a bit of a chance to relax, slow down and take in the art. A sequential page can have more panels, but it becomes denser, and each panel can contain less information — one or two dialogue balloons, limited backgrounds, etc. The more panels, the less room and detail each panel can contain.

Personally, I like to think about most of my sequential pages being about 4-8 panels, peppered with one or two splash pages. I can bump up or lower the panel count as needed. If you start by thinking about 3-4 panels for big cinematic action and 5-9 panels for dense conversation or smaller actions, then you’ll probably find yourself with a decent balance through your comic.

Those are my long-winded answers. I hope this helps. There’s much more to talk about in terms of craft, but this covers most of what I think about when breaking down a comic book story.