Comic Writing Exercises: Making Them Move

Part I - The Syllabus
Part II - A Moment in Time

Last week Chris Piers and I taught Week Three of the Writing for Comics and Graphic Novel class at the Bethesda Writer's Center. This class focused on what happens in-between comic panels (the gutters). We started with a discussion of closure and how the mind can often resolve what happens from one panel to the next provided the writer and artist give the reader enough visible cues to make the connection. We showed examples from Watchmen (below) where Alan Moore and David Gibbons effectively established scenes within a nine-panel grid by keeping at least one object consistent while moving from one panel to the next. Looking at the first page, for example, we follow the button to the foot to the man with the hose to the blood splotch to the hand on the windowsill to final shot. There's something familiar in each new panel that allows us to instantly understand where we are and where everyone is in relation to each other.




After discussing the Watchmen pages we flashed several more pages on the screen to get the students opinion on how time was being handled in each one and how the gutters were being played with in order to manipulate time. Those pages are below:








We then went into exercises that Chris Piers compiled. We started by asking students to thumbnail several short scenes borrowed from Matt Madden & Jessica Abel but instructed them to do the scenes in either three or four panels. It allowed us to discuss different ways to compress and expand on otherwise short scenes.

For the second exercise we asked the students to craft a nine-panel comic about how they got to class. This exercise allowed us to comment on how much space there is in a panel, especially for a nine-panel page, and how time between well-structured panels is often perceived as a constant for reader.

The third exercise was borrowed from Paul Hluchan. The students teamed-up into four groups and told the story of an astronaut that went to the moon and came back to the wrong planet. Once we had sixteen panels we hung them up on the wall and the students systematically removed one panel at a time while ensuring the story still made sense. As expected, the panels at the beginning of the story disappeared pretty quickly, mainly because it's always easy for the brain to intuit what happened before the story's actual start point. Seriously, if you ever need to cut something down, chances are you can just throw away the opening.

The fourth exercise was borrowed from Isaac Cates. Pretty self-explanatory, we presented Panel 1 and Panel 3 to the student and asked them to give examples of a panel two that showed moment-to-moment, subject-to-subject, action-to-action, scene-to-scene, aspect-to-aspect, and non-sequitur transitions.

And that was it for that class. This week we're working on dialog and I put together some great little exercises for that one...I think...

Labels: comics, education

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