Self-publishers with widely varying quality, styles, and sales.Currently, comics publishers come in about six flavors: The publishing scene is in the midst of a sea change. But the reality is that before you start writing a comic book story, you should know a little something about the comics industry and community. It may seem odd to jump from an aesthetic discussion to hard, cold business facts. What it boils down to is that all comics employ sequential art: a series of static images arranged in sequence to tell a story or express thoughts and feelings. Scott McCloud spends the first nine pages of his groundbreaking work Understanding Comics developing a definition of comics as a medium. In this workshop we’ll concentrate on writing for linear, narrative comic books. Your stories can be verbose or wordless, serialized or self-contained, funny or tragic, color or black-and-white. If you want to write mysteries, science fiction, autobiography, or even surrealist montages, you can do it in comic book form. In fact, comics are not a genre, but a medium of expression - like movies or prose - that can communicate a wealth of ideas and emotions spanning all genres.

Many people, especially in the U.S., equate comic books with the superhero genre or dismiss them as kiddie fare. This whole section of our site is devoted to serving as a gateway to helpful information about making, teaching, and reading comic books. I add new links periodically, so send me your suggestions! For more in-depth and current resources, see my Comic Book Creators page. My writing guide is intended for newbies, and parts of it may need a little updating. And if the process images on this page caught your eye, they’re from the “Creative Chaos” presentation I did with Paul, which shows different types of comic book plots, scripts, and art. If you like bulleted lists, you can also download the slides I made for a different version of my writing workshop. (The HTML version is more up to date, while the PDF has some additional visuals.) You can read the HTML version below, or download it as a free PDF. Friends in the comics business tell me they regularly send students to read it, so I’m keeping it available online and supplementing it with recommended books and resources. I created a concise comic book writing guide for a workshop I taught some years back, and I’ve used it many times since then.

“Good comic book writers think in pictures as well as words.” -Anina Bennett

Removing a template in comic life 3