Story structure for your comic

[gold_tangerine]

I’m surprised there’s not a tutorial about this yet. A lot of people here probably want to know how to structure their comics better. Now I’m not a pro and I’ll never say that, but I’ve tried and failed a heck of a lot of times, and I was just thinking of why comics like mine are still hot when I don’t update them for weeks when there are much better artists on the board. Maybe I do know a thing or two about telling a story.
There are 3 parts to this tutorial; the preparation, the rough story, and the actual creation of a comic script. I don’t script since my procrastination thrives on such practices and I tend to consider things like panel shapes important, but I do know how to and I’ll put the formats at the end of the tut with some sample storyboards. Don’t skip through, y’all. I did that, and how long will it take me to finish that novel?
This should be read along with Mofo09’s tutorials about making a manga, since I posted some character help in there too. Why, here they are!
http://www.polykarbonbbs.com/showthread.php?t=13839
http://www.polykarbonbbs.com/showthread.php?t=14135

Part I____________________________________________
What do I mean by preparation? The things you can’t start a comic without. There are three: concept, characters, and setting. Yes, there are more, but I’m talking about the engine, wheels, and seats, not the vinyls and pimped-out rims.

The concept, to authors, is also called ‘the hook’ or ‘the pitch’ because in this hyper-competitive world of stingy people who only spend anything on what they like, you need one hell of a worm to reel yourself some recognition, even. What exactly is a concept? Here are three successful ones:

A boy who has everything—brains, good looks, mad tennis skills—finds a notebook that kills whoever’s name is written in it, and decides to purify the world of all evil.


A gang revolts against a sinister billionaire by burying Tokyo in graffiti, surviving everything from battles with rival gangs to beatdowns from riot police in their crusade to get their anti-oppression message out.


Two former-thief brothers embark on a cop-dodging quest to put their blues band back together so they can raise enough honest money to save the orphanage they grew up in.


Now you know a concept is a once-sentence summary of your core idea, but also that the three above were Death Note, Jet Set Radio Future, and The Blues Brothers—respectively a manga, a video game, and a funny-as-hell old movie. Yeah, concepts are that important.
It’s hard as hell to think of a one-sentence summary when you’re just starting out, because you barely know it yourself, so don’t stress. A pitch is used to tell your would-be literary or screen agent why she should represent you, because they don’t have a lot of time when they’re at writing conferences. Just blunder through your story till you have a rough idea of your concept, and put it in a paragraph or two. If your comic had a blurb on the back, what would it say? Look at this example from Breathing Underwater by Alex Flinn:

The Nick everyone saw was one of the really cool kids at school. Rich, popular, smart, handsome, he played on the football team and drove a classic '67 red Mustang convertible. He had a charmed life--everyone wanted to be Nick. The Nick no one saw was an angry, resentful loser, who frequently missed school when his father's abuse got too obvious. His father may have given Nick his car, but he also told his son, over and over, that he was a failure, a loser, never good enough at anything. Nick hasn't seen his mother since he was five, and he and his father live alone with a series of housekeepers. Nick avoids his father as much as possible, and worries about what will set him off. Then just after school starts, he sees Caitlin, and thinks "dream girl." His friend Tom helps him meet her, and they start dating. Nick is in love for the first time, but the only examples he has of love are the memories of his parents. Which Nick will he show Caitlin, the one everyone knows, or the one that no one does?

