Believing the Unbelievable

The suspension of disbelief happens automatically in readers and audiences if a story does its job.

Audiences WANT to believe in a story when they start reading or watching it.

I mean, you can' t count on everyone. I remember going to see the Benjamin Button movie and my friend said she didn't buy into a baby being born "old". She said the wrinkles and "oldness" would be impossible to be born with. I didn't think that was valid, personally. If you're going to engage with that story, you have to buy in to the central premise. Believing that one piece of magic was a requirement to watching that movie.

The movie was not good. But that's besides the point. The impossibility of the "magic" was not the problem.

In a supernatural horror story, you have to be willing to buy in to the premise of ghosts, or monsters, or aliens or whatever the premise is -

- but it's the job of the book, or comic or movie to allow you to suspend your disbelief unconsciously, and to not ask you to buy any additional fantastical or illogical events.

What I mean is, an audience can be expected to buy into a magic spell that forces a lawyer to tell nothing but the truth, but the mechanics of his family life, job, and the legal mechanics of the courtroom plot should make as much sense as possible. The more the non-extraordinary parts of the story fall apart, the worse the story will play.

(there should also be an internal logic to the "magic" itself. Tantz Aerine talked about this last week).

So how do you create belief in something extraordinary?

There are several ways I'm sure. I think comics have an advantage there; readers of comics are preconditioned to accept magic powers, wild creatures, and all kinds of fantastical stuff. Also, the visual aspect of comics can present a shortcut to believability. The reader is SEEING the creatures, or powers, or whatever. So they'll believe. Believing in the real humanity of the characters and their relationships becomes the challenging part.

To make readers believe, my favorite technique is to make a character NOT believe. Like Agent Scully in the X-Files or Han Solo in Star Wars, a character who doesn't buy the magic of the Force or the existence of the paranormal was a big help in making those extraordinary things seem real.

I used this technique in a ghost story I did in my Typical Strange comic. Abigail was being haunted by a ghost, but it took her the entire story before she would accept the possibility that the ghost existed. I believe this allowed readers to accept the reality of the ghost much more easily.

The other method that comes to mind would be to create a realistic, believable, environment and characters first, and then bring in the fantastical. This was done nicely in E.T. and Guardians of the Galaxy.

Do you do anything to sell the fantastical in your comics?