Learn From Webcomics

darapti asked: In regards to lesson 4, does this mean any work where the protagonist is both a rounded and evolving character and a rapist or a pedophile (etc.), like A Clockwork Orange or Lolita, is automatically reprehensible?

It’s a fine line, that is for damn sure.

I guess the key here is that neither of the works you’ve cited portray the rape or pedophilia as heroic or laudable acts. They’re treated as serious crimes in both, even though the perpetrator is technically the protagonist. It’s okay for the protagonist to commit these sorts of crimes as long as the crimes themselves are treated with the gravity they deserve.

Midterm Review 1

All right, class, it’s time for the new feature, Midterm Review!  In it, I take a look at a student-submitted comic and then give a review as well as a suggested homework assignment.

You should all be doing your homework, of course.

Student: Tubartist

Comic: Soul Symphony

Best Lesson: Love What You Do (Lesson 7)

Needs Improvement: Think About It (Lesson 4)

Soul Symphony is a pretty young comic, and doesn’t take long to read through. It’s about a high school band nerd, Olivia, who is suddenly tasked, by a little floating spirit creature, with helping the people around her with their problems. 

Frankly, in the beginning, there are some originality problems. The first arc has very standard high-schooler-gets-powers dialogue, the sort you can see in about a dozen first episodes and comic arcs. But, as the series goes on, this improves a great deal, so it’s not really much of a problem anymore, especially since the creator decided to use a Flash visual-novel sort of interface for some of the exposition-heavy scenes. Saves space, since it’s all wrapped up neatly in one little parcel, even if it is one little parcel you’ve got to click through. The dialogue is otherwise pretty comfortable; it’s rarely show-stopping, but it’s smooth enough to work.

The reason I’ve cited “Love What You Do” as the best lesson here is because it’s a comic about band geeks, written by someone who obviously loves music. The author’s great at inserting details about music and band without drowning out the story, and it gives the comic a sense of heart in a really lovely way. Little things like Olivia’s paranoia about injuring her hands in the spirit world, like the way notes are drawn in the background. It’s sweet.

Unfortunately, if you’ve got a problem lesson, you really don’t want it to be Lesson 4. It’s not a full-scale Dominic Deegan problem, but the author has kind of a problem with stereotypes. The only confirmed person of color in the cast is Eric Sakai, an Asian student whose overbearing parents put too much pressure on him to succeed. Of the two women in the cast, one of them pretty much revolves her life around men she’s interested in (she’s established as a genius drummer, but she makes all her choices based on men) and the other, Olivia, is still prone to blushing more or less any time she’s in any proximity to a man.

So, here’s the thing. There’s nothing wrong with including characters like Eric and Ashley because, well, people like that do exist in real life. (Actually, Eric is one of my favourite characters. He’s a sweetheart.) The problem is that they’re the only minority characters, which means 100% of the confirmed characters of color in this strip are stereotypical, and 100% of the women are preoccupied with romance, 50% to an obsessive degree. So, it makes kind of a poor showing.

(I say confirmed, because the strips that take place outside the spirit world aren’t coloured, which means that there are several students who have only ever been seen in line art.)

On the other hand, the theme of the comic lends itself well to broader thinking about these things. Olivia, you see, is pretty much the worst. She’s a self-absorbed brat of a teenager who, until Carl the spirit comes along, couldn’t really be bothered even thinking of her fellow students as human most of the time. But, through going into other people’s spirit worlds, she’s starting to learn that everybody has their own problems to deal with, and I think that’s my favourite part of Soul Symphony. I love watching her learn that she’s not the only one with troubles, and a heroine like Olivia was a good choice, since it highlights that theme nicely.

Since the moral of the story is that other people’s lives are more complicated than we can know, having this many stereotypical characters kind of dims it. A setup like this is a great chance for a writer to think seriously about the problems the people around us could be facing, and to add unexpected dimension to characters. For the most part, a character’s problems are pretty obviously based on their role. Ashley’s worried about boys, Eric’s stressed out by his family, Charlie the metalhead has a problematic relationship with his family.

So, overall, although I didn’t start enjoying it until the first arc was over and the dialogue improved as characters other than Olivia showed up, I did indeed start to enjoy it. It’s got a lot of heart, and you can’t really teach heart, but there’s a lot of room to grow. At the same time, it’s really got to work on characterization in general and representation issues in particular, and work hard.

Homework: Make a list of your own interests, worries, and pursuits. Are they all related to the same core “hub”, or related to each other at all?

