Book Notes: The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics, by Dennis O’Neil

Part One

To be a comic book, those words and images must work together as parts of speech work together in a normal English sentence. Think of comics as a language comprised of two separate and vastly different elements used in tandem to convey information. To be a good comics writer, you must be, or become, as fluent in this hybrid language as you are in your mother tongue.

I did it for the sake of novelty, and that’s not a sufficiently good reason.

One of the most obvious beginners’ mistakes is also one of the most common, that of asking the artist to draw two or more actions in a single panel. Since one of the recurring and embarrassingly valid criticisms of modern comic books, particularly the adventure and fantasy titles, is that they’re extremely difficult to understand on the most basic level. Sometimes, it might be easier to breeze through your little sister’s dog-eared copy of Finnegan’s Wake than to understand why the guy in the purple cape is bashing the guy in the orange mask. And what is the guy in the purple cape’s name? Who’s behind the orange mask? Where on (or off) the Earth are they? What year is this? What century? If the writer and artists have done their jobs, the reader will be fed the answers to these questions without ever realizing it.

Plot-First This method was devised in the early sixties by Marvel Comics’ founder, guru, guiding light, and eternal inspiration, Stan Lee,

The writer can be inspired by something in the art. This is the reason many good writers chose to work plot-first. An expression on a character’s face, a bit of body language, something in the background—any of these can suggest clever lines, characterization, even plot twists that improve the final product.

Archie Goodwin.

During the early years of Archie’s career, he would begin by sketching out an entire story on typing paper and then write his script on other pieces of paper. This allowed him to control both the visual and verbal pacing, and produce some superb comic books. If you’re an artist-writer, you may want to experiment with Archie’s method.

Know the end of the story before you write the beginning. You may get a better idea halfway through the work, and rethink your plot, but, unless you are very experienced indeed, or enjoy massive rewriting, you should begin by knowing what you’re working toward.

Stories are, one way or another, about change,

One-Damn-Thing-After-Another Structure

two powerful antagonists bash each other and the nobler of them eventually wins.

O’Neil’s Heavy-Duty, Industrial-Strength Structure for a Single-Issue Comic Book Story

Act I

The hook. Develop and complicate situation.

Act II

Events leading to: Inciting incident. (Major visual action.)

Act III

The climax. Establish situation and conflict. Major visual action. (Major visual action.) Denouement.

A character’s reaction to something off-panel creates a compelling question to hook the reader.

The submission guide that DC Comics used to send to writers defines the hook as “the essence of what makes your story unique and nifty.” I call that premise.

how do you hook ’em? Let me quote one of the mantras often heard around the office in which I currently work: “Open on action.”

Characters doing something, preferably something big and dramatic, will probably capture a potential reader’s attention. If they’re doing something big and dramatic that poses a question, even better, as you’ll learn in the next paragraph.

The second kind of hook: a question. A character is reacting in horror to something the reader can’t see: What is it? A character is opening a box: What’s inside?

Hook number three: danger.

enemy was lurking in a culvert or was massed around a corner or was otherwise hidden from the battle-happy Joes. That’s classic danger hook stuff. A simpler, cruder version might be someone shooting at a hero, or about to shoot, or an innocent person falling out a window or from a plane, or an innocent maiden enjoying a bonbon unaware that Dracula’s nasty older brother is coming in the window behind her

Hook number four: An image so striking that the reader has to continue.

What you never, never want to do is open on an inanimate object—a building, for example—unless it is so unusual that, in itself, it excites curiosity. People are interested in people, not things.

Always start a scene as late as possible.

Inciting incident This is the event that causes the hero to react, that provides the danger or puzzle or task that galvanizes the hero into action. According to Robert McKee, it is what “radically upsets balance of forces in the hero’s life.”

a McGuffin is what the hero and villain are fighting over—the code, the hidden will, the treasure map, the computer disk which contains the information that will save the city.

Said in Woody Allen’s early and still-hilarious movie What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, the good guys and bad guys vie for the world’s best chicken salad recipe.) If the McGuffin is clever, as it usually was in Hitchcock’s films, you’ve given the reader some added enjoyment.

