The next obvious question

It seems reasonable to wonder, having spent so much time on studying and writing and appreciating comic books, if I am going to go back. I already said I would read more, but will I write more?

My initial thought was that there wasn’t really a place for me. I feel like what I am writing has a very female energy. There is a lot of action, but the action is not as important as the relationships, and there is a lot of talking. Then I remembered that as I was starting this all of my conversations were happening with women who were fans of comics. Yes, the adolescent boy factor is important, but it is only one factor. So I had to rethink that issue.

I still suspect the answer is “no”, because to me it makes more sense for the field to be led by more visually inclined people. I am somewhat visual, but I really am more verbal. So many times I will look at the art and see the sheer joy of the artwork, where it is just a celebration of form and color, and I can’t offer that. The story does matter, and the words, but it is the pictures that lead.

Where I can totally see getting involved is if an artist needed help. If they had a vision of the kind of world they wanted to portray, but were not sure what to do with it, I could totally work with that. I think this is backwards to how it normally goes, but still, I think it could work.

Of course, I have been wrong before, and I find that in my next round of comic book study, I really want to know more about the mechanics of it, like how the artist and the writer collaborate, and what software they use, and how long things take, and a lot of other information that technically should be useless to me, but I find myself very curious about.

Also, I started wondering how much material I actually have. In Final Draft, I am currently at 289 pages. For a movie, that would be 289 minutes of screen time, but I wanted to know about how many comic pages it would be.

My first thought was to just pick a couple of pages and draw them. I thought about how frustrating my stick figures would be, or if I tried to do better than stick figures, how that would be even more frustrating, and so I discounted that idea, but I keep coming back to it. I may end up still doing it, merely as an experiment. Oh, but it will be ugly.

For the original question, what I did instead was took one of the comic books I bought—in this case, Infinite Crisis Crossover JLA World Without a Justice League (123 Feb 06) and opened up a new Final Draft file and started typing. One page in Final Draft took me through the first two pages and into the first panel of the 3rd page. Let’s say it is basically 2:1, and what is really scary is that particular issue is only about 20 pages. (I may have accidentally counted some ad space. There were a lot of ads.)

So, I guess if I was going to do this, I could be super-prolific—my power is not shutting up. But I’m not going to do it. I think.