A funny way to tell a story

There’s been a lot of talk lately of MCU style writing, meaning the kind of quip-filled dialogue which doesn’t take the story seriously. Characters behaving like high schoolers made sense in Buffy, where they actually were high schoolers, but is a lot less effective when the mighty Thor says lines that you’d expect from Xander Harris.

Good writers know that their writing must be true, and thus it must include humour because humour is a part of life. Also that the humour must be in-character, not any old joke that will raise a laugh – then it’s not cinema, it’s panto. Thor’s comments in the first movie are funny because they are how an arrogant Asgardian god might see our world. But six years later: ‘He’s a friend from work,’ is the director* sneering at you for taking superhero movies seriously.

That’s the lazy way to get a laugh, which is just to have characters in a fantasy setting use slangy modern idioms. But the writers who began the trend did it with serious intent; they still wanted you to believe in and care about their story. They were looking for ways to make the audience relate to the characters, and clearly lots of ‘Prithee, varlet’ dialogue wasn’t going to do it. There is plenty of humour (I hope you will agree) in Mirabilis, but Leo and I try never to put a line in a character’s mouth if it isn’t true to the moment and spoken in their voice.

Undercutting tension with humour can be very effective if it’s true to character. Look at Steed and Mrs Peel, most especially in the scene at the end of “The House That Jack Built” when the defence mechanism of their insouciance almost breaks down. But for the writer who doesn’t care, it’s a short step from there to having every character reach for the glib line that will get a laugh.

It is unjust to call this MCU writing. The entire Captain America trilogy managed to include humour in a way that rang true. The Russo brothers’ Avengers movies likewise. And in any case, Marvel didn’t invent the trend. Look at the Universal monster series. They start off selling us the story straight with Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy. Four years on, The Bride of Frankenstein is most definitely Whedonesque – or perhaps we should say that Joss Whedon’s writing is Hurlbutian. It took Universal a bit longer to get into their non-stop gag phase but Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein could easily match Thor: Love and Thunder or Willow for hey-it’s-all-a-joke silliness.

And, as a writer, how do you know when that funny line you’ve thought of serves the story and when it’s going to kill immersion? Well, that’s the job, isn’t it? But if you need some pointers, this video by author Brandon McNulty is an 8-minute masterclass in the use of humour:

* Yes, we all know that particular line was suggested by a kid who was visiting the set. But it's the director's choice whether to include it, and it fit in with the tone he decided on for the whole movie.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I don't want the blog to turn into serial excoriations of the latest bit of entertainment to waste my time. Honestly, I'd far rather read and watch good things (The Shadow Hero, Dirty Snow or Elementary, if you want recent examples) but, having sat through the whole of Agents of SHIELD season one, I feel I owe it to the world to say something.

The great thing about The Winter Soldier is that when you get Fury or other SHIELD agents spouting their ends-justify-the-means doctrine, Cap is there to reground it all with a real moral code - the point of that whole narrative of the movie being, not that a lot of Hydra agents have been pretending to be SHIELD agents, but that SHIELD is Hydra. In the war on terror they have virtually become the same thing.

The TV show, on the other hand, depicts the breakdown of any line between the good and bad guys without apparent irony. On the surface it's about a few stern-parent characters left in charge of a lot of flirty, high-schooly young folks who ought to be partying the night away at the Bronze but instead have been given a plane and as much rope as they like. Agents on both sides are willing, indeed eager, to use or condone torture and killing in cold blood, but Coulson can't provide any counterbalance because he isn't driven by Cap's unalloyed morality. He's your typical self-righteous maverick-with-a-badge who is happy to (ab)use his position of power as he sees fit. It's the kind of show the infantry in Starship Troopers probably watch between battles.

