Short Comic Book Stories - Back to Basics

I’ve made a promise to myself that I won’t start any more huge projects until Bluster, The Dominoes, and a new secret project are wrapped up. In that time I do want to work on my ability to write short comic book stories. It’s been a while since I wrote a short, but I remember how useful it was to learn to tell a full story in a quarter of the pages that standard comic books usually have.

The best part about writing is that you can choose your mentors. The even better part of choosing your mentors is that you never have to meet them. I’ve learned just as much from studying other people’s work as I have from talking to actual writers. In order to sharpen my short story skills (until I can take a Comics Experience course I’ve been dying to enroll in) I decided to pick up All-Star Future Shocks from 2000 AD.

All-Star Future Shocks from 2000 AD

Some of my favorite creators have shorts between these covers. Including Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Peter Milligan, and Frazer Irving.

I wanted to share this because it’s important to go back to basics and sharpen your skills for projects down the road. Making a mini-series or original graphic novel is fun, but there’s still room to dabble in short comic book stories or strips in order to experiment with narrative and characters.

Welcome to the Strange

There are times when I'm able to step back and realize something about myself as a reader and watcher of media. Ever since I was little I've loved stories that were bonkers. What do I mean by that? I've always loved things that went into the realm of the strange and got a little bit creepy. I think that Alien might be the first example. That film really moved me when I was little. It also got me into a ton of trouble when I drew a picture of the chestburster in my second grade classroom (and later the Predator ripping out someone's spine). I never had a cap on what I could watch when I was little, and I think that really gave me a head start in terms of enjoying film, TV, and literature.

Now that I'm older I keep gravitating toward those stories that have a bit of science fiction, a bit of mystery, and just a touch of horror. Grant Morrison's Animal Man, Doom Patrol, and now The Invisibles have really inspired me to explore the strange in my own comics and writing. There's only so many times that you can write one person fighting another, but creating situations where people fight ideas and face the horrors of reality is just as fun to write, if not more.

The last thing I want to do is copy anyone's style. That's not my aim. I don't want to be the next anyone except myself. My goal is to just tell the kinds of stories that I enjoy and share them with readers. If that means telling stories set in situations similar to the work that Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis, or even Morrison have done, so be it. I just think it's interesting that I never noticed how big of a part these writers have played on my subconscious and how it's affected the way I approach a story.

I've always outlined a story completely and moved from point A to point B in my own mad scientist kind of way. But now I'm thinking more about how I can make the comics medium work to the best of its ability on the page, doing things other media can't, while remembering that writers like Gaiman, Ellis, and Morrison are there to show me that there is no set way of doing things. You have to carve your own path in anything that you do in life, and I've woken up today with a big hammer and chisel.

And after reading that last sentence I want to assure everyone that it's not a morning wood joke.

Most people say write what you know. And that's true to a point. But I think it should be amended a little. The way it should be said is "write what you love." Because you could know a lot about a subject and no one else would want to read it. When you write about something you love the passion comes through on the page and it resonates with everyone that reads it. Not everyone will love it, some might hate it, but it'll be the purest form of what you put on the page.

That goes for any and all creative endeavors that you set sail on in the ocean of imagination.

I hope that this inspires someone the way that those writers and countless other artists have inspired me to share my musings with the world. Because in the end that's all we're really doing. We're sitting around the celestial campfire and sharing stories on a global scale.