Act II

We should now take the story in a new direction. Something unexpected happens, maybe something that involves hero in combat with villain. If you’re writing a super hero story, that something will probably involve action and a demonstration of what powers and abilities make your super hero super. If you’re not doing super hero stuff, you should still try to surprise the reader by complicating your protagonist’s life or introducing a new problem/ obstacle for him. Get him in trouble. You want to convince the reader that he cannot possibly win.

As an old short story writer’s adage advises: Put your hero out on the end of a limb and start sawing.

But don’t type “The End” and hit the computer’s off switch just yet. You might want to finish with a denouement. This is a kind of postscript, a brief scene that follows the climax and eases the reader out of your world. You may use it to answer that bothersome final question you were forced to leave unanswered in the climax, or show how your characters have been changed by their adventures, or indicate what will happen to them next.

“… We always tried to get a good, interesting, climactic situation and then find a reason for that situation … It was a good way of making stories … to find a good, big climactic gag—a very interesting situation—and then build everything up to that.

In other words, work backwards and let the story structure emerge organically from the incidents needed to arrive at your big finish. With this method, the writer is sure that, at least, his story is going somewhere.

start the scene as late as possible and once the dramatic point is made, end it.

each incident in the plot is more intense, each action bigger, each danger more menacing, each complication more difficult, than what went before. The idea is to bring the readers to an acme of suspense and emotional involvement and then provide them with a catharsis—a relief, usually pretty sudden, from the tension you’ve created.

Suspense is the state or condition of mental uncertainty or excitement, as in awaiting decision or outcome, usually accompanied by a degree of apprehension or anxiety.

Surprise has limited entertainment value.

Suspense can keep readers enthralled.

the end of each act should incorporate a major visual action. This applies mostly to super hero stuff.

Subplots are plots. They must advance toward a resolution,

You’ve got to con the reader into being willing to believe that the subplot is heading toward an ending. And you should work to make the incidents in the subplot as entertaining as possible.

A rule of thumb might be: when you’re writing an ongoing series, always reintroduce subplot elements if they haven’t appeared for two issues.

(Ideally, you’d reintroduce them every time out.

A hero must be the agent of the story’s resolution. That means that a) he must act, rather than be acted on, and b) he must be directly involved in the main plot.

Most heroes also do something else: They represent values the audience will find admirable.

deconstruction is a very limiting narrative strategy. Where do you go, once you’ve shown your hero to be a creep?

You’ve given readers no one to admire, to root for, no one to identify with

Here’s the question to ask yourself when determining what negative qualities to impart to your hero: Do his flaws add to or distract from the story? Nothing should ever distract from the story.

What does my person always want?

Who or what does he love?

What is he afraid of?

Robert Towne insists must be asked.

Why does he involve himself in extreme situations? If you’re writing a single story, not part of a series, this question will be answered when you establish the conflict. But if you’re working in a serial form, you must give your hero a logical reason to continually put himself in peril.

Television folk call this the hero’s “franchise.”

Robert McKee tells us that our true nature is revealed by the choices we make under pressure.

One very good writer-editor I’ve worked with believes that many readers don’t read captions at all, and he may be right.

realistic dialogue involves the reader more completely than any other single device.”

Here’s a simple trick: Read your dialogue aloud. Does it sound like spoken speech to you? If so, it’s probably okay.

If you’re going to be a slacker, be lazy about your hero and save your industriousness for your villain. He or she is in some ways the most important character in your story. The reason is simple: A hero is only as good as his antagonist.

Part Two

There should be no scene that doesn’t advance the plot.

You should avoid, like dirty handkerchiefs, anticlimax, a term which once meant oversentimentalization and now means explaining plot elements after the emotional interest is exhausted.

To avoid anticlimaxes, you may have to feed information to the reader as the story progresses, particularly if it has whodunit elements.

The Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, is the Citizen Kane of comic art, a work that entertains, innovates, critiques, and defines a genre.

Basically, the procedure is this: The writer has two, three, or even four plots going at once.

• The main plot—call it Plot A—occupies most of the pages and the characters’ energies.

• The secondary plot—Plot B—functions as a subplot.

• Plot C and Plot D, if any, are given minimum space and attention—a few panels.

As Plot A concludes, Plot B is “promoted”; it becomes Plot A, and Plot C becomes Plot B, and so forth. Thus, there is a constant upward plot progression;

people will always respond to a strong story, though they may initially resist it.