A concept is just a polished idea, really. To start polishing an idea, you have to have a rough draft of that idea in front of you. Go get it. Look at it and ask 2 questions. They seem the same, but they’re different, and the answers will help you decide how best to ‘put’ your hook.
What is the genre?
What is the theme?
In a nutshell, a genre is what shelf in Blockbuster your idea would go on if it was a movie, and a theme is the overall mood, tone, and complexity of your story. Obviously a theme takes some practice to nail down, since it’s not always a moral—it actually pisses me off when it is—and it’s not always easy to even put into words.
Say you want to do a comic about a Central American myth your gran told you when you were a kid. You remember it was about a man who gave three golden chains—his only valuable possessions—to a princess he loved just so he could sleep at her feet for three nights. You also remember that she fell in love with him after that, but said her father wouldn’t let them marry because he wasn’t rich. Then the man went away for three years to seek his fortune, taking three pieces of her clothing as pledges that he would come back. When he comes back, he’s rich, and it’s her wedding day to a rich landowner, but her father is impressed by his fine horse and invites him in. The man tells a story to all the invitees of how he was hunting a rhea that dropped clothes each time he sent one of his three hunting dogs after it—and everyone’s laughing when the princess screams that those were the three pledges she gave him, and she won’t marry anyone else.
You know you liked that story because it has feel-good morals; though it was mostly about using all your assets to get what you want, it was the man keeping his word that made him a winner. In fact, this is an actual Central American myth, and most myths survive through the ages because of their rock-solid morals. The genre is ‘myth/legend’, and the theme is ‘chase your heart’s desire and let wealth and power catch up with you’.
Breathing Underwater has a whole lot of themes, as listed on the Book Talk in the author’s website:-- Hitting people, even once, no matter what the reason, is wrong.
-- Sometimes it's a good thing when life kicks you in the butt so you'll take a good look at the messes you've made.
-- Exploring the past brings out feelings that cause us to become insecure, controlling, or violent.
-- What happens to you at home is the cornerstone of your other relationships.
-- Control freaks are frequently also violent.
-- People interpret your behavior differently from the way you do, and may see patterns you are denying or blind to.
-- Abusive behavior is both physical and mental.
-- It's important to acknowledge your emotions, and find positive ways of dealing with them.
-- You're not a loser because someone calls you that, over and over. You become a loser when you tell that to yourself, over and over. So, figure out how to turn off both those voices, and be a winner.
-- You can't respect yourself if you're letting someone beat you up, whether they use their words, or their fists, or both.
However, Flinn certainly didn’t beat her readers over the head with each of these—she wrote her novel while working in a Florida court where she soaked in the many abuse and teenage-violence cases as any fiction writer does, and these are all thoughts that a reader takes away from reading the book. Though it has many complex themes, Breathing Underwater still has the tag of realistic fiction/young adult. The concept, or pitch, probably went something like this:


Popular and rich sixteen-year-old Nick Andreas hid everything that marred his perfect façade all his life—including his fear of his abusive father. When he’s ordered into therapy for beating his girlfriend, he slowly realizes that the person most hurt by his lies was himself.


(Two sentences. Sue me.) This pitch is put simply, but somberly, because it’s dealing with the dark subject of self-discovery. All pitches should actually be simply put. Let’s pitch that myth, shall we?


To the woman he loves, Hento promises he will return in three years with enough money and power to impress her greedy father into letting them marry. But he returns during her wedding to someone else.


Refining your concept means snipping away whatever prevents it from being just right, and whatever the reader doesn’t immediately need to know. In the myth example, the story didn’t go into the adventures our horndog had for 3 years—it just said he came back a wise and rich man, because the important parts of the story were his giving away his three treasures and getting everything he wanted in return, not his actual traveling. But summary means cutting out—in general—characters, events, and information that don’t fit into a comfy pitch, and that’s why usually a pitch only mentions the name of the main character, his or her problem, and why it’s interesting.

[gold_tangerine]

_______________________________


Characters. OK, I recommend about.com because no way can I teach you how to do them right—it’s too hard. If you read and write enough, they just come out. I’ll just give some general help.

Surprise the reader:
See the quote. Give your characters something different, something people won’t expect. It’s not rocket science. Looking at me, you’d never guess I was green belt in Tae Kwon Do. You wouldn’t. Bullies might love watercolors, gangsters to play the piano, government agents might have hacker kids. Mix it up.

Share the coolness:
N00bs have a tendency to give everything (you know; the cool car, the dog, the awesome skills, the hot girlfriend, the best clothing, the apartment, the motorcycle…) to their protagonist just to make him or her overwhelmingly cool. The other characters are so boring they fade into the background, and the whole story is wrapped up in what the main character thinks and does. Don’t do this.
Sharing juicy backstories, props, special abilities, etc. between your characters not only makes them interesting and vital, it adds realism and makes the overall work more interesting.