Thanks to tubartist, both for proposing the new feature and for starting us off! If you’ve got work that you’d like to submit for a Midterm Review, go ahead and let me know in a fanmail!

tubartist asked: Would you ever consider taking requests for webcomic reviews? Personally I feel like I struggle more as a writer than an artist, and I feel like other creators like me would love to hear your thoughts on our work.

You know what? Sure. Why not? Felt like I was running out of subject matter anyway.

As long as somebody submitting understands that I’m a professional and I take editing damn seriously, I’ll give it my best shot. New feature: we’ll call it “Midterm Review”

Lesson Seventeen

Today’s Lesson:  Know The Reasons

Today’s Teacher: Tim Buckley (Ctrl-Alt-Delete)

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We’ve talked about dialogue before. In Lesson Three, we touched on the idea that characters shouldn’t say really stupid obvious crap, and in Lesson Two, we talked about how characters should speak in ways that reflect who they are as people. Since dialogue can be a hell of a beast, let’s take some time today to talk about realistic and contrived dialogue.

So, take a look at the comic above. It seems pretty normal, doesn’t it? He’s frustrated at the server maintenance, and the joke is that he winds up sitting around waiting to play anyway. You’ve got the information you need, and it’s one of those CAD jokes that’s funnier to people who know the game—no shame in playing to a niche audience.

But, here’s the problem. When was the last time you responded to any technical difficulties like that? Last time I ran into some unexpected server maintenance, I looked at my screen a moment, then I looked down, sighed, and said, “Well, fuck.”

That was it. I do not think I have ever felt the need to narrate in detail to no one in particular that I was trying to get online but had been thwarted due to server maintenance, nor did I say to the same no one in particular that it was hard enough getting the damn thing to connect that day and that this was terrible timing. Because there was no reason to.

Whenever you say anything to anyone, you’ve got your own reasons for it. This is because, the vast majority of the time, people have reasons for everything they do. They’re not always good reasons, but they’re there, and they’re your reasons. As a writer, you want your characters to be as lifelike as possible, and that means that they, too, need to have their own reasons for doing things.

By “their own reasons”, by the way, I mean reasons aside from the writer’s. Let’s go back to the sample comic. Why is this guy saying all that stuff in the first panel?

He’s saying it so that you, the reader, know the premise of the strip.

Remember “Show, Don’t Tell”? It goes double for dialogue. Because nobody in real life says things so that the audience at home knows what’s going on, your characters shouldn’t either, or your audience will see the strings. When your audience can tell that you’re doing things just for the sake of convenience, they lose interest, so contrived dialogue can seriously hurt your writing. Never use your characters as mouthpieces to say things you could just demonstrate, even if it’s harder. Especially if it’s harder.

Because speculative fiction authors have a lot more to explain to the reader than someone writing memoir or romance, they’re even more prone to falling into this contrived dialogue trap. There are three words that stop so many science fiction stories cold on the editor’s desk: “As you know”, as in:

“As you know, Dr. Jones, after the band Aqua led the revolution of the 2020s, space travel powered by the song Candyman has become commonplace.”

Of course Dr. Jones knows. And, if Dr. Jones knows, and the speaker knows that she does, then why is the speaker saying it? Because the author needed an easy way to explain to the reader that Aqua music is the basis for interstellar travel in this story’s setting. Not wanting to risk an “info-dump” by just putting setting details in the narration, speculative fiction authors often try to camouflage the exposition as dialogue, without realizing that it makes their characters look like morons.

This isn’t to say that your characters should only say necessary things. Real human beings, after all, say unnecessary things all the time. We mutter to ourselves when we’re trying to solve a problem, we say pointless things just for the sake of conversation, we talk to animals even though they don’t understand us. If we only spoke when we needed to speak, we’d hardly talk at all!

But, at the same time, we always have a reason. When we mutter to ourselves trying to solve a problem, it’s to help get our thoughts in line. When we say pointless things to keep a conversation going, it’s to stave off an awkward silence. When we talk to pets, it’s because they feel like friends and because, if they judge us, they’re very good at hiding it. Even if the things we say don’t have any meaning or don’t accomplish anything, they’re still the product of our own thoughts and feelings, not artificial projections from someone else looking to make a point.

If you use your characters as mouthpieces, that means you’re stepping in and overwhelming who they are with your own voice, and your readers can tell. Even a throwaway character like the one in the sample strip—you can tell that he’s not lifelike, right? In that first panel, he might as well be saying “I was fabricated to tell you this joke.”

