ActionsIt’s time to let you in on a comic book writer’s secret:

Action is the most important element of a comic book script.

While this should be an obvious statement to most writers - after all, without action in a story, nothing actually happens - many beginners (and even professionals!) never truly learn to understand its meaning. Perhaps it is because writers tend to process action as they read it - in short, choppy sentences with quick, vivid descriptions. Or perhaps it is because writers have trouble imagining the appearance of action. It may even be that most writers assume that artists have better imaginations when it comes to action and will be able to draw something more captivating than anything a description could offer.

Unfortunately, all of those lines of thought (any many others like them!) are based on the misconception that a writer’s most important contribution to a comic book is the plotting and the dialogue. Any experienced writer, however, knows that this is not true - the real role of a writer is to develop a story as well-realized as that of a novel and then to offer instructions to the artist as to how to make the story come alive visually.

Action is not simply a word for fighting - it describes any sort of motion that is shown rather than described. In a visual medium like film or comics, action is key to delivering a story, regardless of how small an action there is. Consider the daily newspaper comic Peanuts, for example, through which Charles Schulz managed to tell thousands of tiny stories every decade within four panels:

Copyright 2005, Universal Feature Syndicate.A simple dialogue exchange is made more humorous by the action going on in the scene. Violet walks by and, without stopping, insults Linus, who has to spend some time thinking and evaluating himself before he is ready to shout back his retort. And while this scene could be told quite easily in one or two panels, it would lose its humorous impact without the action.The same principle holds true in a 22-page comic, though on a grander scale. For a comic book to read well, there needs to be room for the characters to move so that the reader gets a sense of the scale and timing of the story. Unfortunately, most writers fall into one of three traps when plotting action:

1) Too much action: You know the sort - the new comic book you just picked up is a 22-page slugfest that can be flipped through backwards and forwards in three minutes. A good example of this kind of book is Dragonball Z, which often features page after page of two guys hitting each other with no definite resolution to the conflict until two or three issues have passed.

That’s not to pick on DBZ, of course - as a comic, it was originally published as a serialized adventure in a boy’s magazine in Japan, and it had to stay high-action to keep the attention of its audience. But as a general rule, comic books that can be read so quickly don’t fare well with American audiences unless they’re published in an inexpensive, black and white graphic novel format.

2) Gratuitous dialogue: As I stated in chapter 3 of this guide, dialogue needs to be plausible for the reader to be able to hear it as part of the story. And yet many writers insist on inserting lines into their characters’ mouths that have no place in a scene. During a big action sequence, for example, many writers love to put a quip in the mouth of every character whenever a blow is landed. But again, this dialogue is generally unnecessary - it doesn’t add anything to the story, and it only makes the action sequences move more slowly in the reader’s mind because they have to take time to read the words before their eyes move to the next image.

Gratuitous dialogue also tends to limit what the artist can accomplish in a panel, since room must be left for the dialogue to be inserted.

3) Too little action: By far the most common of these “traps,” the condition of “too little action” plagues most writers for their entire career. Put simply, writers love to write, and when they get rolling, they often forget to leave room for things to happen in the story. This particularly affects writers who are trying to communicate sophisticated ideas through the medium or who love to develop characters through dialogue and situational drama.

Based on my experience in the comic book world, I would recommend that all three traps can be easily avoided with one simple guideline:

Comics should generally be paced at one minor action per panel and one major action per page.

To elaborate, let me explain the differences between a major and minor actions:

-A major action refers to a movement that begins a new shift in the story. If a detective turns, startled, at the sound of a ringing phone, that is a major action. In acting, she changes the course of the story and moves the following actions on a different path. In this case, the next several panels will revolve around her actions involving the phone.

-A minor action refers to a movement that continues the action of the previous panel. If the detective picks up a phone, for example, the following minor action might be for her to dial a number, or say “Hello,” or something else that is natural and related to what she’s just done.

