The Carver's House

When my first full-length graphic novel, “The Spectacular Adventures of Zsazsa Zaturnnah” made waves for the most part of the 2000s, many people said that I was a success, that I could content myself with the fact that I’ve made a great contribution to Philippine pop culture, Philippine comics –Philippine literature even– in the New Millennium. While I was thankful for the unexpected accolades, it didn’t sink in so much. Maybe I was in denial. Maybe I believed the success was premature. Or maybe I didn’t really have an idea of what my success should look like. To me, the fact that I was able to finish the book and get it published was my true success. Everything else became a nice bonus. But maybe I should have looked at building my success differently, especially if I had really wanted to make comics my career. It’s important to define what your success will look like, especially if you plan to make comics over the long-term. If you’re starting out, your measure of s...

When learning how to draw comics, it’s prudent to start small and work your way up. Many times have aspiring creators approached me to talk about their planned “epic series” but never got around to starting. They’re chasing the big dream without knowing what achieving that big dream entails. My first solo work back in 2001 was 56 pages long, and the story was simple–two people talking about their past romantic relationship. There were no physical fight scenes nor adventurous camera angles, and I had been drawing other people’s stories for a few years prior, so tackling 56 pages for a simple story wasn’t much of a stretch. For you, it’s advisable to spend a couple of years to create one 4- to 8-page story every month or two. Ideally, these works won’t be for public consumption. Instead, you can post your pages on forums like DigitalWebbing to get crits. As you work on shorter stories, you’ll be able to: 1) Learn how to draw different things. With each story, try a ...

I was at De La Salle University this afternoon, invited to give a short talk at the Student Media Office Comics Convention. During the talk, I said something that I'd like to elaborate upon here, because it could easily be misconstrued. I basically said that, personally, I feel it's really important for Pinoy comics creators to learn the principles of story, to be good at the craft, and try to make the best possible comics they can, especially if they intend to sell their works. We're asking people to give us money, and so our works--essentially consumer products--need to have worth. There's one thing to consider here, which I think is very important to note: what may have worth for some people can be seen as worthless to others. I personally don't find a lot of value in a Louis Vuitton, but many consider LVs great investments. In contrast, one man's trash has been proven to be another man's goldmine. An article over at Business Insider reveals the su...

Since I'm the kind who thinks about these things, I've come up with a list of the different skills of story creators, and I use the word "skills" loosely here. While creating stories, I find myself making use of all of them, some better than others. 1) Research - The ability to search for, consume, and digest relevant and interesting information. 2) Omnipresence - The ability to go into "god mode," that is, to see a story from all angles, within and without. You are aware not only of the events that take place in your story world, but also of the aspirations and motivations within the hearts and minds of your characters. 3) Causality - The ability to see how things lead to other things, why some events take place, and what these events can lead to. 4) Interconnectedness - The ability to determine the connections between seemingly unrelated elements. 5) Psychology - The ability to dissect personalities, attitudes, relationships, and states of mi...

If you've read the series of blog entries I've been posting about how to create a comics story, that's actually my second attempt at this. (My first attempt was through a small workshop I conducted with volunteers and pizza. That was fun.) I will admit that even those blog entries have come off sounding complicated, even to me. I haven't gotten substantial feedback on them, and that tells me that they haven't made any impact. (Either that or there's not much of an audience for that kind of thing.) I'm trying again, since the main reason for my doing this is to come up with something I could personally use. There's so much information out there on the topic, from books to blogs, interviews to courses, so I wanted to distill all that information into something manageable. I'm in the process of putting together a third attempt, which incorporates the lessons I've learned while developing "Zaturnnah sa Maynila" and "Kung Paano Ako ...

