A thing I’ve been asked often in the past: how can I tell when a new idea is a graphic novel or a prose novel? I’ve previously answered that it’s instinct from experience, but that’s not very helpful. And the question occurs to me again this week because in the past few days I’ve started work on a new idea that I instinctively knew was a comics series. I usually don’t develop comics ideas without a specific artist in mind: I develop for and with them, to their skills and interests. TREES, for example, comes as much from Jason Howard’s curated moodboards and curiosity collections as it does from my own obsessions.
To begin with, I will say: this is my personal approach, not an immutable physical law. Find your own way of doing things, make your own rules.
The two things I consider first are information and interiority. The comics page radiates less information than the prose page. And serious interiority tends to require lots of words, and the comics page can only usefully interpolate a certain volume of words.
(Various people have expressed various different “rules” for that. Stan Lee claimed something around 28 words of text in a panel, as I recall. Mort Weisinger said it was 35. Alan Moore once suggested it was 210 words per page. See how those work for you. Lettering was a lot bigger in those days, but lettering is a graphic actor in the panel. And then look at the brilliant Emil Ferris in MY FAVORITE THING IS MONSTERS breaking every “rule”)
The third – how boring is is going to be for the artist to draw?
These things can connect in different ways. There are artists who love nothing more than drawing acting, physical language, facial expressions. This is one of the reasons why I prefer to develop comics with an artist in mind. If your artist is absolutely allergic to “talking heads” comics, then your calculation will shift.
What does your artist want to say? (This is the rule I’m breaking right now with this story idea. Maybe I’ll find an artist who finds what they want to say in it, or just fancies drawing it. Maybe I won’t. It happens.)
Comics and books have different toolkits. One is not “better” than the other. Each is capable of effects that the other is not. There are things I can do in comics that would be near-impossible to even attempt in books, and they wouldn’t have the same effect anyway. (Also, be aware at all times that a comics script is only ever half a piece of art — it’s not a complete statement until your collaborators have finished.) Prose has access to a bunch of tools that comes can’t always get near. Comics and prose even have different ways of approaching time itself.
What does the idea require in the way of length? You need a very long graphic novel to tell as much story as in a mid-length prose book. Most things we think of as graphic novels would come in as novella length if they’d been done as prose. This can be the killer. If I know I’m going to need sixty thousand words to elaborate the idea, the decision’s been made for me.
But also: how does the imagery of the idea strike me? How specific is it, in my head? Describing an image down to its finest edges in prose can freeze it and kill it — you have to suggest it, so it takes on its own life in the reader’s head. If you need to see it on the page in all its clarity for the thing to work for you, then it’s a visually-led story.
I only had a handful of very strong images for GUN MACHINE, but they were simple enough that they’d have more life in prose. And almost everything else happening in that book was happening inside John Tallow’s head. In NORMAL, the visuals had strong and complex motions to them, and, aside from that book being very interior indeed, they would have been a pig to draw.
TREES needed the Trees. It wasn’t going to work unless you could see them, feel their massive presence in the landscapes, the sheer alien pressure of them on the seen world. It wasn’t enough, for the story, to just tell you they’re there. Their silent weight had to be present.
(Which is a weird thing to say because Jason Howard’s art is generally all about motion, as anyone can tell. But Jason can do anything, basically.)
What does the story need to be its best self? That’s the thing you learn by trying.
RELATED: Comics And Time, a short talk I gave some years ago in Dundee.
(Written 3 April 2022)