The writing is a curate's egg of the usual Whedonisms (in this case Jed, not Joss). The early episodes have some great unexpected twists such as Coulson's use of the truth serum, but those are quickly forgotten as the story gets bogged down in talk, plans and McGuffins. As the plot spirals in ever-decreasing circles, there's a sense that the writers are barely an episode ahead of their desperate reveals and reversals. By the time we get to the betrayals, which are all easily seen coming, it's starting to feel like Dollhouse season 2 (*Sideshow Bob shudder*)

The plot has become such a mechanical tyrant by the last few episodes that a told relationship like Coulson's and May's is privileged over a shown relationship like Garrett's and Ward's - as if by now the writers had lost any ability to respond organically but were simply sticking to whatever story outline they came up with months earlier. And there is the usual Whedon inability to see a bad guy as anything other than a parrot squawking crazy plans. It's as if, when any character reveals themselves as a Hydra plant, they grow a metaphorical moustache to twirl while gloating. Maybe in a very different show this might have turned into an interesting conflict of ideologies. But no, this is a story in which you are just supposed to root for the people you're told are friends and boo the ones you're told it's okay to despise. The finale is a particularly damp squib, very reminiscent of the Dollhouse finale in fact, and it's not improved for having saved up enough budget to pay for Samuel L Jackson and his gag writer.

Ah yes, gags. In Buffy they served the story. Here, if a funny line occurs to the writers, they use it. Whether it's something that character would actually say, or if it breaks the tension of the story, makes no difference. If only they'd gone the whole hog and remade Get Smart with Maxwell as a SHIELD agent. That might have actually been funnier and more engaging.

When you consider the quality of other shows in the Feds-tackle-weird-shit genre - Fringe and The X-Files especially - Agents of SHIELD looks particularly lame. Its only excuse for existence is to keep the Marvel torch burning between the movies, and great as those movies have been for the most part, so far DC are winning the TV battle by a mile.

Stories are gardens

Stories are organic, but they're not single organisms like a tree, say. A story is more like a garden. You plant seeds and then as you walk through the garden those seeds are sprouting and growing and flowering all around - at, you hope, just the right moment.

One of the most obvious kinds of story seed is when you embed the germ of a plot idea early on so that the reader is prepped for it later. Ever seen a movie where the characters get bogged down in exposition in the last fifteen minutes? That's because the writer failed to plant all the seeds. At the end of a story you need to be thinking, "Oh my God, this is happening!" not "Wait - what's happening and why?"

A seed can also be planted to carry the burden of complex discussion of a theme that would interrupt the story if it had to be fully elaborated in dialogue. For example, in the Buffy episode "Crush" (ep 5:14) very early on we hear Willow explaining to Buffy and Tara that Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame wasn't really a hero because his decisions were not taken as part of a moral compass: “He did good things for love of Esmerelda, but that doesn’t make a hero”. Later in the story, Buffy is arguing with Dawn about hanging out with a dangerous vampire like Spike. Dawn says, “You used to date Angel,” and Buffy says that’s different, Angel had a soul. To which Dawn replies: “And Spike has a chip. Same difference.”

Because of these seeds, when the climax arrives we’ve already covered the thematic question of what makes a hero: doing good things, or having good motives?

There are two kinds of story seeds. The first is at the basic level of craft. At the risk of mixing metaphors, those are the screws and washers that hold your story together. The second is a more subtle foreshadowing of things to come.

The two types are used well by Edna O’Brien in her BBC adaptation of her own short story Mrs Reinhardt. The main character, who is staying at a French rural hotel, has a valuable emerald necklace that she wears most of the time. She meets an American whom we suspect of stealing the necklace. However, at the end of the story we learn that it was not the American who took it, but one of the hotel maids.

There are two scenes that demonstrate the basic level of seed-planting. The first is in Mrs Reinhardt's bedroom where she is delightedly swinging a pillow, letting off steam because she thinks she's alone, when the maid comes in with breakfast and surprises her. Later, Mrs Reinhardt strays into the kitchen to find the maid and the other serving staff fooling around until the chef brings them to order.

So those two scenes do the basic craftwork: they tell us (1) that the maid has a key and could enter the room at any time, and also (2) that the maid may act all serious and deferential when on duty, but she is an individual who in private is frivolous and playful like any young girl.

