Prose v Comics

When I first started putting together my story idea for Typical Strange many years ago, I imagined it to be an animated series. With a lot of time and effort and learning Toon Boom software along the way, I had a pretty strong idea of the main characters, and a handful of possible story ideas.

It turned out that it was a massive amount of work, and I didn't think I'd live long enough to finish nearly as many episodes as I wanted. So after awhile I switched the idea over to a webcomic and joined the Duck.

There can still be plenty of delays with making a comic, as we all know! Today I was thinking about another ambition from back in the day: I wanted to write novels and short stories. I wrote a few in high school, and a few since then, but never written a novel - though I still want to. I've written far more in the comics medium.

Stories are stories of course - but I was thinking about the special delights of writing in comics form rather than prose. Every time I try to write a short story I realize how rusty those muscles are!

What I like about writing comics -

The art does a LOT of the heavy lifting. My story outlines look the same for prose and comics, but when it comes to prose, a writer needs to be more creative with the actual words (makes sense). So many of my outlines are "this happens - then this happens. then the character does this - then the other character says this!" In a comic, this takes some figuring out as far as panels and actual dialogue, but since I haven't worked on it enough, my prose feels very flat, and sort reads like a list of events. It takes work to make these things feel alive and interesting in prose.

Also, character descriptions. Deciding how much of a character's appearance/demeanor to describe or not, and how often to describe certain qualities, is a challenge, especially in a longer story like a novel! Sometimes even major characters are not described at all, appearance-wise! I know too much description of a character's looks, clothes, demeanor, and style is usually not a good idea. But in a comic, it's taken care of in the art! There are still decisions to be made there of course, but it takes away something that I find very challenging in prose!



Obviously one drawback of telling stories in comics is that it's labor intensive on the drawing side!

Have you written comics as well as prose? Which do you prefer and why? Or are they each satisfying in different ways?

See you next time!


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