Poetics, Conventions, and Physical Objects

The poetics of comic book narratives are indelibly bound to the page. Each issue of a 24 page comic will contain twenty-four pages of narrative, give or take a few spaces for advertising. Which means a smart comic book writer is always thinking about layout and using pages to generate effect–pitch this sequence across two pages that open together so it reads a particular way, pitch this reveal for the end of an odd-numbered page and the start of a new scene when the reader flips over.

I’m using the word writer loosely here, as befits a collaborative medium where an artist will bring scripts to fruition, but it’s not exclusively the artists deal. Go read interviews where the folks who script comics talk process, and the obsession with pages is there.

Neil Gaiman hassled DC editorial because he wanted to know where the advertising sat in upcoming Sandman issues, because he knew they’d affect the way the story was consumed. Alan Moore put forth a theory he learned from an editor: comic book characters are limited to twenty-five words of dialogue, with 35 words maximum in an a panel. Anything more, and the words take up too much of the panel, giving too little space to the art.

The conventions of comic book storytelling were built around the physical object, the production tools used to create it, and the economies of scale in the marketplace.

This is true for fiction, although it tends to be a little less obvious. Prose doesn’t fit on the page in the same way, flows across the page and continues on with nary a pause.

Tell an editor that you want to focus on a dramatic reveal at the bottom of page thirty-three, and they’ll look at you like you’re nuts. That’s not the way books work.

Tell an editor that you’ve written a 200,000 word novel as your debut, and they’ll give you that same pained look. Also not the way books work, 99% of the time. Costs too much to produce, intimidates the fuck out of an audience. Easier by far to sell two 100,000 word novels, which is how that becomes the default length for fiction in the vast majority of genres.

The fiction industry has conventions based upon marketing and production concerns, just the same as comics, but it’s easier to ignore the impact they have on poetic process because the page is invisible in the narrative process for prose fiction.

Instead, it turns into conventional wisdom around word-count: if your story goes over 6,000 words, it’ll be a bugbear to find a market that’ll take it; avoid novellas, because there’s no audience for ’em; work towards a 100k novel, because that’s the easiest sell if you’re starting out.

When I first started talking about using comic book models to structure a prose publishing company, everyone naturally leapt to the idea of using serial fiction instalments. Which is definitely on my radar, but not the real kernel that makes the idea interesting to me.

What appeals to me is thinking about the physical object of a thirty-two page booklet and filling it in an interesting way. Paying attention to the way the finished product impacts the conventions of telling a story, and what happens when the job ceases to be “write a narrative,” and becomes “fill 32 pages.”