But that's not all. In the second scene, O’Brien goes further and plants the higher level of seed. As the maid is going past her out of the kitchen, Mrs Reinhardt points at a plate of fruit and says, “May I?” and the maid says, “Of course, madame; they’re all hanging out there in the garden to be picked.” So that introduces, very subtly and in retrospect, the notion that the maid might regard things that are lying around as there for the taking.

Now, having pointed out how the story mechanism works there, I'm going to add a caveat. Analysis is not the same as synthesis. All these patterns, where to put the plot points... well, knowing the paradigm of a Mozart concerto, say, wouldn't mean that you or I could write one. Storytelling has to get into the bones, to the point that you do this kind of thing without thinking. You only notice it after you've done it. When Garth Marenghi says, "I often re-read my own stories to learn from them" it's intended as a joke. But so you should. It's analysis of your own work, even more than that of the masters, that will guide you in planting the seeds to make your story grow.

Darkness is too easy

Back when I was working in games I saw a lot of concept pitches. If you’re picturing the likes of Pikmin or Ico or LittleBigPlanet – well, that would’ve been a job to get in early for. Instead, what actually seemed the most common effusion of the collective unconscious was a succession of dark, edgy takes on something like Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz.

In these pitches, Alice/Dorothy had usually gone psycho, confined to a mental asylum, her family dead or abducted by stark horrors that had pursued her from Wonderland/Oz. And from there it’s a paint-by-numbers to decide what had become of the Tin Man (cyborg), Cowardly Lion (serial killer), Scarecrow (cyborg serial killer) and so on. Those same writers would even have pitched Dark Pooh if Disney weren’t standing guard over Hundred Acre Wood with a very big stick indeed.

The reason why that’s such a heart-sink is not because I don’t like stories with a bit of darkness. More than a bit, in fact. My fave comic of all time is Sandman. No wait, it’s Watchmen. No, maybe it’s Swamp Thing. Whatever – all of those had darkness but they had light, beauty and humanity too. And, in the case of Sandman, real sweetness.

But plain unadorned darkness is just too facile. My wife Roz used to ghostwrite a middle-grade action-adventure series for a brand name author. The heroes were mid-teen crime fighters but the readership was centered on 10-12 year olds, meaning that sex and violence were mostly just hinted at. Over dinner one evening, for fun, Roz and I envisaged a YA version of the series, revisiting the characters a couple of years on and going right into the abyss with them. The kid whose obsession with computer hacking had given him a dangerously detached view of justice. The one who achieved his dream of joining the army but quickly became traumatized by the realities of modern warfare. The rich one, who had hardened and become arrogant working for her father…

In a dark pit struggling to reach the light. It almost writes itself. Trouble is, that’s so easy to do. And nothing good in writing is accomplished with ease.

As well as being the lazy writer’s option, a story of unremitting darkness is tonally boring. It’s way harder to write hope and humor and humanity alongside the horrors – which is why I value TV shows like Buffy, Fringe and Doctor Who. Yet in comics these days we so often see the stories copying the least original videogames, with heroes constantly being maimed or disfigured or driven mad. And, trust me, relentless twentysomething angst is not the way for comics to tap back into a broad market.

The best of the horror comics have heroes who are surrounded by darkness but who haven’t got darkness in their souls: Hellboy, B.P.R.D., even (believe it or not) John Constantine. And the authors of those books don’t gratuitously wallow in the darkness of their stories; they remember they are telling underworld myths that must lead the heroes back to the surface world. Like Alice, emerging from the rabbit hole disturbed, enchanted, altered – a far more interesting fate than simply being forever scarred.

Stories - how long is too long?

How do you know when it’s time to bring the curtain down on your characters? I got to thinking about this because Kevin McGill of the edutainingly brilliant Guys Can Read was lamenting this week what a damp squib the Smallville finale turned out to be.

