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.

National Graphic Novel Writing Month - part 5

WHY GRAPHIC NOVELS AREN'T JUST "MOVIES ON A PAGE"

It was 1989 and I was reading Hellblazer Annual #1 round at Paul Mason’s place. (Script by Delano, art by Talbot – we didn’t know how lucky we were.) “Guy’s seen a lot of Roeg movies,” I said.

Paul looked at the page. “Huh.” A week later he added, “I thought you were talking nonsense, but I just read an interview with Bryan Talbot where he says he’s heavily influenced by the films of Nic Roeg.”

Movies are my other big passion, so inevitably I spend a lot of time talking about my comics work – and storytelling in general – in terms of cinema. When I was posting about dialogue recently, most of the examples came from movies because I figure they’ll be more widely familiar than if I were to quote, say:

“I’d fall in love, or fall in lust, and at the height of my passion I would think, ‘So this is how it feels,’ and I would tie it up with pretty words.”

Not so easy to place as a classic movie line, perhaps? Though there are some you can’t mistake:

“Soft on scum. Too young to know any better. Molly-coddled them. Let them live.”

But comics are not movies and, as Alan Moore has pointed out, they can only suffer in the comparison:

“The use of cinematic techniques can advance the standards of comic art and writing, but if those techniques are seen as the highest point to which comics can aspire then the medium is condemned forever to be a poor relative of the motion picture industry. That isn’t good enough.”

Comics both allow and demand that the writer supplies visual interest to a scene as well as the plain events and dialogue. It’s the same with movies, true - but comparisons are invidious, as we know. A movie has its own predetermined momentum (unless you choose to hit Rewind) whereas you’ll adjust your reading pace with a comic or graphic novel to fit how much each page gives you to take in. You can flip back easily to check on something earlier – in that sense, the experience is more like a prose novel than a movie. Yet it’s not prose either.

Take a scene where two characters are talking. In a movie you have to cut that right to the bone: the audience is impatient with waffle. In prose, you can let it go on for page after page, and not even bother with what the characters are doing. Eg:

"You have overlooked the curious incident of the dog in the night-time," he said.
Watson stopped walking and stared at him. "The dog did nothing in the night-time."
Holmes speared a dock leaf with his cane. "That was the curious incident."

See, that’s too much detail for prose. Any decent editor would strike a red pen through all the dock leaf and stage direction stuff. But in a comic, that isn’t enough. You can have the talk, but you’ve got to keep interest in the scene in other ways too. It’s neither movies nor prose, nor a halfway house between the two. It’s a medium in its own right.

In Mirabilis #3, I planned a long sequence where Gus is telling Jack about the green comet. As exposition, even with the little frisson of uncertainty around Gus, it would lie there on the page like last Friday’s fish. Starting with the sense of unreliability Jack should be getting from Gus, I found a solution that injected surprise, action and danger into the scene. Serendipitously that gave me an opportunity to undercut all Gus’s wordy explanations with another bit of business which has Jack eavesdropping on part of a conversation between McNab and Estelle and hearing (he thinks) nothing good about himself. That accidental inspiration in fact gave me a title ("Outside Looking In") for the sequence when it appeared in Random House’s weekly David Fickling Comic. And as an extra bonus, the way the scene was set up provided an easier and more dramatic way to reveal Gargantua, the cause of that episode’s cliffhanger.

In prose, that same scene would have been so cluttered with different strands that it would have been impossible to follow. In a movie, it would have needed to be rewritten to reduce the expository dialogue while massively amping up the action beats.

Being a frustrated novelist or a wannabe scriptwriter are the wrong reasons for choosing to work in comics. A good storyteller can move between those media, but he or she will appreciate they call for different techniques. That’s why they call it an art.