Art Journal 008: Speech

Comics aren’t unlike written stories.  We substitute a lot of the descriptive text- the words outside the quotation marks- with our art, which illustrates the world and the things that happen in it.  But we’re humans, we’re social creatures.  We communicate a great deal with one another, and it’s through this communication where the soul of a story unfolds.  We yell and we shout, we think and we whisper, we bellow, we laugh, we growl.  The way in which we speak is as important as the things we’re actually saying, giving our words a shadow of subtext to tilt them towards one emotion or another.  Dialogue is a big part of my comic-making process so this week I’m going to talk a little about my thought processes when it comes time to put words in everyones’ mouths.

I have a bit of an unorthodox method of writing, I think.  When I plan my comics and pace my story ahead a couple pages I rarely actually write any dialogue down.  I’ll make notes next to thumbnails but these are more scraps than anything, what I’m actually plotting out is what I want each page to do and how I want to pace that page.  When I’m planning a comic my primary concern is how the characters and the camera physically move within the space of a page and what they actually accomplish in that page- every page of the comic has to have some specific something happen; it has to be advancing something, establishing something or elaborating on something.  If a page is superfluous it gets cut for the sake of the story flow (and there were a couple of these during the Cop/Army/Van chase scene in Chapters 7 and 8).  I’ll have a rough idea of what I want the tone of a page’s dialogue to be but nothing at this early stage is even remotely close to established.

There’s a lot of visual planning that goes into each page, but it’s only after a page has been drawn, inked and the main characters painted that I actually sit down and write the dialogue for that particular page.  This doesn’t mean that the dialogue is less important, though; there’s a bunch of reasons I leave the actual specifics of the spoken word to the second-to-last step.  One of them is a matter of space.  I don’t like when my word balloons cover the important character art so when I plot a page I’ll leave room for text and then I’ll try to word the specifics of the dialogue so it fits in the space available in that panel without overlapping anything I don’t want it to.  There’s been a bunch of times where what I wanted to include was overly wordy so a cut-and-trim revision fit it just right, and this helped make the dialogue better, more natural and more efficient in the long run. Related to space is the issue of pace!  Each panel represents a moment in time, a span of minutes or seconds, and what’s said in that panel needs to reflect how much time is actually spent in that moment.  We don’t want a character in casual conversation to be frozen in place with a novel coming out of her mouth, something like that would feel more natural broken up over multiple panels in sequence so the art can reflect the organic way she would move or change her expression along with the dialogue.  Which brings me to the other major reason I keep my dialogue writing so late in the process:

When I draw a panel that panel is loaded with emotion.  Alice is reassuring, Lizzie is irate, Lou is worried or Monday is indifferent.  I establish posture, camera angle, lighting and facial expression to convey a mood or a tone- in effect I’m planning the climate and the flow of the dialogue without any words.  Is this sarcasm, is there an idea, is someone objecting or agreeing?  How do the other characters react?  In my thumbnails I’m plotting the emotional rhythm of the page, and the dialogue can then be written around that to make it feel more like it’s a natural expression of the characters.  Visual context is hugely important to my writing, it’s the difference between a character saying “I’m fine” with a smile on their face and an upright, confident posture and that same character saying “I’m fine” with a faltering smile and a slumped posture meant to avoid eye contact.

The way art and dialogue play together can have a very strong effect on the overall presentation of the page. One of the more stand-out examples of this is on page 451, where Monday is sneaking up on a pair of cops.  They’re having a dialogue between one another which on the surface makes sense for the cops to be having in the context of their situation, but the art of Monday sneaking up gives every spoken line a second meaning, like they’re describing what he’s doing as he does it.  Double-meaning is one of my favorite tools and this comic is absolutely loaded with it, but it’s all based on the art giving what would otherwise be a normal conversation a contextually-relevant alternate meaning without disrupting the primary function of the dialogue.  By drawing my emotional blueprints and establishing the flow of my pages first I’m much more easily able to come up with the right wording to pull off a double-meaning, it’s often just a matter of being very careful with my word choices.