You want your characters to be as much like real people as possible, because your audience isn’t going to empathize with puppets. Even though, really, all a writer does is put on puppet shows, the last thing you want is to show your audience the strings.

Practice: Grab a chunk of dialogue from a work you enjoy, be it a movie, a book, a game, a TV show, or a comic. For every line of dialogue, write down the reasons the character is saying it, and the specific information they are trying to convey and to whom. How does the character’s emotional state influence the information they try to get across? Can you see places where the author might be putting words in someone’s mouth?

Lesson Sixteen

Today’s Teacher: Randy Milholland (Something*Positive)

Today’s Lesson: Don’t Look Away

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Normally, I rather like S*P, hence the link. The dialogue is sharp, and the author’s dedicated to respectful treatment of his subjects. I’d never have to write Lesson Four about this guy. But, go ahead and take a look at the sample comic. Mike, the character these two are talking about, is well-known for being something of an entitled jackass; he started out as a parody of the worst of tabletop gaming culture before he started turning himself around.

Are you curious about what Mike did? Because you will never find out. The entirety of this storyline consists of a small handful of pages like this. Characters saying they can’t believe what Mike did, Mike saying he can’t believe what he did. And then it ends.

When I was much younger, I read a book on how to write from the library. I’ve forgotten most of it, but there was a quiz in there designed to help with character development, and there’s one question that’s stuck with me.

“Is this the most interesting time in your character’s life? If not, why aren’t you writing about that instead?”

Don’t look away. If something funny, or dramatic, or tragic, or moving happens to your characters, you get much more emotional mileage out of it if you put your audience right there as it’s happening. In Milholland’s case, the story was not told, and not only that, but it was not-told to a character who didn’t really have any stake in it at all, and who didn’t care much.  So, he’s presented a hint to us that something interesting had happened, and we get to watch the reactions of characters who witnessed it, but not only do we not get to see the event itself, but we also don’t get to see the real-time reaction of someone who cares enough to make finding out about the party an event in itself. The reaction of his wife would have been moving, but it happens off-camera, as she was at the party. Aubrey here, who’s invested more than most other characters in trying to help Mike become a decent person, found out at the party.

When you’re writing a scene like this, ask yourself, what is the actual event you’re portraying here? In this case, for example, the actual event is Davan learning about what happened at the party. What’s watchable about Davan’s reaction? It would have been more dramatic to see Mike’s wife’s reaction, and it would have been funnier to see Aubrey’s.

This applies to trying to give a character a tragic backstory, too; a character recounting something that happened to her in the past is not the same thing as putting the audience right there with her as it’s happening. Flashbacks and second-hand descriptions of events lack immediacy and tension; because we’re looking back at them after they’ve happened, there are things we can assume. For example, if your heroine’s tragic backstory nearly killed her, the audience knows she got out of it fine, and has no reason at all to fear. If two friends are telling the story about how fiercely they fought over football scores, then of course the reader knows they patched things up.

There’s a type of gag—and this plotline didn’t run long enough to sustain it—where the reader is left in the dark about events that have happened, but consequences for them keep piling up. In order for that gag to work, though, the story needs to be driven by those consequences and by the reader’s curiosity. But, since Mike isn’t the central character for this arc, none of the consequences for his actions are really shown front and center, and there are few consequences for Aubrey or Davan. A better way to try and pursue this would be to follow Mike around for a day and watch the way other characters react to him after the events of the party, holding off on describing the party itself, or to have the events of the party turn out to have unexpected consequences for Aubrey, who can’t really shake them.

Whether it’s a gag or not, just talking about something that happened isn’t very interesting unless the act of telling someone about something has consequences. Everything you present to your audience should have meaning and should hold interest; don’t sacrifice intensity.  Find out exactly where your story’s conflicts are and look them square in the face from beginning to end.  If you don’t want to show something for whatever reason, then make sure that your point-of-view character learning about it is an event worth writing about.

Avoid flashbacks, and avoid framed stories where a narrator tells the tale of what happened to him in the past. Every little step you put between the reader and the story dulls the audience’s interest, gives them time to settle in and get comfortable instead of keeping them on the edges of their seats.  When something interesting, funny, dramatic is happening in your story, show it to your audience, and show it as it happens. Don’t look away.

Practice: We are gonna write us some fanfic. Think of a character you know of with a backstory, ideally one whose backstory is often alluded to but rarely actually depicted. Write the backstory as story, as it happened. Feel free to change any details you like, and even to change the ending, too, while you’re at it. What do you feel the story gains from immediacy and uncertainty?