I haven’t seen many episodes of Smallville, but after ten seasons there are only two places a show can end up. Two different kinds of whimper that can supplant the bang of a timely end. One is when the show runs out of steam. You keep tuning in because you care about those characters, but you know they’re not going to be hitting balls out of the park ever again. Case in point: the final season of Babylon 5. That wasn’t Mr Straczynski’s fault, but it was still an exhausted winding down, best forgotten, of what had been at times the most exciting SF show on television.

Or the show can spiral into the sucking singularity that is narrowcasting. I’m a devoted Buffy fan, but I’m not sure that anyone could pick it up at the start of season seven and have any idea what was going on. I began to get a whiff of the narrowcasting bouquet this week with the Doctor Who fan discussions (in which I took part, got to admit that) about whether or not Rory is still an Auton. And if that means nothing to you – okay, you got it; that’s narrowcasting.

Stories have an end, even when they’re about characters we really love. You may not want to admit it, but your parents’ story ends when you leave home. After that it’s all reunion shows – usually “The One with the Cranberry Sauce”. And endless reunion shows are fine for real people whom you love, but in the case of fictional characters then it really is time to boot them off Reichenbach Falls.

The Norse gods had Ragnarok. The British Empire had World War Two. Beowulf had his dragon. The end dignifies what came before, and sometimes redeems it. Stories need endings. At the close of a well-crafted tale you should be sad to leave the characters – even the bad ‘uns – but you know it’s right. Their story is over. “I feel… cold,” says Captain Barbossa, and it’s such a brilliant culmination of everything that’s gone before that it ought to be the end. Only the magical might of Calypso and the million-dollar demands of Disney could undo so absolutely essential a demise.

Ongoing comic book sagas risk the calamity of too long a life more than most. Sandman is great because it built to a definite conclusion. If we properly cherish what we were given in Watchmen, we won't ask to read the ongoing adventures of Nite Owl and Silk Spectre. Conversely, at a full century of issues, even the freshness of 100 Bullets was starting to feel more than a little stretched out. Knowing when to take a last bow is the mark of an effective performer.

Because of this, Leo and I are resolved that Mirabilis will run to issue #40 and sufficit. After the green comet has gone and normal service is resumed with the beginning of the real year 1901, whatever happens to our characters after that is up to you. Gentle breath of yours must fill their sails - Shakespeare thereby acknowledging, as he threw aside his pen for good, that ultimately all great stories are merely enablers for the reader’s own imagination.

When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead

To properly appreciate just how disturbing Jefferson Airplane’s "White Rabbit" is, you need to burn all your furniture, daub luminous graffiti on the walls of your house, and crank up the hi-fi to a volume that could liquefy human bone. That’s the scene Michael Douglas comes home to in David Fincher’s The Game. His life is being taken to pieces and it’s going to take more than the King’s men to put it back together again.

What makes Grace Slick’s original version of the song so much more unsettling than most of the "White Rabbit" covers is the way she delivers it so plainly. The tone is hectoring, not haunting; fanatical, not febrile. And that’s what makes it powerful. The stark, shouty simplicity of the presentation. The whole nightmare otherworldliness is right there in the lyrics, and Ms Slick delivers them in a relentless martial rhythm that has its own unstoppable momentum. You are dropping down a rabbit hole and there's no parachute. Dressing it all up in a self-consciously “weird” melody would only weaken it.

Are there other examples of that in other media? There’s a superbly creepy one in The Fearless Vampire Killers. When Alfie Bass sits up on his bier there’s no showing-off in the photography. Polanski films it the scene as plain and stark and shocking as a dream. It’s funny at the same time, of course, but that only makes it more unsettling.

Or how about the ghost stories of M R James? Unadorned prose and almost a humdrum narrative frame from which the supernatural pokes through like a mouse in the skirting board. I find that much more shuddery than Lovecraft’s florid prose, always so anxious to assure us this is all very, very frightening. Likewise, there are more scares in one minute of Let The Right One In than in all the last decade’s output of Hollywood horror movies, precisely because Tomas Alfredson plays it completely unplugged.