-A minor action might also refer to a follow-up punch once a fight has been initiated, a back turned and arms crossed once an insult is landed, or a shocked face once a secret has been revealed. The word minor is not meant to lessen the intensity of the action, but rather its progression in a sequence.

Every panel, then, should move the story forward with some slight action that plays upon the last. And yet many writers tend to neglect this guideline in any scene where a group of characters are in heavy dialogue (or, as they’re called by many in the industry, “talking head scenes”). Often, writers leave it to the artist to make these scenes visually interesting, which can be a dangerous mistake if the artist is inexperienced, hurried, or lazy. It is, after all, difficult for an artist to imagine the same scene several times and at several different angles when the writer is more concerned with the dialogue than the scenery or the body language of the characters.

But if a writer understands the progression of minor action, he or she can more capably help the artist to make the scene stand out. What if, for example, the writer focuses on the nervous movements of a witness on the stand as he offers a long and boring testimony to an assembled courtroom? Or what if the writer focuses on the facial reactions of the defendant, whom the witness is accusing of heinous crimes? Writing scenes with this degree of visual oomph not only aids the artist - it also allows the writer to tell a more complex story in the same amount of space.

But minor actions can only play off one another for so long before the story needs to shift directions, and major actions are necessary for a story to continue to move forward. If the prosecutor in the courtroom begins a direct examination, he will eventually need to rest and allow the defense to bring a cross-examination. This shift results in two different types of pacing - a direct examination might have a short string of minor actions while the prosecutor lobs easy questions to the witness, but the cross-examination might play out in quick and dirty sequence that leads to another major action as the witness breaks down on the stand.

Of course, in the play between major and minor actions, there often arises a need for a transitionary action that ties one sequence to another. For example, if, during our courtroom drama, it was necessary to return to our detective to see what he or she was uncovering in a related case, a transition could serve the purpose of tying this shift into the overall action of the story. Transitions are wonderful tools that can effectively cover the seams of a story, but they also have a nasty way of putting the brakes on an action sequence and abruptly changing tone if they are used artlessly.

As you might remember from chapter 2 of this guide, I recommend writing scripts from the top left corner to the bottom right - from spread to spread, from sequence to sequence. I have often found that either beginning or ending a spread with a major action results in better reading overall, with a transitionary action at the opposite corner.

And once you’ve mastered the use of action, you’re ready to have some fun with the other side of the coin: effects.

Effects

If you’ve read a comic book since the late 1990s, you’ve no doubt noticed that comics have gained some wonderful new storytelling abilities over the last decade. While in the past, actions had to be delivered with words like “POW!” or “BAM!,” comic books have become sophisticated enough that they can display actions with motion blurs and other cinema-style special effects that sell the action more effectively.

And yet, at the same time, comic books still use words to indicate certain actions, leaving many writers to wonder which style is more effective.

First, let’s examine the pros and cons of each.

Word effects:
+say exactly what the writer wants the action to suggest
+are easy to read in a script
+are traditional
+work in any sized panel
-get in the way of the action
-get repetitive and dull if used too often
-take longer for a reader to process than a visual

Visual effects:
+offer an immediate suggestion of the action
+look really cool and cutting edge
+can give a reader a clear picture of the action the writer had in mind
-can be difficult to process visually when they’re done poorly
-require a lot more visual space to be effective

Clearly, this is a subjective art that depends heavily upon the artist or the project. I tend to use words to describe distinct sounds (”Boom!”, “Thud!”, “Slickt!”) and visual effects to focus on impact. There are times where the two mix quite nicely (during a swordfight, for example, where words like “Clang!” can suggest the impact of a strike as it’s blocked while the art shows the blades crashing together with motion blurs), but there are times where the two are redundant or, even worse, counter-productive. My suggestion, then, is to be as descriptive as possible about any visual effects you would like to include and make the word effects optional at the discretion of your book’s letterer or art director.

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