Now, you probably realise that inevitably
at some point during this Maestro course
we were probably going to be sucked into
the nightmarish vortex of working in the comics industry.
Well, here we are.
Now, comics, I would have to say
is one of the most sublime media in the world.
It can do almost anything.
I would also have to say
that it is one of the most voracious
and kleptocratic industries in the world.
And until it's sorted itself out
I would probably advise you to avoid it.
Wait until it has proper publishers
who are not based upon a policy
of rigorously robbing every talented person
that passes through their hands.
You have to understand
that the entire of the comics industry
is very much like the situation suggested
in the film Barton Fink by the Coen brothers
where the young, naïve
inexperienced writer, Barton Fink
initially having been snapped up eagerly
by a big American company
is told in no uncertain terms
why he has no power at all.
The big producer is saying to him
IN AMERICAN ACCENT: "Listen
you think you're the only guy
can give me that Barton Fink feeling.
I can find 100 guys out there
who can give me that Barton Fink feeling."
Now, this is pretty much what happened to me
and...
in the invention of Vertigo Comics
which seemed to be largely
a kind of middle-class Alan Moore farm.
We have a lot of people who were more than capable
of giving that Alan Moore feeling.
So I'm not saying that this will definitely happen to you
in comics, but it very well may do, in my experience.
None of this takes away from the extraordinary power
of comics as a medium.
One of the things that comics has...
and yes, movies have this as well, but in a different way.
One of the things that comics has
is a visual track.
And unlike a movie, it is static images
that do not pull you through the film from beginning to end
at the exact speed of the events in the film.
With a comic, you can sit and ponder over the images
and the words for as long as you want
until you've absorbed them.
This gives you some fantastic opportunities.
It gives you the opportunity to use the image track of comics
to be telling a substantial part of the story
which will free up the verbal part.
Perhaps to talk about something else entirely.
You can tell another story in the verbal stuff
which will create striking juxtapositions
with the story that you're telling in the images.
You can do all sorts.
Having two tracks to tell your narrative upon
enables you to suddenly do
all of these wonderful magic tricks
with your narrative
You can do nearly anything.
And given that comics, in its modern form
is a relatively young medium
there is of course the added advantage
that most of the great comic books
hopefully, have not been written yet.
That there is still a whole world out there
this entire medium for people with a suitably adventurous mind
to explore and to find all of these things.
One of the things about comics is
you would be very surprised
at how elastic the comics medium is.
By this I mean, how much information
you can crowd into a page if you have a visual image track
to convey some of that information upon.
I remember when I was doing the book Brought to Light
of which I was writing half.
The half detailing the activities of the CIA
and the so-called "Secret Team" of people
who were really running America.
This was called Shadowplay
and it meant that I had to, in detail
track the history of the CIA
from the end of the Second World War
when they were still the OSS
up right the way to the Iran Contra affair.
Along the way I was having to mention
lots of sums of money, lots of massacres
lots of arms deals, lots of drug deals
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of names
of conspirators and associates of conspirators.
It was a mass of information.
I had got 30 pages to do it in.
But because of the comics medium and its startling elasticity
I was able to do a very, very elegant job
getting all of that information in there
and even having a couple of pages left over
for what you might call grace notes.
Little bits of extravagance that I'd added to the narrative
just to make it look that much more perfect.
So yes, that is what you can do with comics.
You can fit an immense amount of information into them.
In fact, there was a Pentagon study
where they were anxious to find out
what was the best way of conveying information
in a form that it would be understood
and importantly, that it would be retained.
So they tried various things. They tried straight text.
They tried text with photographs.
They tried text with illustrations.
And they tried comics.
They contacted the great comic-book creator
Will Eisner
and asked him to do a series of comic strips
explaining certain parts of military life
like how to disassemble and assemble your rifle.
And Will Eisner did a remarkably good job.
He had a character called Joe Dope
who was the world's worst marine
and couldn't do any of this stuff
so would have to have it all pointed out to him.
It turned out that of all those methods
of conveying information to soldiers
the one that they would retain and remember
that was comic strip.
Comic strip as an educational tool
is, I would say, it probably has a bigger future
as an educational tool than it actually has
as an entertainment media.
