Warren Ellis on writing for artists
An awful lot of this is instinct. Studying pages of their work to see how they handle certain things, and identifying areas of difficulty. Not every artist has complete control of every aspect of comics. I've known some great sequential artists who can't compose a decent cover to save their lives. I've known artists who just die on the page if you give them more than six panels, and I've known some who haven't known what to do with their lives if you give them less than nine. Every artist is totally unique.
So you get down into the page. Cover up balloons with your thumb and see if you can still follow the narrative. Can you follow where the lead characters are in space down the page? A comics artist is as much a director as a cinematographer -- are the characters acting? This speaks directly to how you write the script. With Colleen Doran, you tell her what's in the character's heads and off she goes -- she's acting-geared, she responds best to knowing the psychology of the players. You can tell that from any issue of her Distant Soil -- she's absolutely bound to the characters' performances. John Cassaday's a designer of shots, so you give him dynamic shapes. Darick Robertson's a great caricaturist, so you give him grotesques and reaction shots to get his best pages -- one of Spider's malevolent crook-toothed grins was worth volumes. Carla Speed McNeil is just supernatural with body language and expressions, like a bloody anthropologist -- establish the spaces and the physical panel-to-panel beats very clearly, and you concentrate her focus on how the bodies are moving, giving you the masterclass on comics art that was her Frank Ironwine.
What kind of panels work best for the artist? Which ones come off kind of clumsy? Why are they clumsy? In full-script comics, any bad panel is down to the writer not setting up the artist properly. The artist carries the load of first-impression - anyone picking up a book for the first time and seeing bad pages is going to say, "wow, that guy can't draw comics," not, "Jesus, the writer really screwed that page progression up," or "My God, the writer just crushed that guy into the ground with those eleven off-grid panels, seeing as the artist's not George Perez or Matt Wagner..." So the writer's responsibility, beyond getting the bloody story right, is to make the artist look good.
And that means you go blind in your office at 3am staring at comics and photocopies and scans, picking apart their pages. Like me.
So you get down into the page. Cover up balloons with your thumb and see if you can still follow the narrative. Can you follow where the lead characters are in space down the page? A comics artist is as much a director as a cinematographer -- are the characters acting? This speaks directly to how you write the script. With Colleen Doran, you tell her what's in the character's heads and off she goes -- she's acting-geared, she responds best to knowing the psychology of the players. You can tell that from any issue of her Distant Soil -- she's absolutely bound to the characters' performances. John Cassaday's a designer of shots, so you give him dynamic shapes. Darick Robertson's a great caricaturist, so you give him grotesques and reaction shots to get his best pages -- one of Spider's malevolent crook-toothed grins was worth volumes. Carla Speed McNeil is just supernatural with body language and expressions, like a bloody anthropologist -- establish the spaces and the physical panel-to-panel beats very clearly, and you concentrate her focus on how the bodies are moving, giving you the masterclass on comics art that was her Frank Ironwine.
What kind of panels work best for the artist? Which ones come off kind of clumsy? Why are they clumsy? In full-script comics, any bad panel is down to the writer not setting up the artist properly. The artist carries the load of first-impression - anyone picking up a book for the first time and seeing bad pages is going to say, "wow, that guy can't draw comics," not, "Jesus, the writer really screwed that page progression up," or "My God, the writer just crushed that guy into the ground with those eleven off-grid panels, seeing as the artist's not George Perez or Matt Wagner..." So the writer's responsibility, beyond getting the bloody story right, is to make the artist look good.
And that means you go blind in your office at 3am staring at comics and photocopies and scans, picking apart their pages. Like me.
posted by Rowan at 9:59 AM
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