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Comic class - change of plans
15 years ago
General
For those who remember, I've started my second year in evening schooling for the Comic Author course.
Now, we are required to work on a 5 page project throughout the year which we'll eventually present to a jury. We had to work with "zombie" as our theme, and expand upon that as narrow or as broad as we can think of it.
Seeing the comic page from last year, my teacher said I should expand upon that and hand in a segment from the story I want to work on, namely Dalehan and Rumbottom. But, here lies the problem again that I'm really not good in writing a well-thought out plotline that should encompass several albums, split up in several sub-stories. I can only think up "scenes", but there's no proper narrative that combines them.
Combine that with the page I posted a while ago. there really isn't anything going to happen in the 5 pages I'm required to draw, nothing worthwhile that'll make you eager to read more.
I'm also not sure what I'll do with the timeline for my story. Right now it seems that I want to start somewhere in the middle, and have the history of the characters told through backflash. It isn't neccesarily bad, I know plenty of manga and anime tend to do this.... mostly when someone dies. But, to me, it brings the progressing story to a halt to provide background information on a character who won't matter any longer. My two cents ofcourse, but I just don't like it.
Anyway, rambling aside, I've decided to put that project on hold for a 5 page short story that I wrote down last year, still in line with the overall theme of "zombie".
A short story about a washed up superhero who got into a slump when -everyone- became a superhero or villian, making his old generation of superheroes obsolete.
He became a bitter old man, and traded in his cape to work as a plumber, because no matter how 'super' the people became, they were incapable of completing simple household tasks.
During one such job, he is confronted with the child of a superhero couple, who had always admired our plumber, reading his old comics and watching the TV shows.
Because of this, he realizes that him being "normal" makes his unique among the superheroes, a hero among heroes so to say, and picks up his cape once more as The Plumber.
It's a bit simple, but it's solid in my eyes. We learn enough about him in those 5 pages and there's a conclusive ending.
But I'd still like to write a proper storyline for Dalehan and Rumbottom..
Now, we are required to work on a 5 page project throughout the year which we'll eventually present to a jury. We had to work with "zombie" as our theme, and expand upon that as narrow or as broad as we can think of it.
Seeing the comic page from last year, my teacher said I should expand upon that and hand in a segment from the story I want to work on, namely Dalehan and Rumbottom. But, here lies the problem again that I'm really not good in writing a well-thought out plotline that should encompass several albums, split up in several sub-stories. I can only think up "scenes", but there's no proper narrative that combines them.
Combine that with the page I posted a while ago. there really isn't anything going to happen in the 5 pages I'm required to draw, nothing worthwhile that'll make you eager to read more.
I'm also not sure what I'll do with the timeline for my story. Right now it seems that I want to start somewhere in the middle, and have the history of the characters told through backflash. It isn't neccesarily bad, I know plenty of manga and anime tend to do this.... mostly when someone dies. But, to me, it brings the progressing story to a halt to provide background information on a character who won't matter any longer. My two cents ofcourse, but I just don't like it.
Anyway, rambling aside, I've decided to put that project on hold for a 5 page short story that I wrote down last year, still in line with the overall theme of "zombie".
A short story about a washed up superhero who got into a slump when -everyone- became a superhero or villian, making his old generation of superheroes obsolete.
He became a bitter old man, and traded in his cape to work as a plumber, because no matter how 'super' the people became, they were incapable of completing simple household tasks.
During one such job, he is confronted with the child of a superhero couple, who had always admired our plumber, reading his old comics and watching the TV shows.
Because of this, he realizes that him being "normal" makes his unique among the superheroes, a hero among heroes so to say, and picks up his cape once more as The Plumber.
It's a bit simple, but it's solid in my eyes. We learn enough about him in those 5 pages and there's a conclusive ending.
But I'd still like to write a proper storyline for Dalehan and Rumbottom..
I'm writing, currently, a 3 season, live-action series.
When working up the concept, I started with the "why". Not some big existential thing, but why is the story interesting? So, I grabbed my antagonists, the baddies. Why are they bad? What are they after? Why is that not a good thing? Once I had this satisfied to my liking, and solid feeling (I hate "evil for the sake of evil" so their motivation is important to establish believable bad guys), I then moved on to the protagonists. Who are they? How are they involved in this? What makes them special enough to warrant the spotlight? Through this engineering of the plot, I was able to develop the world, the main characters on both sides, and also through fleshing this out, some of the character personalities.
Once all that was done, I sat down and decided to figure out the end of the story. It's a lot easier to get to your destination if you know where it is. (I compared this to going on a road trip. Instead of driving around aimlessly and going "Oh, this looks like a good place to stop", we start out knowing we're going to Las Vegas. The "where" in Las Vegas isn't as important -yet-, but at least we know where the story is going to end, if not the specifics of how.) To me, this makes the writing a lot easier. You pick out your key "scenes" and arrange them in a sort of progressive order, kind of like sight-seeing in the road trip comparison. You know you have certain "stops" you want to make, and you know where you're going. Usually this is enough of a starting guideline to put you on the right path to writing an interesting story that is constantly moving forward and growing.
Hope this helps.
whereas my plumber became a plumber because he was a superhero at first, but his generation was pushed aside when everyone and their mother became a superhero. :p
And BTW, there's an old saying among authors; start the story in the middle of action. (It gets the audience involved in the story right away.)
Somehow that reminds me of Record of Lodoss War, where the first episode was, as explicitly stated in the commentary, an episode which took place during the same time around the 5th episode or so. It was also a very action packed episode to get you pumped, fighting dragons and fiends and "showing everyone being awesome". Though the rest of the series felt very, very slow. I should watch it again, I probably didn't understand too much of it back then.