I will admit that I haven't bought pamphlet comics in a very long time, though I try to keep myself updated on the general goings-on in the American comics industry, particularly what's been happening with the Big Two. I've been reading some of the new X-Men titles as well. Lately, I've been reading some blogposts about the sorry state of the comics industry, how it has failed to attract new buyers, how prices have become prohibitive, how the number of "good titles" have decreased, how film and television adaptations have not substantially improved comics sales, and how "big events" have begun to lose their novelty because of their regularity. Sadly, it seems that the same mistakes are being made. (I recently heard that special effects covers were being considered for a comeback. Did that push through?) One development that had been seen as a way to boost comics sales is the production of film adaptations, with the perceptio...

Backstory is essentially everything that happened before your story starts. Alan Moore recommends building a Backstory as one of the first steps in creating a comics story. By building a substantial background for your character and his world, you'll have a goldmine of sources for story. But maybe you don't have the time, so let's see how we can get the ball rolling quickly. To start a story, we asked you to list a series of Story Events, focusing on your character as he makes his way through his day. In following your character, you may have had him talking to other characters, going to different locations, essentially living his Ordinary Life. You continue listing Story Events until you reach a Disturbance, which launches your character into an adventure. But what if you can't find a Disturbance? The easiest way to identify a Disturbance is to find out what will literally disturb your character enough to leave his Ordinary Life. Here's a question to get yo...

Below are the steps that summarize story development for graphic novels and comics limited series. It collapses everything that we've talked about in this series of blog posts that began with How To Create a Graphic Novel Story From Scratch Part One . If you haven't read the series of blog posts, it's advisable that you do so. STEP 1: If you're starting from scratch: Take a character, any character you've created, and follow him through his ordinary life by listing a series of Story Events. STEP 2: As you list Story Events, identify a Disturbance that will rock your character's ordinary life and make him decide to fix it. (List the Disturbance as another Story Event.) STEP 3: Continue to list Story Events after the Disturbance until... STEP 4: ...you can jump all the way forward and deduce a Possible Ending to the story. If you can't find an Ending yet, continue adding Story Events to what you have so far until something inspire...

When I was an actor in theatre, I always looked forward to improvisation exercises. When we do improvs, we're given a situation to work with, or a "prompt," and try to act out a scene. It becomes more challenging when we're given limitations, like, "you cannot talk," or "all you say should be sung." It encourages us to think on our toes. A similar game that you may have played before is Train of Thought. A group of people sit in a circle and create a story as a group, each person contributing one sentence. There are other storytelling games in the market, such as  Talecraft  by Komikasi, and  Once Upon a Time  by Atlas Games. Both are card games, and great ways to get a group together to have fun. The following exercise is similar to all of the above. Though it is best done by two people, you can create variations to accommodate more. But since we're working with two people, one will be the storyteller, and one will be the facilitator. ...

If you've gone through a number of the blog posts in this series, you might find yourself scratching your head. I apologize for that--it's not easy to pin down the intricacies of making comics because there are so many disciplines involved. Some may argue that anyone can make a comics story--that is true. But anyone can write a screenplay, or a poem, or any form of art, and a few innately talented people can do these particularly well with very little training. But, in general, to be good at something, you need to break it apart and see how things work. What I'm trying to do is to lay down foundations, and I'll be the first to say that there may be others who can explain everything better, or even differently, than I. But If you pick up just one or two things from the series and have found ways to apply them in your own work, that's great. In the future, I intend to expand the previous topics into more comprehensive, but simpler terms. Do You Start In General or...

We took a peek at compression and decompression in comics in the previous blog post . Now, let's look at pacing, or how to pace comics. Pacing is simply how fast a reader reads your comics. Much like compression and decompression, pacing allows you to highlight pivotal events in your story. And this is primarily done by influencing how long your reader stays on a panel. The longer the reader stays on the panel, the reading place slows down. The faster the reader stays on a panel, the reading pace speeds up. 1. By default, the amount of text you place on a panel dictates pacing. The more text, the slower the pace. Chris Claremont is known for having verbose panels during his acclaimed run on Uncanny X-Men . 2. When the size of the panel is small, the pacing quickens. Conversely, large panels slow down the pacing. 3. Then the amount of visual information (details) you have inside a panel dictates pacing. The more visual information, or the more a reader has to look at, the ...