The best episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is “The Body” where any attempt to dress up the drama with eerie music and clever-clever direction would insulate us from the raw emotion. Instead, Joss Whedon strips that all away and we’re left with no cosy refuge such as the usual fictional wrapper would provide. Result: forty-four minutes of intense drama that leave you genuinely shaken.

Can you think of other examples from prose, movies, music or comics where simplicity delivers a punch that could not have been achieved through showmanship?

Strictly hush-hush

Good news - though the barest whiff so far - from AintItCool, who have this story that Joss Whedon is meeting with John Landgraf, the head of cable channel FX. I call it a whiff because they're only getting together over a meal at this stage, but after hearing Mr Landgraf's words of admiration for Joss's work I'm sure there'll be candles and music and chocolates.

Seeing as FX are behind the greatest television drama series ever (The Shield, if you even have to ask) and Joss is responsible for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is of course the other greatest television drama series ever, I'm just praying for a quick betrothal followed by the pitter-patter of brilliant new shows. After the tragic demise of Dollhouse, cable is the obvious move for Joss. (Actually, it was the obvious move after Firefly... Joss, for such a smart guy, you took your time, man!)

The future of comics

If you want to start the comic geek equivalent of a bar fight, just try popping up in the forums to say print is dead. That’ll do it every time.

I get why it bothers them. I’ve been collecting comic books most of my life. Shelves have collapsed in this house under the combined weight of Gaiman’s and Moore’s imaginations. Lee, Kirby and Ditko have to stay on the ground floor; no ceiling would hold them. These are my greatest treasures.

Yet, all that said, print’s on its way out.
Okay, maybe not at the prestige end of the market. The same people who buy the deluxe box set of Buffy DVDs (a snip at $166 – are they insane?) after getting hooked by the TV showings will buy the trade paperback of Hellboy having read the monthly comic books. So print will survive there - for a while at least. But that’s the five percent of comic readers for whom it’s a real passion, and their wallets can’t sustain an entire industry. It’s the 95% of casual readers we need to hang onto. As pamphlet comics die, electronic publishing offers the only answer.

There are two reasons why I’m so smitten with e-publishing of comics, especially on mobiles. The first is rooted in habit. I’m used to reading comics in monthly installments. That model still just about makes sense for Marvel, DC and Dark Horse, but it’s a shrinking polar cap even for them. On smart phones and handhelds like the PSPgo, you’ve got the perfect platform for delivering regular comic episodes.
But that’s merely the reactionary argument. The real bonus is that electronic media provide a better way of reading comics. Some of the early comic reader apps have just treated the phone screen as a little window for peering through at a comic page. I say: let’s kiss goodbye to pages! My biggest headache in writing comics is getting the reveals to come at page breaks. The way forward is going to be a step beyond current features like Sony’s autoflow system, to the point that the old historical idea of the comic page might even be jettisoned entirely. Whether it is or not, the view can track across each frame rostrum-style to reveal new parts of the image. Each story will be some blend of animation, motion comics and static comics.
Here are some frames from Mirabilis to show a very simple way that an e-comic could enhance the reading experience. Each time you press Next, you get successive word balloons or sound effects. At the transitions between panels, there could be cuts, dissolves or fades depending on what works best for the story.

Welcome to the future. My ten-year-old self would’ve eaten this stuff up!

Grr Argh

Maureen Ryan has an illuminating in-depth interview with Joss Whedon on the Chicago Tribune site. They're mainly talking about Dollhouse, his recently-cancelled show about operatives whose minds are blank until they’re imprinted with the personality and skills required for an assignment. (And if that suggests Joe 90 sitting in the Big Rat, put the image right out of your head; what Echo gets up to in Dollhouse would really steam Joe's bins.) After a couple of early episodes that make you suppose the show is going to settle into a comfortable weekly mission format, Joss takes it off in a whole strange, murky and kinky direction. And then at the end of season one it suddenly goes off the map into totally unexpected territory.

