I was browsing around Once Upon A Geek, which has a lot of amusing superhero content. For example, I liked this blending of Peanuts and the Watchmen.
They also collected some interesting Christmas-themed covers. Below the jump: Spiderman lassoing a surly Wolverine with Christmas lights, and two shots of Santa packing heat.
1. The story fails to hook readers in the first three pages.
The easiest way to do this is to show a likable character facing a serious problem. It doesn’t have to be a life-and-death threat, but that helps. Another method is to establish that the writing style is particularly compelling.
2. The plot lacks urgency.
A character walking from his door to his car is not very interesting. Running to his car to make it to work on time is better. Running to his car to avoid gunshots? Even better. To make the plot more urgent, I recommend making giving the characters goals that are time-sensitive and high-stakes. If John doesn’t make it to work in ten minutes, he will be fired. If Captain Carnage can’t find and defuse the bomb in ten minutes, the building will explode. Etc.
3. The writers rely too much on exposition (particularly narration and dialogue) to tell the story.
Try not to tell your audience things that they should be able to see in the picture. For example, check out these two versions of one of our panels.
Superhero Nation is slightly eccentric and wacky, so I kind of want an eye-catching cover that conveys that. Here are a few of my latest ideas for our first cover.
The cover shows a desk with a careful array of US presidential bobbleheads. (It’s Agent Orange’s desk). At the front of the desk would be bobbleheads of the most important characters in the first issue, Agent Black, Agent Orange, their boss and possibly a Navy SEAL. In the background, we’d have one of Agent Orange’s motivational posters for humorous flavor.
This cover would show Agent Black getting chewed out in an over-the-top manner by Agent Orange. I’d probably frame it like a scene with Peter Parker and JJ Jameson, but I’m relying on Agent Orange’s “what the hell?” factor to make it uniquely eye-catching and appealing.
A mock Rambo pose of Agent Black on a weapons range ineptly wielding a machine gun. All of his bullets are wildly off his target. Agent Orange is looking on with a hand exasperatedly on his forehead. (This is probably better-suited for the second issue than the first).
A colored comic book page that’s good enough to publish should probably cost between $50 and $100 on a site like DeviantArt. Some artists charge more than $100 a page, but unless you’re sitting on a massive budget you’ve got to consider the diminishing returns of spending more on an incredible artist versus getting “merely” a damn good artist for $100 a page. And if someone charges more than $100 he had damn well better be incredible.
For example, Banu’s rate for a colored page is approximately $65. His technical abilities are pretty strong and I think he has a great grasp of detail.
If you’re interested in just inks, that would probably cost about a third less than the colored rates. Generally, I find it cheaper to get inks and colors from the same person rather than involve a team of people. (It’s also easier to make adjustments).
Lettering
On DeviantArt, letterers usually charge between $5 and $15 a page.
$5-$7 a page: don’t get your hopes up, this is probably awful. If you have Photoshop and 10-20 minutes per page, you could almost certainly do better yourself. If your budget is so tight that you can only afford this much, I’d recommend doing so because that will at least develop your skills.
$8-10 a page: this should be competent and is probably forgettable. It should be neat and mostly legible. After a few hours, I think the average Photoshop user could get up to this level of proficiency.
$10-$15 a page: The fonts should be stylish and easy to read. Before agreeing to a rate above $10, make sure that the letterer knows how to do special effects sounds and that he is careful to avoid cramming balloons.
$15-20 a page: This needs to be distinctly impressive. Before agreeing to such a rate, make sure that the letterer has an eye for using fonts and balloons to create a mood and voice.
$20+ a page: Diminishing returns. At this rate, the letterer should have an incredible sense of style that makes his text a visual delight. He may make his own fonts or do calligraphy.