This is the continuation of a series of blog posts about how to make comics stories. In the previous post in these series, we had an overview of how a comics creator can divide a story outline into chapters or issues and end each with a cliffhanger. Assuming that a comics issue has 20 pages, let's now look at how we can fill up those pages. Every scene in your story will take up one or more panels. In determining the number of panels you need for each scene, you consider two factors: 1) How much information will this scene give the reader; and 2) How immersed you'd want the reader to be in that scene. Amount of information: Let's say your scene involves one round of a boxing match--two people in a boxing ring. If you use a lot of panels to depict the round, then your scene is  decompressed . If you decide to just use a few panels, that scene is  compressed . In the first issue of Civil War (written by Mark Millar), Captain America debates with Commander Maria Hil...

A lot of professional comics writers will tell you that outlining a story helps a lot in budgeting pages. If you have 20 pages in one issue, then create a 20-step outline. But it's always prudent to start in general terms first. Once you have the beginning and the ending of a story in mind, decide: How many issues or chapters can hold this story? If you choose three issues, then you can determine what should happen in each issue for this story to be complete? Here's an example for a Guy vs. Alien story. Introduce Hero Introduce Alien and why it's homicidal Hero decides to kill Alien because it killed his best friend Hero learns about special weapon and that it is held by a Bounty Hunter Hero finds Bounty Hunter and they fight (Bounty Hunter doesn't trust Hero) Hero makes extra effort to earn the trust of Bounty Hunter Bounty Hunter helps Hero get rare mineral to power weapon Hero and Bounty Hunter learn more about each other and become friends Hero an...

In the previous blog post , we broke down the events in the first volume of The Walking Dead comics series in terms of Challenges and Reveals to see how the story builds tension and anxiety in the reader. In that blog post, we also mentioned the idea of arcs. An arc chronicles a transformation, or a change of state. When you look at any story, the main characters begin the story in one state and end in another state, for better or for worse. When we started, we asked you to plan out the beginning of your story as well as come up with an ending. This is the overall arc of your story. In the first volume of The Walking Dead, main character Rick started with wanting to reunite with his family. That is his beginning state. At the end of issue six, Rick has, indeed, reunited with his family, but he also completely lost his friend Shane because of them. Completely, because not only did Shane lose his physical life because of young Carl, he also lost his emotional life because of Lori. Th...

This continues a series of blog posts on how to make stories for comics and graphic novels. Robert Kirkman's "The Walking Dead" series (art by Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard) has become one of the most successful non-superhero comics series, spawning an equally-successful television adaptation. In this blog post, we break down the first six issues of the comics series to see the different Challenges and Reveals it holds and how they build up anxiety and tension. If you haven't read the first six issues, please do, since the descriptions below are made in broad terms. Issue #1: Challenge: Rick's escape from the hospital--he had been in a coma after being shot Reveal: Finding out about the zombie epidemic; learning how to kill a zombie Issue #2 Reveal: Rick talks about himself and his family--his wife Lori and son Carl. Challenge: Arriving at the city only to discover it has been overrun by zombies; escapes through the help of Glenn Reveal: Glenn t...

Many writers will tell you that, in building a story, every scene has to push the narrative forward. What does this mean? Most of the scenes have to build tension and anticipation. Tension is stress, and you want that stress relieved. Anticipation is anxiety, that feeling that makes you want to confirm a hunch. 1) To build tension, introduce Challenges . They are meant to prevent your character from moving closer to achieving his goal. Challenges come in the form of conflict--whether physical (a confrontation), mental (a puzzle), or emotional (doubt, anger, despair, devastation). When you introduce a Challenge in your story, you should give the reader an impression that there is a chance of failure. In Arkham Asylum (by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean), Batman is subjected to numerous challenges, mostly mental and emotional, as he tries to keep his sanity intact with each encounter with the occupants of the asylum. 2) To build anticipation, introduce Reveals , or relevant knowled...