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this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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I have worked with writers before to write comics, and let me tell you, they tend to write about 10x as much text as you can fit into a panel. I once had a professional writer script out a 24-page graphic novel for me, they wrote 10,000 words. Most "writers" are not "comic writers", and it's a completely different discipline - there are very very few "professional comic writers" out there, and those that are, are employed full time.
Trust me. I script comics out first, then I go through several revisions to "punch up the dialogue", and make it as short as possible. My format is incredibly restrictive, because I'm hand-drawing and hand-lettering everything. Worse, I draw relatively small, this comic fits into an A5 page.
Lettering is a different skill to writing and drawing in the comics industry, I'm doing all three here. Lettering legibly means that this specific comic sits at the upper end of the wordcount that I can provide. Most of the major webcomics that you're used to (say xkcd) tend to sit at around 2-5x the number of words per strip as I'm using. OotS tends to sit at about 10-20x the wordcount.
If you're talking about story content - I also have a restriction that every comic has to stand alone. People repost my stuff, they see one on twitter or on tumblr, and don't see the full context of a plot. Some people visit my site once a month, or once a year, and read some of it. This means I have to set up the gag, and deliver it within 4-6 panels. There's very little room to "write a story" with this gag-a-day format, so therefore actual narrative has to take a backseat to satisfy the medium. While sometimes I'd like it to be, this isn't a graphic novel, I'm not delivering 500 pages of prose, it's a webcomic. OotS solves this problem by using 20 panels per comic. I can't hand-draw that much and post once comic per week, my process is slow
While I'm not under any illusions that I'm the greatest writer in the universe, I do have a lot of experience with this format, and the majority of people I could "hire" would do a worse job.
Additionally, out of the three skills you need to make these styles of comics, I know for sure that my art is the weakest of the three - by quite a wide margin. I get far far more abuse and hate-messages about my art than anything else, so telling me that the writing sucks is pretty refreshing.
Also, I focus-test my scripts with a group of people before I draw them. It takes a LONG time to make these comics in this art-style, it's a massive time-loss to draw something that isn't funny or doesn't make sense, or is confusing. When I make a comic, I storyboard it first, roughly sketch it out, and then show it to a close circle of my friends for suggestions, often if the dialogue is confused or meandering, I rework it.
All of this is before the fact that I'm generating these stories out of a campaign with my friends, so the content tends to be jokes that happened in a session, or events from those sessions. I'm making it for free, and I'm not selling it as a professional product. "Hiring a writer" and paying them fairly would be prohibitively expensive for something that isn't intended to generate revenue, if it were even possible to find one who'd be interested.
This made me legit snort.
Sincerely, a fan.
I shouldn't have written that, I got snarky. It's 4am.
Just so you know, even though you might not be "writing a story" you're doing an excellent job of writing a character. :)
Honestly, my strengths in writing are in creating characters, dialogue writing, and jokes. My biggest weakness is narrative.
I should point out, every character in this comic other than Konsi is the creation of someone else. Razira is an NPC created by my DM, Faelys and Toron (As well as Sand and Mystery) are other players' PCs. To a large extent, their personalities and behaviour are are prescriptive for me. I can work to do them justice, and I have some wiggle room to alter them here and there to serve the format, but they're not my ideas.
The main reason Konsi features in these comics is that I'm a lot more comfortable making my own character do stupid stuff for laughs on the internet than I am with using the characters of the other players - so to that end, if I have a funny joke, Konsi will tend to be the comedic one, and the other characters are foils that enable her.
Having said that, many (not all) of these scenes are depictions of actual campaign events, that I found entertaining enough to reproduce.
(Yes, everyone in the campaign gave me permission to make comics of their characters.)
This is a little separate to answering the query directly, but people interested in the writing process might find this interesting to read, so I'm going to expand a little on the general thoughts and decisions that go into making something like this. You can skip this if you're not interested.
Panel 1
When writing a standalone comic, it helps if the first panel helps establish the scene. It was important for me to show that this was happening some time after the Previous comic, because that establishes that the characters have had some time to get to know each other better - to this end, I set this comic at night rather than in the day (they were leaving in the morning, and mentioned breakfast) - and I also changed Konsi's clothes to armour to show they're on the road. I also wanted to establish that the two conversations were not in earshot of each other, so I had to show Razira and Toron in the background.
This is a lot of information to fit into a 2-inch by 2-inch square on a piece of paper (that's the physical size of this) - so the dialogue HAS to be very short. I need to establish what the characters are talking about, and set up for jokes. To this end, I started the conversation in media res, trusting that the reader would be smart enough to contextualize what was happening. The phrasing "I don't hold up to her" isn't enough to establish the content of the conversation for a reader, it's a little confusing, and you want the reader to grasp the subject matter quickly, so I reinforced it by making the reverse comparison. "I'm not in her league, she's more impressive than me" - I threw a questioning tone in there to allow Faelys to respond, partly to establish that Konsi is talking to someone else, a trusted friend she's known for a longer time, and partly to give me an excuse to elaborate. This is about as "punchy" as it gets, and I can't afford more text, because I have to establish the scene in the same shot (the alternative is more panels, which is a no-no - six is a pretty hard limit.)
Panel 2
While I, as the writer, want my dialogue to be as concise as possible, Konsi does not wish to co-operate. Konsi is a chatterbox. She talks a lot when she's nervous or anxious - it's part of her character.