The bit that really got my attention was when Joss starts discussing his plans for more internet projects along the lines of Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, which has parallels with how Leo and I would like to build up an audience for our comic projects:

Ryan: When I was soliciting questions for this interview, I kept getting, "Why isn't Joss Whedon going to cable or just going off and doing his own Joss Whedon online portal or whatever?"

Whedon: Well I can answer both those questions - because Fox forgot to cancel my show. They looked on their calendars and went, "God, we were supposed to cancel this months ago!"

Nice to see that television networks also operate under the “idiocy of the system” method. Although by some fluke the system hasn’t behaved quite as idiotically as it does in other media, because Fox are after all allowing the show to run until the end of season two. Which is a lot more sensible than just filibustering a project and generally pissing off the people who created it until they wander off to do something else so that the publisher/studio/network gets to keep the biggest slice of an infinitely small pie.

Whedon: The Internet is slightly more interesting [than TV] right now just because I feel like we have to get in there and start figuring out how to create entertainment without the networks and the studios, because they’re basically trying to figure out how to create and entertain without us.

Ryan: Yeah, I think you’re right there, but as you say, it’s not easy to kind of create a new model for how everyone gets paid and makes what they want to make.

Whedon: Yeah, but people aren’t going to make what they want to make anymore. That’s not going to happen. The rainbow, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow got smaller, significantly smaller. […] The artistic community is more and more left out of the equation, so the trick is going to be finding out how to make the Internet work in such a way that people [can get by] because it’s not going to pay TV money. It’s not. In fact, people are going to have to be entering the business less with the idea of making a fortune and more of the idea of just making product, getting it done, getting it out there and then hoping that there is a way in which it can support [a creative community].

If anything, book publishing is further along that curve than TV. People complain about novels “written by” celebrities, but the fact is that an author must first build a platform, as they say, or their opus will assuredly sink in the sea of books being published every month. A soap star is someone who has nailed that obscurity problem, and the fact that they can’t actually write is easily dealt with by bunging a relatively small sum at a ghostwriter. (That's the way producers and editors mostly prefer writers anyway - as hirelings.)

The problem is that ghostwritten novels with celebrity names on the cover will not produce the original content necessary to drive the whole industry onwards. So some genuine authors are still needed – not many, but some. However, those authors too have to build their platform to stand out from the crowd. Networks and publishers should therefore be delighted to see authors willing to strike out and take all the risks themselves on the Internet. Then they can offer sweet deals to the ones who bob up to the surface. It’s like being able to wait and see if a lottery ticket has won before you pay for it.

Anyway, back to Joss Whedon. All this has just reminded me that I still haven’t got around to watching Firefly. The hokey cowboy angle just keeps getting in the way. But I’ll try and get past that because Whedon’s TV shows are like Alan Moore’s comics: even the weaker stuff rewards your time. So if you’ve begun puzzling over Christmas presents, that could be your answer. Dr Horrible is a great laugh, Dollhouse is compelling and thought-provoking, and Buffy is just about the greatest body of work yet made for television. Go on, you won’t be disappointed – and, better yet, you’ll be helping Joss escape the clutches of the networks so he can go on to create even more original stories.

New direction

"If you liked that then you'll like this." Except... not necessarily. For me, Buffy is the masterwork of television drama. I buy everything Joss Whedon does on DVD because he and his team have earned it ten times over just for those seven glorious seasons. And Dollhouse and Dr Horrible too - fabulous. But I keep on trying and I just can't get into Firefly. I admire it, but how faint is that praise? "Don't you find me attractive?" "Well, I do admire you..." Ulp!

Leo and I have been talking about what we should work on next. Front runner among a whole bunch of notions is a graphic novel rom-com. See what I mean? If you were hoping for cyborg dinosaurs you're going to be bitterly disappointed now. I often hear from Dragon Warriors and Fabled Lands fans who are usually bewildered to see what I'm doing these days because they perceive little overlap between those old sword-n-sorcery adventures and the richer character-driven stories in Mirabilis. I feel like I've matured, the fans just wonder when I'm going to get back on track: "We enjoy your films. Particularly the early, funny ones." So to speak.