Only a few weeks ago, Dark Horse required writers to have artists on-board before their stories could be considered. However, according to Dark Horse’s Submissions page, it seems like Dark Horse has nixed that requirement. In the miscellaneous notes, it says that “If a submitted project has an artist collaborator, samples of the artist’s continuity work must be included.” That suggests that DH will consider submitted projects that don’t yet have an artist. That should make it much cheaper for writers to prepare a script for DH.
However, if you’re applying to DH, I would really recommend getting an artist anyway even though it’s not required. Preparing a sample of 5 pages and a cover will probably set you back $400-500 (colored) or maybe $250-350 (inked). That’s a major investment. However, if you’re serious about your application, having art accompany your writing could really help you. Providing pages that have been inked (preferably colored) will make it very easy for the editors to decide if you’re worth hiring. If all you have is your script, it won’t be nearly as clear whether your team has the style and skill to convey the story on the page. Remember, businesses hate risks. When they put money down, they want to know they’re getting quality.
I got tired of looking at the same header for three months, so I tweaked it a bit. The main differences are the fonts, but I also adjusted the background flag.
The bubbles are kind of nasty right now, but I can fix them as soon as I get back to campus in a week or two. What do you think?
About 40,000 sets of Google search terms brought readers to our website in 2008. Most of them found something useful. Here are a few that definitely didn’t.
literary agents who are not biased against louis farrakhan
Expand this site to 500,000 hits and 1.5 million page-views. That would be about 1500 and 4500 of each a day, growth of roughly 400%.
Get a comic book series published. I need to receive my first paycheck before graduation in May.
Finish writing a nonfiction book about how to write superhero stories and get them published. I expect to have completed this before graduation because I’ve already done so many articles for this website. So the content is mostly finished. Now the main task is adapting the chapters for a younger and more superhero-interested audience.
Chip away at the novel.
Get a fulltime job. Ideally, I’m thinking I’d work there for a year or two before moving on to grad school.
So we have one of our pages fully colored. What do you think?
The rest of our query will include 4 more colored pages, the script for the rest of the first issue, the cover for the first issue, the synopsis for the series, and the query letter. I think the main obstacle at this point is the cover.
Generally, a book has only 5-20 pages (depending on audience age and genre) to establish three critical elements.
The status quo of the main character. What is this character like before everything goes wrong? In the Lord of the Rings, for example, Frodo celebrates Bilbo’s birthday before being called upon to save the world. In Superhero Nation, Gary is a workaholic accountant.
The inciting event. What throws the character off his status quo? Usually, this is the point at which everything starts to go wrong. For example, in Superhero Nation, Gary narrowly survives a car-bombing very early on. This forces several changes on him: first, he is transferred away from his job for his safety. So he’s completely out of his social comfort zone. Second, assassins are now trying to kill him.
A goal for the main character. This is usually a response to the inciting event. This can be as simple as “I want everything to return to normal.” Gary wants to rebuild his life by getting a job somewhere and he wants to survive the assassins. This brings him to the superpowered Office of Special Investigations. Wacky hijinks ensue! (Buy the book when it finally gets published, heh heh).
A lot of manuscripts get bogged down in details that are typically too far removed from these three goals.
Prologues. They usually lack immediacy and, far too often, they just skip the main character entirely. Ick. The main character is almost always the best available way to hook readers into your story.
Backstory. Typically, it doesn’t really matter what your character was doing 5 or 10 years ago. Readers want to know what’s happening now. If you are literally unable to start the story without explaining what happened 5 or 10 years ago, you may wish to reevaluate the starting point for your story. Ahem. “If your backstory is more interesting than your current era, you’re writing the wrong story.“ If you have to introduce backstory, try to keep it to a bare minimum. Tell us only what we need to understand what is going on now.
Side-characters. If the side-characters are the best hook to your story, there’s probably something wrong with the main character and/or the plot. For example, if a fantasy novel wants to show us the parents of the hero right before he is born, that will trap us in backstory. Furthermore, will readers care about the hero’s parents? Probably not. If they were the most interesting characters in this book, they would be the leads. Harry Potter #1 was very well-written, but it made a questionable choice to start the book when Harry was an infant. It was a very slow beginning.