The main "joke" I'm making is that Konsi thinks Razira is incredible and important, and Razira is realizing that Konsi is a much bigger deal than anyone else here (at least to her.) - because both conversations are effectively similar in subject matter, I want to establish a contrast in feel between them. Konsi is very talkative, Razira is very direct. Konsi's concerns are unfounded and silly, Razira's are serious and grounded. Konsi overthinks, Razira is blunt and hasn't realized what's going on here. To this end, I need Konsi to babble incoherently for a bit, which is going to take the whole panel... however, I manage to fit in a secondary gag here, a callback to an earlier comic.
This text isn't superfluous, it's very deliberate - for readers of my comic, it delivers a laugh moment, which breaks the pacing up and allows me to shift focus.
Panel 3
Sequential Art writing isn't just about dialogue and narrative, but also about visual narrative as well. You can use imagery to establish information to the reader, and thus you don't have to write as much text - in an ideal world, the images and text should work together to both contribute information to the whole, and the reader should take in both at once as they travel through the comic. Many new comic writers don't fully grasp this, and just "write a story" then stick random images over or under it. The dreaded "talking heads" comic (where two characters just talk at each other, and the images don't matter at all" is way to common in webcomics, and it takes understanding of the medium to use both together synergistically.
Because I'm moving scene focus, I need to re-establish the scene, this means I have to draw at least some background again. I also want to include a reason why Razira and Toron aren't right in the middle of the campsite, and "gathering firewood" is a good enough one to serve.
The dialogue in these four panels needs to accomplish a couple of things all at once:
However, as much as I want to do all of this, Panel 3 needs to establish scene, so I can only get one speech balloon into it. Razira's dialogue is about as short as I can make it to establish the conversation, while leaving room to show a forest and firewood.
There's also a subconscious visual reinforcement of the character roles I deliberately chose here. Razira is holding the wood, and Toron is picking new sticks off the ground. This is because Razira has 19 strength, and Toron has 6. Most DnD players will naturally assume the full-plate-greatsword Paladin is "strong" and the rogue is "not-strong", but not all of my audience plays DnD. Regardless, this panel is intended to just give a little confirmation-of-presumption in the characters' relative physicality.
Panel 4
Toron's doing the exposition I need here. He could say a lot less, but the details here help explain how unusual/strange an event this was for him, and also give the reader an idea of how "involved" this divine contact is. This isn't a single sentence, or a vague vision, this contact took a significant period of time, and was an event.
I vary the shotr here, mostly because I want to practice my composition work. Having Toron bend down to gather a stick mostly varies the visuals so they're not one-note, but it does serve also to show that they're currently collecting firewood and not just standing around.
Panel 5
This is the setup for the payoff. I know that my payoff has to be a single very short "oh no" kind of statement, so I have to get to the point right now. Toron saying that "Tymora took her to the temple" really hammers home that this is some kind of special contact - a goddess going to these kinds of lengths is somewhat unheard of in the Forgotten Realms.
Razira is only just now realizing the gravity of all this, so obviously she tries to clarify it... Surely Toron means that Konsi just got a vague feeling to go somewhere, or a confused omen or something?
Toron responds not only by confirming that no, this is direct divine communication, but that it's not even a unique occurrence - it's happened before. The fact that he doesn't view this as remarkable enough to stop collecting firewood is intended to show that either (a) he's gotten used to it, or (b) he doesn't really understand how significant this is, or both. (it's both, but that's not too important to the reader - this is mostly like this to establish a subconscious tone of the conversation from Toron.)
Panel 6
Any more dialogue here detracts from the impact of the panel. No dialogue also works, but I find the little speech bubble with the smaller text rather comedic myself - that's preference.
So... that's the thought process that goes into scripting and storyboarding something like this. I find this really enjoyable to do, and to develop as I go. A lot of the specific choices are restricted by my medium, or by the need to get to a gag before the comic ends, but a lot of them are informed by a study of the invisible rules of comic-writing, such as the need to break up pacing, make jokes as you go, establish scene, vary composition, and convey information through a mixture of art and text.
Most of the time, anything I choose to write is performing double or triple-duty, it's not just making conversation or filling space, it's either setting up something later, making a secondary joke, providing supplementary information, or growing the reader's understanding of the different personalities of the characters.
thanks for the free info and the free comics
I forgot something else.
Speech balloons are... a restrictive shape. You don't get "free word choice" when writing dialogue for speech balloons - you need to break your sentence up into "lines" and each line has to be approximately the same length. Longer bubbles are less restrictive, because you have lots of words on the line, and can normally use a synonym to change something on the line to get what you want... but long skinny bubbles tend to look bad in-panel. I get away with it by cheating with "text blocks" when I'm expositing, but in general it's bad practice to do too much, because a big text block draws the reader's eye away from the images.
Panel 4 here is an example of this. I don't really have space next to the art to put the lower bubble into the frame, so it has to escape the bounds a little to make room. In an ideal world, I would write "100" I'd write "a hundred" - but there's no way I can fit that in. I wanted to write "a sunken temple" but that's too much to fit into the line, so I have to pick something shorter. I want to write "she woke up with..." but again, it's an extra word I can't afford to spend.
FWIW, I really like these as they are.
I've binged through them a while ago and they feel like a wink to an actual campaign, genuine.
Little windows offering glimpses of things that could have happened during actual play.
Like.. this doesn't need to have happened as is during a session, but it feels true enough for the characters that it could have happened during or inbetween your actual D&D sessions.
Countless forgettable series on streaming sites have writers, didn't do them any good.
Even if you did hire a writer, it would just lose focus.
Do they even know the campaign? Probably not. Even if they somehow did, they're notorious for not sticking to source material because they too wanna get creative. I don't have anything against writers, but you're doing a fine job yourself and I don’t really see how someone else could write these without losing touch.
I'd rather hear it from the goblin's mouth, so to speak.
I love Konsi and the work you're doing.