Now if...
and I suppose that there is quite a likelihood of this
if you are actually watching this course at the moment.
There is a possibility that you might just be somebody
who wants to get into comic writing
and that you might be an admirer of my work.
Other than saying...
spare yourself a great deal of trouble and don't do that
I can only say that if you are determined
to go ahead with that
what is the best way that you can use my influence
as a comic writer in order to actually secure
a comic-writing career and to write good comics
the best tip I can give you is
don't write like I write.
By that I mean, don't try to copy my effects
or the things that I do
or the various aspects of my writing
my overblown language or anything like that. No.
Don't do what I did in terms of my writing.
Do what I did in terms of my thinking.
That is to say, when I started out in comics
I was massively influenced
as was everybody else that I knew
by the American genius, Harvey Kurtzman.
Harvey Kurtzman was the author of the original Mad comics
which was nothing like the fairly sedate and anodyne
later Mad magazine.
Mad comics was probably the most inventive
brilliant and funny comic that ever existed.
So much so that it has doomed us
for probably 50 years now
that any humour magazine that comes out as a comic
must be named after some form of mental aberration
and must have all of the same clichés
because that's what they have become.
The clichés that once were fresh and original
in the hands of Harvey Kurtzman.
So the best way to copy Harvey Kurtzman
I decided, was no
don't do stuff that reads like Harvey Kurtzman
that borrows his jokes, that borrows his stylings.
The best way is do what Harvey Kurtzman did
which is to do something
that nobody has ever seen before.
Now...
back in the day, long ago
when I was a relatively fresh faced 23-year-old
or 26-year-old or something
I had just started to publish
my first couple of comic scripts.
So I was very new to the field of comics.
And there was an organisation
called the Society of Strip Illustrators
which was a kind of coffee evening
for people who drew.
And they published
the Society of Strip Illustrators newsletter
which was a very tiny publication
that would perhaps be seen by about 50 people
who were working in the field.
And as a new writer
they were giving me a kind of questionnaire
about how I was finding the experience.
And their last question was
what are your ambitions in comics?
What would you like to do?
And possibly in a jocular mood
I said that what I would really like
is if some publisher out there
were to revive the naïve 1950s British superhero Marvelman
because I'd got some absolutely killer ideas
as to what I could do with it.
I signed off with a jocular "Cimota".
Which was, it's "atomic" spelt backwards
and it was Marvelman's magic word
that turned him into a superhero.
Now, within a surprisingly short time
of that being published
I was contacted by a comics publisher
who, apparently coincidentally
had been thinking himself of reviving Marvelman.
What are the chances of that?
And asking me
if I would like to make good with my idle boast
by actually writing the strip for him.
So the way that I approached Marvelman
was actually not a million miles away
from what Harvey Kurtzman had done
with his brilliant Mad magazine.
But it was an example of what I was saying.
It's alright to take basic ideas from the people that you admire
but apply them in a different way
that is uniquely your own.
What I did was to decide that
Harvey Kurtzman's superhero parodies
like, say, the excellent Superduperman
from Mad comics
what they were doing was taking a superheroic character
and placing him into the real world
for comic effect.
Because actually
a lot of these characters that were created for children
50, 60, 70, 80 years ago
they are kind of comical
especially if you imagine them in a real world
and that was what Harvey Kurtzman
and his collaborator, Wally Wood, had done.
I thought you could actually do the same thing.
Imagine these absurd children's characters
in a realistic, real-world environment
but not do it for comedic effect
do it for dramatic effect.
What kind of creatures would these really be
if they existed in the real world?
These superhumans?
And what would the world be like
that had them existing in it?
This was my basic strategy
that I could take
the initially amusing idea that I'd had some years before
probably just after reading Harvey Kurtzman's Superduperman
when I thought "Ooh, I could do something like this."
I'll point out I was only about 12 at the time.
I thought I could do something perhaps about Marvelman
and I could make it really funny.
I'd have him having forgotten his magic word.
And he's a sort of shambling bum
who used to be a superhero,
but he's forgotten his magic word.
That would be really funny.
By the time I'd actually become a 26-year-old
and was actually approaching working on this strip
I thought "Actually, that would also be very poignant
and quite dramatic to have this person
who has forgotten that he was ever a superhero.
