How to Write a Comic Book

How to Write a Comic Book

What approach to writing can you take to make people view comic books as something more than children’s doodles? It doesn’t help that 40% of the illustrated panel - media market consists of children’s books. Now, how can a comic book writer break through? What approaches are there to be taken seriously? Over the past couple of university heavy months, as a glorious form of escapism, I’ve been reading all kinds of comics. To make myself feel like I wasn’t wasting time (not like I was anyway, but that’s a common mental trap), I decided to use my reading as an opportunity to learn comic book writing. This blog is partly a document of the superhero comic books I’ve read. It is also a way for me to engage critically with their writing, and see what can be used in my own writing.

The writer I started with was Jonathan Hickman.

His Fantastic Four is considered one of the best marvel storylines. What makes it so great? Ambition, and meticulous worldbuilding. Also, capturing what worked about the previous iterations of the Fantastic Four, and stretching that essence to thematic extremes. Hickman made a series with a deeply silly name such as the “Fantastic Four” into an epic universal saga of unfathomable stakes, not only for the characters, but for the whole of Marvel’s comic books. The culmination: Secret Wars. It was designed as an event to reset all the main-line comics. Whatever happened before or after, Hickman did great with handling the death of a franchise. On “Battleworld”, the Fantastic Four ask the question of what it means to be a good god. Hickman concludes that a good god is one that creates something, and allows it to develop by itself, with no oversight. That was his approach as a writer too. As Secret Wars came out, he announced his retirement from Marvel. Like the good god of the F4, he created the foundation of a new era of Marvel, and left it to grow without his oversight. Hickman’s ideal god is a comic book writer. Cool, meta stuff.

Where’s the humour though, the silliness? He even renamed part of his run from “Fantastic Four” to “Future Foundation”. To support that, the art by the great Esad Ribić strives for realistic perspective and proportion. The parts that are funny are funny, but the humour feels like a functional tone rather than a part of the story.

Hickman’s Fantastic Four run is essentially a work of historical analysis. Hickman himself even mentions it as part of his writing method. He read a bunch of the old F4 comics, trying to get the fundamental conceptual relations between the characters. “What makes the series tick? What works about it?” His work is firmly rooted in the history of mainstream comics. He plays with parts of it, but he is reverent towards established forms. This is his approach to fight for comics to be taken more seriously: making mainstream comics and superhero culture serious concepts.

Look at his passion projects. S.H.I.E.L.D. features Michelangelo, Nikola Tesla, and Isaac Newton with varying time-hopping superpowers. East of West, his “indie” Image comic, features biblical figures such as the four horsemen of the apocalypse. They have superpowers, of course, and the setting is a future sci-fi post-apocalyptic U.S.A. He uses the Bible, and “great men” of history to lend a seriousness to the idea of superheroes and western mainstream comic book tropes. And sometimes that gets exhausting. There’s a dissonance. It still remains somewhat silly, despite his imploring that it get taken seriously.

One writer who takes a different, arguably more effective approach, is Alan Moore.

Moore continues what Art Spiegelman was the figurehead for: making comics a fine art, with his holocaust graphic novel Maus and RAW magazine. What’s interesting about Moore, though,  is that he does it within the superhero tradition. Alan Moore takes the superhero form, and deconstructs it completely.

While Hickman asks you to take existing tropes seriously, Moore nudged the form of superhero comics into the direction of literature. He abandons the inherent silliness of comic books. Instead, he focuses on telling profound stories that subvert tropes and examine superheroes critically.

However, it’s not like you can’t have both. One example of that is Matt Fraction.

His writing is self-conscious, silly, and deeply brilliant.

Somehow, he manages to toe the line between reverence for original material, deconstruction and inventiveness, and retaining the playfulness of the comic book form. These elements coalesce into what I think is the best superhero comic book: Fraction and Aja’s Hawkeye.

Fraction’s approach is maybe the most interesting of the three. He is deeply aware of the silliness existing in superhero tropes. However, he doesn’t settle on merely reproducing them while making sarcastic self-aware quips. What he makes is funny, but also thematically rich and literate.

Here’s some more great writers to check out, for those who may be inspired to look at comic books from the writer’s point of view…

• Louise Simonson, who did the four horsemen of the apocalypse but with superpowers thing way before Hickman, and arguably better.
• Brian K. Vaughan, who embraces the playfulness of the comic book form (Fraction’s approach) to write incisive and insightful social satire.
• If you want great superhero writing à la Hickman but more diverse and less serious, check out Grant Morrison: I recommend their Eisner award-winning All-Star Superman.
• For a similar approach to Alan Moore, check out Frank Miller. If dark, gritty atmospheres and constant discourse on fascism can be a bit depressing, though.
• Finally, if you really hate superhero comics and think they can never be redeemed as a form no matter what, Garth Ennis and the comic book form of The Boys might be your thing (trigger warning for… everything?).