Dialogue:
You probably don’t have to worry about dialogue yet, but just keep in mind that it’s one of the most important aspects of character and relationship design. Once you’ve read enough books and had enough conversations, you’ll automatically prune clichés (“Take this!”, “I’ve been expeeeecting you…”) from your stories.
It’s not just what someone says; it’s how they say it, what they do as they say it, and what they mean. I suggest reading some great classics—no, not Henry James or that crap, but yeah, Sherlock Holmes. What’s amazing about the way Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tells his stories isn’t just the suspense he can create or Holmes’s character, it’s how the dialogue delivers—it actually puts you on Baker Street in a room smelling of tobacco with a tap on the door and a man who can tell everything from your habits to your intelligence by the hat you wear.
The best way in all writing is to try to make your characters talk the way you generally hear people do it. Don’t borrow dialogue from movies; those people aren’t real. Go for natural instead of dramatic, because—and this is a great trick—natural dialogue is more dramatic.

Background
Good characters are demanding. They want jobs, pets, skills, fears, hobbies, tragic histories, favorite foods, lifestyles. Don’t get hung up on it all. Keep thinking about them and make notes. Give them traits that contrast with each other, histories that show something in common between them, and decide on which relationships are already set in stone and which will develop in the story. Go at it little by little and eventually you’ll reach a point where you just know your characters, and interesting ones come to you on the toilet. The best ones, actually, come from people you know or knew. Trust me.

The thing about making good characters is it’s not all book-learning—you have to steal bits and pieces from real life so they’ll stand up on their own, like good origami instead of cereal-box cutouts. None of your characters have every trait showing all the time—that’s impossible. But you’ll need to know their every trait, even if you never actually tell the reader. Oh, and don’t make a character angsty and no fun to make the pool look deeper than it really is. That gets me.

________________________________


Setting. This one’s a home base for the two above. If you’re writing about coming-of-age story in NYC, it’s going to be different from one someone wrote about it in The Great Era of Piracy. As the old adage goes, ‘it’s easier to teach an outdoorsman to use a copier than a businessman to shit in the woods, but not a lot easier.’ Touche; the setting can be really fun, especially when you change it and your characters flop like fish out of water.

Time: In Harry Potter, the year the story takes place in is never mentioned. It doesn’t matter unless it’s a historical work; the reader just wants to know the general time frame. The distant future? A fictional past (if there were dragons in the Napoleonic wars, like in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series? Or if aliens invaded feudal Japan, like in Gin Tama?)? Depending on when your story is set, you’ll either have to do a crapload of research on what a 1977 dollar could buy today or imagine a lot of weird technology. Be lazy and set your story in the present day. Wuss…

Location: It’s not a GPS position. Is it a big city (Hong Kong) or a peaceful mountain (Giulin)? You can make up a name for the place…does your story start when it’s raining, or when the hero is on vacation? Play with it. You might as well have fun with it ‘cause you won’t be making money with this for a while…

Politics: Ooh, write one set in a war. They sell like hot cakes. You don’t have to consider all these in your story, they’re just ideas. Is there a lot of racial or other discrimination? Is the community detached and cold or woven together? Is the area rich or poor? Or set your story in a world ravaged by a certain type of criminal trend, like in One Piece.

Society: In Naruto, the rest of the ninja village hates the hero because the fox demon that killed their other hokage is sealed inside him or something. This is one of many similarities between Naruto and the start of Harry Potter. Are your characters ignored, worshipped, or somewhere in between—and why?

All three of these factors—concept, characters, and setting—are the essentials of a story, but they’re not a story on their own. Yeah, it’s only gonna get harder, because in a story you have to decide what to do with them all.

[gold_tangerine]

PART II______________________________________________
Let’s start with the bones. You remember reading passages in sixth grade and learning the beginning-middle-end rule, right? Your teacher didn’t lie, at least about that. But this is important—to a reader, there’s only a beginning, a middle, and an end in a story; to a writer, there’s a beginning, a rising action, a turning point, and an ending.
To avoid confusion, let’s call it Infection, Mutation, Outbreak, and Quarantine instead. Easier now, n3rd? Good. All stories are built on this four-floor blueprint, except the avant-garde stuff I’m not here to teach you about. In a way, they’re all recipes that require certain ingredients.

