I’ve written a lot of things in my
twenty plus year career. Novels, Novelettes, short stories, screenplays,
articles and blogs. But the one thing I’ve always wanted to write since I was a
kid was a comic book.
I was talking to my friend Mike
Williams, artist of the Deak Sledge comic strip on Twitter and he suggested I
try to write a graphic novel. Now I believe I could write a graphic novel; I’ve
been told the Isis series books like Amari’s Revenge, Isis: The Beauty Myth, and
the first Isis book read just like comic books.
Writing a comic or a graphic novel
has always been something I’ve always wanted to do since I was 13. In fact, one
of my life goals is to publish an Isis graphic novel or series of graphic
novels. But there have always been two issues:
While I’m good at designing costumes
and characters that most people find visually attractive and translate well
from artist to artist, I can’t draw panels for shit,
And,
I don’t know how to write in the
format for comics.
Now the drawing I can possibly get
around the art issue, by working with an artist like Mike Williams, Terry
Beatty, Josh Howard, or a Bill Walko, but the writing well in the format is the
challenge. I’ve always been a pretty solid storyteller when it comes to novels
and screenplays, but writing comics is different from those mediums. Comics are
a different storytelling medium from what I’ve previously worked with and
making my style of storytelling fit within the medium would be the challenge.
From what I’ve gleamed from Mark
Waid’s script pages in the Kingdom Come trade the comic medium is a uses some
elements screenwriting when it comes to dialogue, and the descriptions of
scenes are quite similar to the short prose style I use in my stories such as
those in the Isis series. I believe my writing style would be a good fit for
comics, because I use a high visual style that allows the reader to imagine a
scene in their heads, but with a minimal economy of words.
The big challenge for myself working
with an artist is translating the images in my head words that can be described
as pictures. Comics tell stories in panels, and I kind of see things like a
movie in my head. And each chapter in a story I write is like a scene in a
film. There are some chapters in my novels that I know would make for some
powerful scenes in a movie such as when E’steem reveals her demon form to John
Haynes in The Temptation of John Haynes. The way I imagined that scene was her
standing near the balcony with the moonlight cascading down on her as she
changed from human to demon with her face filled with anguish and guilt. As she
looks over at him to gauge his reaction to her monstrous form, I imagined
John’s impassive expression as he sat on the sofa. It’s powerful sequence
filled with lots of emotion; the irony of the demon changing to tell the truth
about herself showing readers how human she truly was.
While I could easily write that same
scene where an actress like a Salli Richardson-Whitfield (Inspiration for
E’steem) could easily understand the emotions that would be needed to be
conveyed if it were written as a screenplay for film, translating that same scene
into a series of comic panels would be the challenge. It’d take a lot of skill for
me to write that scene so it would convey the right emotions for the artist to
translate into a series of pictures. That climatic scene in The Temptation of John Haynes is very dark in tone and mood, and it’d take the right type of
panel setup to tell that part of the story for an artist to translate it into
pictures.
In contrast there are action
sequences I write like those In Isis: Wrath of the Cybergoddess. Those would be
a bit easier to translate into comic panels because the sequences are a little
simpler for me to describe as single images that fit into panels. There are
chapters in the story I can easily see as comic panels in that story such as Isis’
flight from the South Pacific to New York and her teleporting to get back to
the city. And I can easily see the selfie she takes to taunt Raheema in the
reflection of the glass of the Freedom Tower and Raheema’s reaction sitting on
a bench in New York’s 40th Street Public Library in her disguise as she
tells the compubitch to upload hers. And I can easily see the final
confrontation between the battle damaged Cybergoddess and Isis in the rain as
comic pages; it’s a powerful sequence of panels filled with emotion.
The second challenge of putting
together a graphic novel besides the writing is finding the right artist to
tell the story. Writing a novel or the first draft of a screenplay is a
solitary process that’s done in solitude. However, writing a graphic novel
requires a writer to transition from being a solitary individual to being part
of a team. On a Graphic novel project, a writer isn’t just working alone,
they’re working with an artist too.
To tell the story effectively to readers have to find the
right artist to work with to tell the story with, one that has a style that
fits the characters and one that can tell a story with pictures in the same way
I do with words. Creatively we both have to be on the same page. Because now
this isn’t just my story, but theirs as well, and they have a right to have
some input on the final product. I’m sure I could work well on a team with an
artist, but again, it’d be a learning curve to make things flow smoothly.
The third challenge after writing the
graphic novel would be publishing it. Publishing a novel like The Temptation of John Haynes or an Isis series novelette like Isis: Night of the Vampires is fairly cheap with CreateSpace,
Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop Elements, but putting together a graphic
novel requires a completely different set of skills. After writing the script
and creating the panels, there’s fitting the dialogue into the panels so it
flows with the ar. That’d mean I’d definitely need to buy Adobe CS4, 5, or
whatever it is or PageMaker to create the .PDFs to create the novel. Lots of
long nights as I figure out the learning curve for laying out that kind of book
and publishing it.
The final challenge would be
financing the whole project. Artists don’t work for free, and their time is
money. It’d be a lot of hours for us both turning a 64 page story like a Isis: Wrath of the Cybergoddess into a 96 page graphic novel or an even greater
challenge turning a 400 page novel like The Temptation of John Haynes into a
200 page Graphic novel. That kind of project requires a minimum of $15,000 to
$20,000 finance if I’m paying $120 or so per page. Yeah, there’s Kickstarter,
but there’s no guarantees I could raise that kind of money. Or even if the book
would sell if I got the project off the ground. No one spends that kind of
money to lose, and I wouldn’t want to come that far to fail when it came to
sales.
I definitely would love to write a
graphic novel. It’d make me proud to see Shawn James on the credits on the
splash page and credited as one of the names on the front cover. I may even try
to take a hand at translating one of my old Isis stories into a comic for fun;
years ago after I published Isis and while I was writing The Cassandra
Cookbook, my sister gave me a copy of Syd Field’s Screenplay. Learning how to
write screenplays on my own I wrote All About Marilyn, the critically acclaimed
screenplay that’s loved and praised by readers all over the world. I think I
could produce a graphic novel of that level of quality if I learned the format
for storytelling used in comics.
Readers, would you buy a Shawn James
Graphic novel on the SJS DIRECT imprint? Let me know; because it’s a project I’d
love to bring to you.
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