Has forgotten his magic word."
And then, "What if he remembered it?
What if it all came back to him and he's a 42-year-old man
he's got a wife, he's got a life.
What would happen to that life?
What would happen to that marriage?
To have this impossible creature suddenly involved in it?"
So this was the start of my thinking on Marvelman
which led to this general idea
of super beings in the real world.
Now, there's a lot of aspects to those beings
that you really should consider.
For example, they look a bit fascist, don't they?
That is one possibility.
There's also their function.
What are these superheroes doing?
How are they functioning for the people that read them?
Well, you might have to say
that with their tremendous heroic courage
which largely seems to come from the fact
that they are actually invulnerable to all harm
that their tremendous courage
might be perhaps a compensator
or a surrogate sense of courage
for an audience that, at least in America
which is the home of the superhero
apparently, as I've been told by numerous people
working upon adventurous superhero narratives
within the industry
that they can't figure out
how us Brit guys can get to sleep at night
without a gun on the night table.
This suggests to me that one of the functions of superheroes
is probably as a cowardice compensator.
Also that superheroes might be compensating for
a lot of other things.
They might be compensating for our inability
to actually behave with benevolence
to other people in our society.
I know that the idea of Batman
is a lovely, charming idea
that we have this billionaire who is for some reason
prepared to go out as an unlikely, bat-themed vigilante
and protect ordinary people from the oppressions of crime
and villainy, to risk his life for all of these ordinary people
and I'm sure that you can give me lots of examples
where Jeffrey Bezos or Bill Gates
or Elon Musk
or any of these people have actually done these things
in costume or not. No, of course they haven't.
So this leads me to suggest that perhaps superheroes
are a compensation for a culture
that does its best not to help anyone out.
But you don't really need to as long as you're reading Batman
and Batman is behaving
in this brave, socially benevolent fashion
who... he is protecting the oppressor
doing all that stuff so that you don't need to.
These were some of the insights that I came to have
into the superhero persona
which, I think, did me alright for my subsequent works.
I was able to expand upon those ideas
and to see all of the nuances
of ways in which these characters
if they were included in the real world
ways in which they might work out.
Now, if you are going to ignore
all of my warnings
if you absolutely have to work in the comics industry
it might be quite helpful if I give you just the basics.
When you are working in comics, try to avoid redundancy
between the words and the image.
Don't have a caption telling you
that the hero goes downtown to sort things out
if the panel has got a picture of the hero going downtown
to sort things out. That's redundancy.
You only need to tell people things once.
You don't need to reiterate it in the words.
Also you should probably remember
that there is a certain important ratio
to balance the page between the text and the images.
This simplest way of doing this, this is a way that I devised...
I'd heard that the strictest...
most disciplinarian editor in the industry
who was a reputedly very unpleasant man
called Mort Weisinger
who was an editor on Superman back in the '60s
but he had said
that if you've got a six-panel comic-book page
you could have no more than 35 words per panel.
So I thought "Well, if that's strict
that's probably a good law of thumb to go by."
So that means, 6 x 35, that's 210.
So if you've got six panels on a page, yes.
Roughly 35 words per panel should be your maximum.
If you've got nine panels on a page
it's what, 23 words?
If you've got four panels on a page
it's about 52 words per panel.
Keep to that religiously.
I know that in my workbooks
where I've got my tiny scribbled pictures
with the dialogue written in next to them
each of the patches of dialogue has got
a little mysterious circle with a number in.
That is the number of words in that particular balloon
or that particular caption
so that I can add them up
and make sure that there's not too many words in that panel
so that the artwork isn't being squeezed.
This is all fairly simple mechanical stuff
but you'd be surprised at how many comic artists
and writers don't appear to actually know it.
So these are the simple, technical things.
Keep it to about 210 words per page
try to avoid redundancy.
It wouldn't be a bad idea to perhaps do a story map
at the beginning. If it's a 24-page story
write the numbers 1 to 24 down in a column
and by each of them, write what is supposed to be happening
upon that page.
And then pretty much, you'll be able to get through a comic
as well as most of the current practitioners
of the medium can manage it.
That's if you actually have to work
in the comics industry despite everything I've said.
But if you do that, just don't come crying to me.