The Glass Half Full is that, because we are self-funded, we can work on whatever we like without publisher interference. Frankly, I doubt if any book publisher would commission us to do a rom-com graphic novel anyway. We need to do it first, then go looking for a publisher. I'm approaching it like we're making a rom-com movie that we would actually pay to see ourselves - and hopefully one that will be laugh-out-loud funny in places. It may not appeal to everybody who likes Mirabilis, but take a look anyhow. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Rabbit

“Hi how are you I’m fine.”

That’s how the late Blake Snyder characterized bad dialogue. “Engaging characters talk differently than you and I,” he wrote in Save the Cat. “They have a way of saying things, even the most mundane things, which raise[s] them above the norm.”

So, writers must find ways to say familiar things in an interesting way. That applies to all prose, naturally, not just dialogue. When it works, you get lines whose poetry lets you see even a commonplace scene with fresh eyes. Buffy the Vampire Slayer ran seven seasons – call it 110 hours – throughout much of which we were watching friends arguing or making up (or making out). Happens every day, right? Yet in the hands of skilled writers like Joss Whedon, Jane Espenson, Drew Goddard, Marti Noxon and others, it was never boring. Buffy always had a new way to say “I love you”, “I hate you” and “I’m gonna dust you.”

But there are pitfalls. In the search to find a new spin on an old line, you can stray off into the realm of the downright peculiar. There was a movie (which will remain nameless because I don’t actually know what it was called) in which the heroine said, “Somebody is trying make me dead” instead of the plain old “Somebody is trying to kill me”. Trouble is, that doesn’t sound like great dialogue, it just sounds like English isn’t the character’s first language. Don’t let fear of a cliché drive you to gobbledygook.

“Match me, Sidney.”

Ah, now - that’s the great Clifford Odets, three words comprising one of the most famous lines in cinema. But but but, you’ll be saying, a simple little bit of dialogue like that can’t work without an actor to deliver it. True; the line wouldn’t have the same impact on the page of a comic as when it’s spoken with chilling egomania by Burt Lancaster. So try this classic Odets writing:

SALLY
But Sidney, you make a living. Where do you want to get?

SIDNEY
Way up high, Sam, where it's always balmy. Where no one
snaps his fingers and says, 'Hey, shrimp, rack the balls!'
Or, 'Hey, mouse, mouse, go out and buy me a pack of butts.'
I don't want tips from the kitty. I'm in the big game with the
big players. My experience I can give you in a nutshell, and
I didn’t dream it in a dream either: dog eat dog. In brief,
from now on, the best of everything is good enough for me.

Nobody talks like that. Of course they don’t. But where “He wants to make me dead” stinks with the sweaty desperation of an impending deadline, Odets’s dialogue comes from truth. It tells us everything about Sidney’s resentments, his fears and what he thinks he needs. And, most importantly, it sings.

But, before you decide how to have a character say something, you need to stop and think whether they need to open their mouth at all. In a moving visual medium, dialogue is the last storytelling tool you reach for. Hitchcock’s test was to watch a movie with the sound off and see if he could still follow the story. In a comic, you’re not going to get the nuance that an actor can bring with just an expression or a gesture, but you do still have a very mobile viewpoint so you don’t need to use as many words as in a novel. (Well, duh. But remember: I’m just talking about the dialogue here.)

Somebody once said you should never have more than twenty words of dialogue per comic panel. There are rules and there are rules. If you look at pretty much any panel in a comic by Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman or me (see what I did there?) you’re going to count more than twenty words. Some comics it’s “Hey!” “Stop!” “Never!” Fine, that’s different strokes… We’re not going to talk about quantity here, we’re going to talk about what constitutes good dialogue.

First rule, as always, is hide your exposition. Dialogue doesn’t have to do any work that the images are doing already. Suppose our hero is talking to a wild-eyed guy who’s setting a clock strapped to a makeshift contraption. There’s no need for dialogue like: “Once you activate the timer, this bomb will go off in seven minutes.” We can already see that it’s a bomb, and we know what timers are used for. Instead the hero gingerly picks up the device:

HERO
How long’ll I have?

