Paul Tobin
This week’s theme is on comics, and tights versus existential angst. It’s a topic I feel especially qualified for, as writing superheroes is rather my day job, having written two or three hundred comics in the past few years, including all of the “big” heroes, such as Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, the Hulk, the Avengers, Wonder Woman, and so on. I know me some angst.
In many ways, it’s superhero angst that drove me to write my Prepare To Die! novel. Comic books are normally twenty-two pages long. That’s not much room. In fact, recently, many comics went down from twenty-two to twenty pages long, and I can tell you those two pages make a huge difference. That’s suddenly 10% of possible storytelling vanished, and that can make the difference between a well thought out scene and a jumbled mish-mash of happenstance.
Because of this lack of room, there’s not a lot of space to develop a character, to get into what is making a character tick… into just why he or she is doing what’s happening on the page. Comics tend to take to the school of “action and reaction” storytelling, even more so because comics are very much a visual medium, so it’s important to have visually interesting action. This is why Spider-Man is often thinking about his relationships, or having deep inner thoughts, even as he’s bouncing over rooftops and fighting a horde of ninjas. You wouldn’t think that a man who’s dodging 30,000 arrows and shurikens would be considering if he should take a date to a certain club, anxious over worries that his girlfriend might be there… but that’s what Spidey has to do, and for a very good reason. That’s the only place where the writer can put it. And, anyway, it makes for better copy than “Holy crap! I sure do hope I can dodge all 30,000 arrows and shurikens!”
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