From Novel to Webcomic?

@Gilded_Cataphract Alexandre Samuel madelon
Sun, 25 Nov 2018 04:04:11 +0000

@Gilded_Cataphract wrote:

As far as I know, in East Asia it's not too uncommon for light novels to become either dead tree or internet published comics. I unfortunately do not speak Japanese, Korean, or any Chinese dialect so I can't tell you too much about that. But from what I can tell, the comic form of the novel tends to expand on the narrative a bit because when you're working strictly with the written word, you have to be very economical with detail because you don't have the eye candy to justify gratuitous action or scenery porn.

Thus action scenes, scenery or character introductions and the like are usually truncated and left to the imagination beyond enough guidelines given by the author to make sure you're not imagining something completely different than what's supposed to be happening. The written word is also incapable of effectively conveying a number of things that are staples in visual fiction; whole genres of comedy simply do not work in text form and it's very hard to get a reader to really buy that anything's appearance is anything special without visuals. If something is supposed to be horrifyingly ugly, simple text is rarely going to convey that enough to actually cause a strong reaction. Weird and psychadellic visuals are also nearly impossible to convey with words in a way that's anywhere near as effective as one good picture; even an amazing Doctor Strange novelisation would never get across the visuals as well as a single clip from the film. Some readers with good imaginations might be able to do it, but your average person is probably going to not think too much of it.

Action is also far less impactful in text form, without cool visuals a physical fight is only more interesting than a verbal argument because unless there's some special power behind the words verbal arguments usually don't result in physical harm. And even in terms of physical harm, in the case of a character say; losing their arm or breaking their legs, the reader being able to see them missing an arm or having to put their leg in a cast and watching them have to struggle with that loss is very powerful; while it is surprisingly easy to forget a character is supposed to be maimed in text form. Video games can get away with gratuitous action to a degree no other medium can (followed by Tabletop games) because they have the combination of cool visuals and the player automatically having investment in a fight because they don't want to lose if they're enjoying the game. As Peter Watts, who is a fairly big name in science fiction, said regarding his novelisation of Crysis 2 "even the best author in the world is never going to make the fight scenes as interesting as just playing the game".

While you don't quite have that pass card in web comics; you can afford to put in a lot more physical action in a comic than you can in a novel. You can expand on action sequences significantly more, and you can also rely on sight based comedic gags like most forms of physical comedy or reaction shots. Reading about someone slipping on a banana peel is never going to be as funny as watching someone slip on one. And when you are now able to just show facial and body expression exactly the way you want to; you can make a character's emotions and reactions easy to gauge without having to spell it out or hope that people can infer the intended emotion correctly from your prose.

However it does add a lot of work. With the written word you can create a weird monster by just stringing together some unusual traits and letting the reader imagine it; or just making a single picture of it in partly illustrated works and letting the reader imagine it from there. You can have characters whom you don't describe at all and just let the reader figure out what they want them to be like, and a lot of very complicated to render visuals can be described briefly. Artists tend to dread crowd shots (though artists working with easily reused assets like sprites or 3D models are less worried about these) especially if everyone in the crowd is supposed to be unique. But you can have a crowded scene in a book by just stating there were a lot of people around.

It's also worth noting that script writing is very different from prose writing. Scripts; comic scripts in particular; are expected to be very detailed with their directions for the artist. Alan Moore would write page upon page of description for every panel in his comics telling the artist exactly where everything was, what everything looked like, and the meaning behind every last detail he wanted in the panel. Even the items on a background character's desk were all described, all given exact descriptions of where everything was on the desk, and he spelled out literally every bit of symbolism or meaning behind anything that was supposed to be on the desk for the artist to make sure the artist was going to convey what he wanted exactly.

In prose writing this is considered tedious to read at best and outright insulting to the reader at most because it denies them the ability to imagine anything for themselves and kills the pacing stone dead with endless description that the reader is unlikely to fully remember. However, an artist you're writing a script for if you're using the DC method of comic creation is strictly someone being asked to take your text and visualise it. They are not there to add their own interpretation, they are paid to actualise yours. While other methods of comic creation give equality between writer and artist or supremacy to the artist (like the Marvel method), the DC method is not for that and if you're creating an adaptation of an existing work, you'll probably want to use the DC method if you're writing the script for the adaptation.

After all, the point of a visual adaptation that the original author is also writing is so that they can show the visuals they wanted to show in the original text as they envisioned it.