Word choice is also important in helping flesh out your characters, giving them manners of speech relevant to their personalities.  Establishing a “voice” for each character helps give them a sense of individuality and colors the lives they’ve lived before the camera found them, whether they’re more serious and intellectual or more colloquial and crude, when spoken within the context of how they currently present themselves can help illustrate the bumps in the road they’ve travelled to arrive at their current station.  It’s important to make sure that whatever a character is saying makes sense to actually say out loud, and it’s useful to either say these things out loud or at least speak them in your head- the way we speak is in short bursts of smaller words, while the way we think to ourselves is much less restricted; the boundaries are limitless.  Ideally a speaker can be identified by the word choices they make and the ways they construct their sentences; assuming a page was set in a pitch black room you’d want each speech bubble to be pretty obvious who is speaking by giving them their own voice.  Alice, for example, often speaks in an upbeat tone, using visual sunshine language and referring to people as “cutie” or “hun”.  She’s a nurse, she’s very compassionate, but we also learn that she’s had a hard childhood and she doesn’t have much of a family, so her bright language reflects her desire to be the sunshine her world really needs.  Lou’s manner of speaking is very rough and blue-collar, pluralizing his words to show how he ain’t maybe cared too much abouts none-a that formal stuffs, but he always presents himself as being knowledgeable and informed so he’s not a simpleton; he’s very hometown-practical.  Monday is meant to be a distant person.  He’s a professional killer, which isn’t exactly a dream job, and he has the personality of someone who is numbed to the world around him.  In the beginning of the comic I used to write him with a surplus of swears to reflect someone who has lived in the underside of society, for whom formality and manners are of little use, but overtime his dialogue has evolved to be something more.  When the modern Monday speaks he often keeps an economy of words, chosen carefully to convey exactly what he intends and nothing more.  Monday’s word bubbles are often short, dismissive bursts, and when he speaks more it’s either out of necessity, manipulation or exasperation.  And when Lizzie speaks she’s the most likely to throw out ten dollar words- she’s educated, intellectual and a bit of a snob but she’s still very much human, stammering or correcting herself mid-sentence.  Lizzie speaks like an English major, someone who is well-read and poetic, but she’s still tempered by her low social status and humble occupation.  Excepting instances of Roman history she is probably the most verbose of the four main characters, but she has a unique dichotomy to her.  Lizzie’s spoken language is always written in a cadence that someone would actually speak, building her sentences in real-time like everyone else with all the limitations that has, but she’s also the only character in the comic whose thoughts we get to hear as well.

Lizzie’s thought boxes are a staple of her character as well as an important narrative tool in the comic.  They never need word balloons or tails to indicate the speaker, in the context of the comic Lizzie is established to be the only one who operates through these narrative channels so when text is presented in a rectangle it’s clear to the reader that these are her thoughts.  These inner monologues help flesh out the world as well as its main character, sharing thoughts and observations she wouldn’t ever actually speak out loud.  This gives us insight into her perspective, whether she’s right or not about what she believes it shows what she’s picking up and what she’s missing about the world around her.  Unlike speech our thoughts are private and almost instantaneous, there’s no need to go from brain to encoding to tongue to decoding to re-encoding in strings of sound, it all occurs in the mind.  This is why there’s a clear difference between the way Lizzie speaks and the way she thinks- she would never say the sort of things she thinks in her head out loud because nobody actually speaks that way in real life, so we get to hear her unabridged private narrative as something much wordier and a bit purpler in its wording.  Lizzie as a poet was a character choice specifically so her narration of the world can be colorful and beautiful, loaded with analogies, visual descriptors and metaphors.  She has a very strong fondness for alliteration, or constructing sentences with the same first letter in most of the words, and this is actually a point that Alice picked up on, having read bits of her writing while under her care.  These poetic narratives aren’t just a way to flesh out Lizzie’s character, they’re mechanically functional to the story as well!  They come in pages, and an internal narrative page can help build a sense of the world and expand on the visual art (“Morning arrived like a horseback messenger, her lantern-light glow piercing uncertain shadows, her missive unmistakable” p.418), connecting the drabness of the world with mental imagery that evokes certain emotions from the reader.  They also do a really good job compressing time.  When people are having a conversation time is decompressed to allow them to engage and bounce back and forth with one another, but a Lizzie Narrative page lets the clock run and serves as a soft segue into a new moment.  Because the narrative is all in her head it doesn’t need to exist in the span of spoken words, the panel cuts can jump much further and the action can compress more efficiently while also conveying important context, observation or emotion relevant to what just happened, what might be happening or what may happen in the future.  A Lizzie Narrative page can also take me the longest time to actually write because I want her thoughts to be meaningful and touch on relevant issues but I also want the word choice to be visual in a way that reflects the tone of events I want it to reflect and I want to connect it to the art within the panel its occurring in to give that appropriate context and double-meaning as well.  I’m very extremely careful about my word choices on these pages, nothing is ever an accident, and that’s why they tend to take the longest time to compose.

For as long as I’ve been writing the comic I’ve been writing things in a way that foreshadows or has multiple meanings, but this is always tucked beneath a narrative that flows naturally on the surface.  If a reader doesn’t pick up the second meaning the first needs to carry everything, and if they get both then the story is all the richer!  Normally I’ll list page numbers of specific examples of things I’m describing in these journal posts but these instances are so deeply written into the story it might be worth a second read-through just to keep an eye out for it.

Thanks for reading!