Elaborate settings. Typically, the main character is a better hook into the story than the world is. A strong character can be relatable and likable, mostly unlike a strong world. Try to limit the setting at the very beginning to just what we need to understand the main character and the plot.
I originally wrote this article for novelists, but it’s largely true for comic-book writers as well. The main difference is that a comic-book writer has even fewer pages to establish the status quo. What is your Peter Parker like before he becomes Spiderman? If your character has a particularly interesting origin story, I’d recommend giving the status quo up to 6 pages. Otherwise, I’d recommend limiting it to just 3 or 4. (I love alternate identities as much as anyone, but usually the superhero identity is more interesting. Would you want to read a comic called The Amazing Peter Parker or Clark Kent/Bruce Wayne?)
In a comic that only has 20-something pages, you really need to get to the inciting event (like the radioactive spider-bite or however else your hero got his powers) as soon as possible. In a superhero story, I’d recommend giving the hero his powers early enough in the first issue that you can introduce his goal. Ideally you can conclude the first issue with a fight.
“Even as we speak, Dr. Insidious might be building a deathray or a weather-control device!” Unless readers know whether this speculation is accurate, this is idle speculation that’s probably not very interesting. Like musing, speculation tends to make stories stall.
If you’d like to use speculation, I’d recommend narrowing the scope as much as possible. For example, if the heroes find a giant robotic hand, the characters might speculate how close Insidious is to completing the robot, and where the rest of the robot might be. At least we have a better idea of what grisly fate we’re contemplating. As always, the trick to intrigue is giving us enough to care.
For our next header, we’re working on getting an illustration of Cadet Davis. Our cartoonist asked for a photograph of him, but C.D. has always been leery about leaving photographic evidence. As a fallback, we looked for reference shots of other hardasses on Flickr and a few open-source image search engines. I had assumed that it would be pretty easy to find, but I was mistaken.
This is the inked version of the second page of our comic. On page 1, we just establish that someone’s trying to kill the main character.
I like our artist a lot, but I’m a bit concerned that his depiction of the bystander might be a bit, umm, insensitive to black people. Yeah. We’re probably going to have to cut those lips by a third or so and shrink the nose a bit to make them look more realistic. It would probably be best to clear up these cultural issues sooner rather than later. Aside from that, I think it’s generally well-inked. I especially appreciate some of the stylistic notes like the squirrel falling out of the tree in the bottom panel.
In the final version, the bystander will be thinking “Should have bought a Honda.”
If you have any tips or comments, I’d love to hear them. What do you think?
I’m very close to sending out feelers on a nonfiction manuscript about how to write superhero stories. I have one main problem, though. My target audience is young (10-20 years old) and my writing style is not naturally breezy or accessible. Ahem. I’m a political scientist/journalist by training.
So I have a writing exercise/contest for you. Take any one of our articles and rewrite it so that a typical thirteen-year-old would find it authoritative, fun and easy to read. I have a few stylistic suggestions.
Fragmented sentences are OK, but I recommend against run-ons.
Keep the words as simple as possible.
It must be fun!
We’d appreciate your help greatly. Depending on how good the entries are, we may also give Amazon gift-cards or a free, signed copy to show our appreciation. Thanks!
The students’ lounge had It Must Have Been The Mistletoe on infinite repeat. Always the editor, I was thinking about some simple ways to fix this song. It was surprisingly easy: It Must Have Been the Missile TOW.
I got an e-mail about an annual conference at the Naval Academy and now all of my Google ads are from test-prep companies. “Do you want to get into Annapolis?” No!
The rest of our query will include 4 more colored pages, the script for the rest of the first issue, the cover for the first issue, the synopsis for the series, and the query letter. I think the main obstacle at this point is the cover.