INFECTION (beginning):
-we are shown the main character. It’s like a blind date; we’re praying he/she isn’t boring.
-we are shown the main character’s world. The reason I don’t say ‘setting’ is because it’s a misnomer, and by now you should know why.
-something goes wrong. This is where the introduction of the character and his/her world ends and suspense takes the microphone.

MUTATION (rising action):
-if you did INFECTION right, the main character has a hardship/villain to work against by now—even though he or she might not be aware of it yet. There is no avoiding this; don’t coddle your characters in cotton wool to the detriment of a good story.
-the situation gets complicated. Complications are the perks of the fiction business. Are you writing a romance set on a transatlantic flight? Make the CEO a fearful flyer who forgets his anti-stress medicine at the Holiday Inn, make the artist have a teenage son who just called her cell phone to say tearfully that he’s gay, and make them get each other’s entrees by mistake and have a fight about it, then give yourself the challenge of making them start having sex in the lavatory by the end of the story (beats the crap out of SkyMall and Sudoku, combined).
-the character doesn’t overcome the big hardship yet—don’t make it too easy. You know how they have mid-bosses in Zelda? In fact, make her fail, setting up the need for character development by the ending.
-what is rising is not only action—your whole story should have action rising. What is rising is mystery, comedy, romance—whatever your story’s theme, it is steadily getting heavier, stronger, deeper with each scene or chapter. A good way to keep the ball rolling is to learn good timing; make your main character learn what’s going on gradually, and remember that if he’s holding onto the steering wheel for dear life, the reader is holding onto the book the same way.

OUTBREAK (turning point):
-time bomb therapy; if you did MUTATION right, the complications have not only steadily made the story more interesting, but also put pressure on your characters. Now they need to make a critical decision about something, or overcome a difficulty, or beat a much stronger opponent. This is when you can’t let them sit and think, not at all—they have a limited time to do it, but all is still lost if they choose wrong, or give up, or get beaten or whatever.
-the villain/hardship might have had his gloves off the whole time—actually, he almost always does, being evil and all—but this is where the main character follows suit, under the villain’s pressure. In Breathing Underwater, a friend’s murder/suicide made Nick Andreas finally realize how abusive he was to his girlfriend—and as a mark of his transformation he stops stalking her, tells the truth to his rehab group, and in the climactic scene doesn’t let his father beat him anymore. The main character gets serious, and gets results.
-at a critical moment, something goes right for your main character. It doesn’t feel like a spoiled child getting candy. It feels like a miracle born from your character’s desperation, even when it technically isn’t. That’s if it’s not a tragedy—but there’s hardly any money in tragedies anymore, look at how they changed the ending in the Animal Farm movie. And they screwed up the song! Bastards.

QUARANTINE (ending):
-the ending doesn`t pop out of nowhere. It should be a balance between scintillating unexpectedness and predictability. I read somewhere that `if the heroine dies in a blizzard at the end, have a few flakes of snow fall in the first chapter`. That`s good advice.
-something changed. The character and/or his world won’t stay the same after the effect of the climax, or it’s too boring of a story. At the end of Breathing Underwater, Nick’s best friend Tom (who cut off ties with Nick after he caught him bloodying Caitlin in the parking lot) says, “I want things back how they used to be.” And Nick says “They aren’t.” It’s going to be a character development, a war won, a crime avenged—whatever it is, it was a result of the decision made in OUTBREAK.
-your M.C. doesn’t ride off into the sunset. Endings in real life are never that cozy or straightforward, so don’t write them. Maybe, like Kenshin Himura at the end of the kick-ass Shishio saga, he realizes that both parties thought they were just as right, and no one will really know what justice is. Perhaps, the villain was such an interesting character (the good ones are) that one of the main character’s friends blames him for defeating him (like in Death Note, but be careful with this, because that main character was actually the villain). Sometimes it’s not a clean win at all—the main character got what he wanted, but he did a hell of a lot of damage in the process, and he vows to never be so selfish again. That’s an interesting one. Sometimes you never find out how the story ends, like the last Sherlock Holmes—which is convenient, since it points to a sequel in the off chance you get rich in the wake of the first story.

