Helpful Comment from Gene Yang

Saturday I saw Gene Yang at Books Inc in downtown Mountain View, CA. He did the usual spiel about his latest publication, his career, et cetera, and was really rather nice and charming about the whole thing.

What I loved, though, was in the last fifteen or so minutes, we the audience made a comic with him. At the start, I thought it was a cute exercise, and I like seeing into someone's creative process, even if it's just a fly-by view of it.

Through the process he stated some obvious things (make sure the reader can tell your characters apart, your story needs an arc) but the end point was what I liked. It was something I had an intuitive idea of, but more on the prose side than on the comics side, and never really put into words.

The story is split in two parts: internal and external. Displaying the story is split in two parts: art and words. And those two pieces have to each carry half the story. Meaning you can have (1) art carry the internal and words carry the external or (2) art carry the external and words carry the internal.

We made a three-panel comic, one where the art carried the internal and words carried the external, and one the opposite. After, we got into a (brief) discussion about which is better. (I ruined it by saying my opinion, which made Gene say "Yeah, that's the point I was going to get to, after hopefully some discussion." Whoops ) (Oh, and my opinion was you need both, you need a balance, pick which best suits the specific scene, and you really need to keep changing it up to keep the reader from getting bored/tired.)

As I said, I've had an intuitive grasp of this, in prose. But I never had it explicitly stated and I thought it was useful noob advice

Now, I know for many of you this will probably be pretty obvious. But having it laid (lain?) out so explicitly was really awesome.

So, yeah. Just sharing that.

sunandshadow said:

That's interesting - I would have assumed it had to be art externals, words internals. What was the comic that exemplified the other way like?

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For instance, in our story, we had Jeff and Gina, a Bonnie and Clyde type couple, and in the first panel they're getting away from another successful bank robbery.

When we had art-external words-internal, the drawing was of them driving away from the bank and the words (now, this was narration, not dialogue, just to clarify) described how they felt.

When we had art-internal words-external, the words described them driving away from another heist, and since the words already told us they're driving away, we don't have to show them driving away as well. So we focused on their faces, posture, on the affects the successful robbery had on our characters.

Hope that clarifies