Introducing UNSCREWED PANELS
Yesterday marked the release of EPIC KILL #6, Raffaele Ienco’s Image Comics title of which I am the acting editor. If you bought it, you got yourself a kick-ass start to a new story arc, as Raff takes his heroine Song Takahashi to new heights in drama and action-packed adventure.
If you read all the way to the back cover however, you also got a great extra: the first installment of my new comic-writing column, UNSCREWED PANELS.
UP is a step in another direction for me. Those of you who already read my Points of Impact column know that I like to pick apart a comic, digging into its inner workings to try and extract just how it runs in order to present you how you too can use the same tricks and devices in the comics you create. Essentially, it’s reverse-engineering applied to comics.
This time around, I’m doing the opposite: actual engineering – and a lot more literally than you think! UNSCREWED PANELS is all about approaching comics with the outlook of an engineer, treating fiction as a machine – a story-telling machine!
Here’s a short excerpt to whet your appetite:
[ ] Engineers design machines whose function aims at solving a specific problem. Writers conceive fiction whose function serves to tell a specific story. Thus, writing fiction is the act of building a storytelling machine. In engineering as well as fiction, function will be the very cornerstone on which to build your entire endeavor.
Always keep function ahead of aesthetics in your mind. Indeed, if you reverse these priorities and first strive to create an object of beauty, it will lose its shine under scrutiny when the haphazard assembly of its parts appears to the critical eye. You’ll have built a beautiful, yet unusable machine.
However, if you focus instead on function, beauty will naturally flow out of your work, since you’ll make sure that the machine first does its job — to tell a story — and the rest will come effortlessly through the sheer efficiency of its workings.
Hence, we’re going to reduce the art of writing fiction to a set of mechanics that aim to perform a function, thus ensuring every essential part of this machine will easily appear to you in the drafting stages, thus stemming the need for a fickle muse. Necessity will be playing that role instead. […]
Like what you’ve just read? Then go down to your LCS and pick up EPIC KILL #6. It’s a fantastic comic and you’re getting one of the neatest extras on the market with it!
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