I know you feel intimidated by all this, but it’s really simple. In fact, this can be used for a single chapter or scene, though it’ll work even if you intend to write a 1000-page trilogy on something. Just remember:
{Beginning ________________}(_______Middle_______)[__________________End]
Infection______][______Mutation_______][_______Outbreak_______][________Quarantine
Mutation and Outbreak are the doors in and out of the middle, that’s all. Let’s see it in action, using the first chapter of Bleach as an example:

INFECTION: High School student Ichigo Kurosaki can see ghosts. He lives with two younger sisters and his father who runs a clinic; his mother died a while ago.
MUTATION: Ichigo meets Rukia Kuchiki, a Soul Reaper. The Hollow she is after attacks his house when it senses Ichigo.
OUTBREAK: Rukia gets injured saving Ichigo from the Hollow. She says the only way his family can be saved now is if Ichigo, since he has such unusual spirit power, becomes a Soul Reaper himself.
QUARANTINE: Ichigo kills the Hollow, but Rukia loses all her Soul Reaper powers.

(Note: Gag comics are an exception. The standard three-panel gag really has only 3 parts: setup, beat, and punchline. I’ll get into them in part 3.)
A good exercise for this technique is learning to see it in the works of others. Finish a book, comic, or movie you like, then wait a while and go through it again, trying to see where Infection ends and Mutation begins and so forth. Study how the author makes the transitions, and what complications were most effective. This will also show you that it’s not as complicated as it looks here—most of the time.
That’s right—it can be hard to tell. You know why? Because a lot of books, comics, and movies start long after the real beginning, or even past the end. These people have experimented with various beginnings to make the introduction of their story—the narration, point of view, timing, and style—as interesting as it can be. There are different places you can begin your story too, but I suggest that your first be written like the White Rabbit says: “Begin at the beginning, then go on until you come to the end; then stop.” It’s easier. Plus, you can always change it in the second draft…there’s always the second draft…

[Dwee dee(3d)]

If you ever write really long stories.. you'll learn not to plan things out to the letter.. write out a synopsis, and then as you go, come up with subplots.. -if the synopsis is too complicated, getting new readers will be hard, and current readers won't know what's going on.. (there's a lot more in the reader's minds than just your story (sorry)) -frustrating right?

once you have the main thing down.. you work on subplots.. the more readers you get that like what's currently going on, the more you veer towards what they like, but staying true to the main plot.. (comic books are a really good example.. -you can miss like 34 issues and still be able to catch on..)

Having little subplots or side stories is good in that you can in some way incorporate current events, trends and even times into the mix.. (this also allows you some freedom from formulas and such.. you get to write what you want to write... -in other words:

-you tell us "your" story... and that's what the reader really wants.. not cliches..
(heck.. if you get enough readers hooked, you can even change your main story and revisit old interesting subplots from who knows when..) or even do cross overs and such.. with other artists and authors.. -yeah, tons more I can tell you, but experience will teach you better..

---gold-tangerine hijacked a thread of mine once, so here's payback :D ...uh.. the links below :D

http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/1230/c_2page1.jpg

http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/1107/c_2page2.jpg

http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/927/c_2page3.jpg

http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/9044/c_2page4.jpg

http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/9015/c_2page5.jpg

mua ha ha haaa!!! uh.. the above is a subplot.. it's only meant
to show little things about characters and such.. but the main
plot's implied... somewhere (anybody who's got too much time
on their hands can probably try and figure it out.. as for everyone
else... just watch and giggle, kay :) )-it's just a comic lol :D

[djizomdjinn]

Teh awesome tutorial!

Much thanks.

[gold_tangerine]

I don`t remember hijacking any of your threads dwee dee...ColdKodiaks and Kraznozenmacs maybe...
It seems you`re showing storyboards. I`ll get to those in Part 3, along with comic scripting, because there are 3 distinct ways you can script a comic that`s recognized by comic syndicates. I started you on the bare-bones structure for a reason. But it`s true, you should always start with simple stuff before adding subplots and the like. the trick is making simple powerful, and it`s a hard trick, believe me.

[Dwee dee(3d)]

I think it's the one where I started talking about a free programming tutorial, and then you went off about your mom finding out about your blog.. it was interesting.. till I found out you totally hijacked my thread !!

lol.. all is well now.. someone found a game about tangerines and.. -you know the rest :)