Grab Hold of Your Tale

I'm a man of my word. Or words, actually, because I'm a writer. My preference is for putting English-language scribbles down on paper and then eventually seeing them in print, even if just as a script for comics, film, or stage. That's how I tell a story. But storytelling can really take many forms and most of those are older than the written word.

The first great storytellers practiced their art orally. The most famous were the minstrels or bards, who went around entertaining the people with their huge mental-storehouse of tales and songs. Boy, am I jealous of their abilities: with only the power of their voice and the assistance of gestures (and possibly some stage props), they kept eager audiences--child and adult--entranced for hours and surely stoked their imaginations. There were rare moments as a teacher when I found myself with the full, rapt attention of my antsy teens or tweens and got just an inkling of what it must have been like for the bards. I don't know how well the job paid, and the traveling might have been difficult at times, but what a brilliant life nonetheless.

As most if not all experts agree, "written" communication began with cave paintings, which consisted purely of visuals. Later came pictographs, or hieroglyphs, which started as drawings but developed into a collection of symbols, which made it easier to construct a message using less space: instead of having to assemble selections from a staggering number of visuals, one needed only to arrange and rearrange the symbols to get the meaning one desired.

This does not mean that art ceased to be a means of communication or storytelling. On the contrary, that continues today. Over time, creative people started combining the pictures and words to make "caricatures," as they were called early on. Today we know them as comics. There must be some form of organized planning before constructing these word-picture stories, even if that planning is just done in the brain. But making comics without writing anything down can obviously only be done when the artist and writer are the same person. Some writer-artists (or auteurs) will make little sketches of each panel, called thumbnails, in order to see the layout of the story concretely.

I'll admit that, as someone who proudly works with words in written form, I have in the past been a bit prejudiced, in a knee-jerk way, against the method related above, but I learned to understand it; after all, if the solo comic-creator could fully visualize his/her tale mentally, the only reason s/he'd have for putting it in script form would be to show to an editor or someone else to approve it.

But surely, I thought, a writer would generate a full script when working with a separate artist. So, you can imagine my surprise and disappointment when I read the legendary Joe Simon's explanation of his routine with partner Jack Kirby. Simon, the guy who produced and edited the stories, would come up with the idea and jot it in short form directly on the large art board, which Kirby would then draw the paneled art over. The completed pencils would then go back to Simon, who inked them. I was irked that there was no physical script to look at, but how could I honestly argue with the method that produced Captain America, the Boy Commandos, the Fighting American, and a stable of other great comics characters?

One of the guys Simon and Kirby sometimes worked for, Marvel editor Stan Lee, had another way of generating comics stories that eschewed full scripts as well. He would sit down and bang out a prose-style synopsis of the tale he wanted to produce; this might be something long and detailed or it might be a few sentences. Lee liked to stand at a table by his pool at home, smiling at wife Joan and typing away while soaking up rays. According to legend, he once gave Kirby a one-sentence synopsis that read, "The Fantastic Four meet God." From that, Kirby created the world-eating entity Galactus as well as an epic narrative that had a permanent impact on the Marvel Universe. There were also times when Lee didn't write anything at all: he would sit, stand, or pace nervously and talk through the plot of an issue with the artist. Using this "Marvel Method," the busy editor was able to personally "script" the company's entire line of comic books.

With my own comics, I just can't work that way; I need to have total control of the story--plot, panel compositions, dialogue, lettering, the whole shebang. But I've come to admit that the famous Marvel Method is a legitimate way of working. And in fact I have produced creative products without a full script. In 1998, I made a silent movie, A Dog and His Girl, using only some jotted-down notes and the fully developed visuals in my head, which I directed and shot myself. (That movie, by the way, is in the longest post-production period in cinema history. In other words, I still haven't edited the damn thing.)

Also, in a manner of speaking, I am at this time creating comic strips--actually single panels--out of my Justice League Unlimited action-figure collection, which I photograph and add word balloons to. In the beginning, I did type up the dialogue for these panels, but that was only because I have a terrible short-term memory and didn't immediately complete and post those humorous works of art to Facebook. Now, however, I look at the available figures (I have dozens), think up the scenarios for selected character combinations, photograph the compositions, and place the dialogue directly on the pictures. Nothing else is written. But I love making these panels because they stretch my comedic talents as well as my ability to tell a story in one frozen moment. This in turn can be applied to my comic books: I'm partial to the old school of comics storytelling that is done in just a few pages, rather than the current vogue for "decompressed" tales that span multiple full issues, cinema-style.

Still, they're all legitimate ways of relating a story, along with songs, theater, paintings, sculpture, even advertisements. And don't forget that time-honored childhood activity known as make-believe, where anyone can be the storyteller. Every one of us, no matter how talented, has a tale that humankind should hear or see or read. It's up to each person to decide how to get that tale out into the world.

#storytelling #language #comics #writing