The first thing I remember reading on my own was The Amazing Spider-Man #122. The Night Gwen Stacy Died.

I was four.

I snuck into the milk crate where my brother held his comics, pulled one out, and leafed through the book. The art was cool at the time, but what struck me was the dialog. I didn’t know what “nefarious” meant at the time, but it was a fun sounding word. I did, however understand death. And when the blonde girl died at the end when Spider-Man thought he saved her, it was genuinely heartbreaking.

I read a ton of comic books in my youth, a practice I continue to this day. Marvel Comics in the 1980s-1990s are what inspired me to write. When I was a teenager, a couple of friends and I decided to start our own independent comic line called Magic Pencil Comics. It didn’t go well, but the lessons I learned from scripting a couple of test issues and reading comics for most of my life have stuck with me, and have made me a better writer.

Pacing. Comic books, like any other storytelling device, work best when events unfold organically, and build in a way that gradually increases investment until you get to a big payoff. Because comics offer a small chunk of a larger narrative every month, multiple payoffs happen in a story arc. Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead (you might have heard of it) is a prime example of this: his arcs are usually six or seven issues long, and every issue has its own buildup and reveal. However, when you take his arcs as a whole, each issue sets up the next and every reveal is pushing to a larger payoff, and by the end of the arc, your emotional investment is paid off, while setting things up for the next arc.

Scene. Because comics are a primarily visual artform, they use limited words when compared to a novel or even a short story. As an exercise, I used to write down the description of the setting in a panel or a page of a comic. Seeing a scene can help your ability to describe it, and while a picture being worth a thousand words may sometimes be a stretch, it can definitely give you 300-500 words of setting.

Characterization. Perhaps the biggest lesson I learned from comics was how to craft multi-dimensional heroes and villains. Even though a comic can be considered a short-form story in and of itself, the successful ones weave a long and connected narrative where the characters grow and change. Characters are profoundly affected by life events – partners dying, marriages failing, parents dying – and the changes in how that character views the world are realistic and based on those events.

For instance, the death of Jason Todd, the second Robin, affected Batman for almost a decade in that he refused to allow another Robin in his midst, and him dealing with the grief and failure was an enormous driving force for the character (until Jason Todd was revived almost 20 years later, but that’s another story).

Got a favorite comic book story? Sound off in the comments!

#2017 #comicbooks #inspiration #writing