BOMB MAKER
Plenty of time. Smoke a cigarette. Fill out your
tax return. Make your weekly phone call to Mom.
Just don’t start War and Peace.

Good dialogue serves more than one purpose. The bomb maker is telling the hero he won’t have much time once the bomb is primed. That’s the surface meaning. But notice that every example he gives is a reminder of mortality: cigarettes, taxes, family. Then he caps it with ironic emphasis, because starting a war is exactly what the hero is going to do.

And then later, if you want the tension that comes with a ticking clock, why not insert a countdown in captions from the moment the bomb is activated? Because, you know, “seven minutes” would’ve meant nothing anyway. With a countdown you get immediacy.

Dialogue like the bomb maker’s there is overdetermined. On a subliminal level the best dialogue bombards the audience with a whole bunch of associations and resonances designed to grab their full attention:

“He says there’s a storm coming.”

“I know.”

Or how about one of the most effective dialogue exchanges ever written:

“Do you expect me to talk?”

“No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die.”

That’s superb writing because it takes us (and Bond) by surprise and explodes an emotional charge that powers the rest of the scene. Whereas look at something like this:

“You can’t just let them die. It’s inhuman!”

“Who ever said I was... human?”

Yawn. Even the most detail-obsessed sci-fi geeks demand a little more emotional engagement than that. Because most of us are more interested in character than we are in information. And that applies even when the information concerns the deaths of millions of people. On the surface, that’s just a statistic. It takes storytelling to make sense of it on a human level.

Penultimate word on this subject from Mr Blake Snyder: “Dialogue is your opportunity to reveal character and tell us who this person is as much as what he is saying. How someone talks is character and can highlight all manner of that character’s past, inner demons and outlook on life.”

And, to prove that point, the final word goes to Ms Rosenberg, courtesy of Jane Espenson:

“It’s a doodle. I do doodle. You, too. You do doodle, too.”

Writing with pictures

More musing on the whole agonizing creative process... Thinking about this a lot this week because my wife is starting up her story consultancy site. I came across this quote from Deborah Moggach on adapting Pride & Prejudice into a movie script:

'Film acting is all about reacting. It’s about the unsaid, and it relies on tapping into the heart of the story. For instance, in the opening scene, where the Bennet family is aflutter with news of Mr Bingley’s arrival, Elizabeth has little to say on the page. In the film, however, we can’t take our eyes off her because the camera picks up her reactions and holds on her stillness in the middle of a busy room.

'Films are deeply connected to the subconscious, and screenplays reflect this. It’s all subtext, and a good director and actors know what a scene is really saying. When Elizabeth bumps into Darcy at Pemberley they have the most stilted, dull exchange. “I thought you were in London.” “No, I’m not.”

'Watching it is almost unbearable, however, because they’re both in torment. Their faces betray their feelings. We’ve come on a long journey with them by this time, and the scene is poignant with what is not put into words. A novelist is terribly tempted to over-write a scene.'

I draw my little sketch layouts before finalizing the dialogue for this reason. For us control freaks it's actually better than movie making, because you get to look at how your dialogue is working and you have total freedom to change it.

And then often I change bits of dialogue again when the art comes back from Leo, because he will have put in some nuances of performance that means a line of dialogue isn't needed after all. Mirabilis is still pretty heavy on dialogue, but that is because it's meant to be. We wanted it to be a dense read - something with a big cast of characters and the room to introduce them all. In that sense it's more like a TV series than a movie.

I am toying with a silent episode, though. Partly in homage to the "Hush" episode of Buffy, because when David Bailey saw it he said it was the kind of idea he'd expect me to come up with. If you're not familiar with the story, it's about hideous levitating fairies who cut out people's hearts but can be killed by a mortal's scream, ergo they steal everybody's voices. So David's remark - well that's, you know, kind of the sweetest thing anyone's ever said about me.