The Beginning

This is a picture of a 2000AD Future Shock, page one. 'Future Shocks' are 5-page SF stories with ironic twist endings - kind of like THE TWILIGHT ZONE - that 2000AD uses as a proving ground for new writers. The thinking behind it is this:

2000AD is an anthology comic, with one-off and multi-part stories. Each installment of each story is 5 pages long (or occasionally 6). Each installment ends with some kind of 'cliffhanger'. Therefore, people who want to write for 2000AD need to learn how to write to this format. All of this is fine.

Now, this Future Shock SPARE PARTS that I've used to illustrate this posting is just an image I found on the internet. I haven't read the full thing, and have no idea if it is considered to be a good Future Shock or not. It was printed before I started reading 2000AD, which was more or less two years ago. A lot of 2000AD readers actually hate Future Shocks because they just want to see more SINISTER DEXTER or whatever, which obviously is good as well but personally I can't get enough self-contained short stories. This guy Bob Byrne did a run of amazing 'silent' ones - BOB BYRNE'S TWISTED TALES - in the comic a little while ago, and most of the forum responses were like "This isn't what I buy the comic for".

Look at the picture again though. Doesn't it look amazing?

Right now there is nothing I would rather have than a framed print of a page of kick-ass comic art from a story I have written. Nothing.

And "nothing" is the problem because that is what I have written to date. Most of it is lack of discipline - this here that you're reading is the longest thing I have typed into my computer for a long time. The rest of it is lack of "inspiration" / talent.

You have to work at that, of course. This blog is intended to shame me into getting stuff done instead of wasting all my time off on sleeping and P2P music theft and videogames, and buying stacks of graphic novels for "research". I'm going to try to work out some kind of comics writing system or something, or identify little tricks I've seen that I think are cool in other people's work, and keep a kind of diary of my progress, or just chunter aimlessly like this. Shall we say once a week?

It's basically work displacement of course, but less so than the mammoth room tidy I just undertook before writing this. I'm grudgingly starting to realize that you really do need to tidy your room despite years of insisting that mess is fine by me (because "this is your only room and it is full of rubbish. You clearly cannot cope in the real world. Rubbish in your room is nobody's fault but yours. You are the rubbish king. You are rubbish" and so on).

Anyway, as part of my new-found determination to sort this writing thing out at last, I just read STORY by Robert McKee. That's why I've started writing titles of things in capital letters, and not in italics or bold or just regular text, like I used to. He doesn't say to do that, but he does it and I've just copied him. I like to think it sort of exposes the artificiality of entertainment, like no matter how interesting and well-invented a fictional thing is, it's still just a made up thing, like CARRIE and not 'real', like someone who actually is called Carrie, so shouldn't be in normal writing. Like 'the LORD'. Sorry. Whatever.

The STORY book is good. I bought it because it's supposed to be on the reading lists of screenwriting courses and whatever, and I knew that if I didn't read it I'd always be wondering what kind of amazing secrets I was missing out on.

A lot of it was stuff I already knew, common sense kind of stuff that probably everybody knows, but such is the nature of books like these that you feel good about yourself when you see that because that must mean you really are cut out to be a proper 'writer' because hey, this guy's an expert and you already knew this thing. There was a lot of stuff I didn't know though, or hadn't thought about so clearly as as he lays out, so it was definitely a useful read.

There is a slightly annoying thing that he keeps quoting Darth Vader as saying "You can't kill me, Luke, I'm your father" in EMPIRE STRIKES BACK as this great turning point and he quotes it like that three or four times in the book, and I'm not much of a STAR WARS geek but you and I know for a fact that actually what happens is Luke says "You killed my father" and Vader says "No, I am your father", which you would have thought someone would have told McKee by now.

So anyway there's this bit at the end of the book where McKee identifies the primary strengths of the three dramatic arts, Theatre, Film and Literature, and he says Theatre is primarily sonic (big flowery speeches), Film primarily visual (big flowery settings) and Literature's strength is showing internal stuff like thought processes (of a big flower). He doesn't mention radio or comics. It struck me that comics can do two of these at once - the visual and the internal, because you have captions (for thought processes) and artwork (for the visual) obviously.

I remember hearing that Opera was once considered the top tier of art because it combined the best of both worlds - music and spectacle. Does that make comics the new opera?

The answer is probably no. But it's a nice thought.