I declare today that the creators of every comic book must be able to answer these questions, or at least make work that shows they’ve considered them all.
1. Why is this a comic book?
Does it want to be a movie instead? A video game? A piece of prose? (If so, you should probably go make whatever it’s supposed to be instead. I have no interest in looking at your proof-of-concept movie proposal.) Is there a reason it has to be drawn as a series of still images, rather than photographed or filmed or animated?
2. What is it going to look like?
How does it look different from every other comic book out there, including others drawn by the same person? There are no great generic cartoonists; first-rate cartoonists treat style and design as integral elements of every individual project, and it’s generally true that the more premeditated a particular comic’s look is, the better it comes out. (The Dark Knight Strikes Again doesn’t look like Sin City, which doesn’t look like 300…) This also extends to coloring, of course. Think of Patricia Mulvihill’s work on 100 Bullets, say, or what Frank D’Armata’s been doing on Invincible Iron Man lately: they’re distinctive, carefully thought out, and hugely important to the way both series work.
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3. What is it going to read like?
How is its writing different from the writing in every other comic book out there, including others written by the same person? Again, style is everything in comics, and good narrative writing doesn’t just tell a story, it fits the story. Final Crisis and Joe the Barbarian and Seaguy are all written by Grant Morrison, but even apart from their visual differences, they’re very different from one another in their mood, their pacing, and their language.
4. What is the first thing I’m going to see on the first page, and why should that convince me to keep reading?
The first page of a comic book is a compact between creators and readers. It’s the first thing we look at. If you nail it, that means you’re paying attention, and we keep reading. If it doesn’t immediately grab our attention, we put the comic back on the shelf and go look at something else. You look at the first page of the first issue of Y: The Last Man, and you need to know what happens next. The opening gambit doesn’t have to be a cliffhanger, either: the first page of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a little anecdote about Bechdel playing “airplane” with her father, which instantly sets up the look and tone of the book and the relationship between its two main characters–that’s enough to draw a reader in.
5. What is this story about, in a sense broader than the plot? What is it expressing? How do its form and content serve that?
Every comic book doesn’t have to be a grand tone-poem on Man’s Inhumanity to Man in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction or whatever. Still, having some sort of idea behind it, or some goal toward which it can work, means it’s a lot less likely to fumble around blindly until it stops, and more likely to find good answers to questions 2 and 3.
6. Why is this comic a bargain for its cover price?
I don’t think $4 is prima facie too much for a comic book; I paid $125 for Kramers Ergot 7, and I’d do it again. But there are a lot of $3 and $4 comics out there, and that adds up in a hurry, and if I’m going to buy a 32-to-40-page pamphlet I want to get the sense that its creators passionately believe that it’s going to be the most awesome, most spectacularly entertaining thing I read all month, rather than another piece of product to fire off in this week’s skirmish in the market share wars. Be amazing or get off the racks.
7. If this comic involves creatively shared characters or settings, how is it going to obey the Campsite Rule?
I’ve lifted that term from Dan Savage: you need to leave the campsite in better shape than you found it. That means that if you’re working in a shared universe that’s subject to change, that universe needs to be both somehow different (in some way, however small) and more open to further interesting storytelling at the end of your comic book than it was at the beginning. Occasionally, superhero comics writers talk about “putting all the toys back in the box” at the end of a story; fine, but if they’re not going to be better toys when you’re done, there’s no reason to pay attention to what you’re doing with them. And if you’re closing off possibilities for stories, you have to replace them with better and more fertile possibilities. (This, incidentally, is one reason why killing off established characters in ongoing serial comics is usually a bad idea; it preemptively eradicates good future stories involving them. A fate worse than death is usually a lot more dramatically interesting, anyway.)
8. Who might I recommend this comic to?
Mostly, this just means that cartoonists need to figure out who their audience is, and make sure they’re creating something that can be enjoyable and meaningful enough to that audience to be worth not just experiencing but passing along; a lot of the pleasure of comics, as with any other kind of art, is sharing the best work with friends. The question has an additional sense for modern American serial comics, which have a well-earned reputation for often being hard to get into unless you’re already an initiate. That can be fine, in the right circumstances; I’ve been reading Green Lantern for enough years that I don’t need to have the premise explained to me at length every time I pick an issue up, and there’s a lot to be said for the fun of well-handled deep continuity. But I think it’s fair to demand that if a comic book has a #1 on its cover, it shouldn’t have any prerequisites to reading and enjoying it.
Thanks to Andrea Gilroy and Evan Narcisse.
Want more Emanata? See all of Douglas’ columns here.
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