The Kickstarter for the collected edition of Diary of Night was launched earlier this week and is off to a great start.
Please check it out at Diary of Night Volume 1 – Distant Thunder Collected Edition
There is also more information available at Diary of Night

More comics stuff because that’s apparently all I think about.
One of the great benefits of attending a comics convention is getting to talk to people that make comics…pencilers, inkers, letterers, colorists, and, yes, writers. This past weekend, I was fortunate to attend Heroes Con in Charlotte, North Carolina and talk to lots of people intimately involved in making comics. Discussions covered the range of comics-creating spectrum, but they all had something in common…storytelling.
Pardon me for stating the obvious, but storytelling is crucial to comics.
Yeah, well, DUH.
Sometimes you just have to state the obvious.
Anyway, chatting with Marvel Editor Bill Rosemann on Sunday actually helped crystallize a few things that I had been struggling to articulate. Clear storytelling from panel to panel and page to page are what make comics so easy to comprehend, and comprehension is kind of essential if you want a reader to invest his or her attention enough to actually want to know what happens. A reader simply can’t do this if he or she can’t figure out which panel comes next on a page. I’ll come back to this in a second, but it gets into a part of the importance of panel borders. Sure, breaking the borders of a panel can look really cool, but when done and done and done, it loses its impact. And that is precisely why it should be done sparingly because it is supposed to have an impact. Every panel simply cannot have the same dramatic impact, even if they were all the same size. If they did, then there would be no impact since they are all the same. It’s like posting to a forum with your caps lock on. If you’re shouting everything you say, then what do you do when you actually need to shout.
Getting back to the page and panel arrangement…a clear panel flow is vital to keeping your reader. Look, I know that we have some amazing artists working in the medium that can execute some achingly beautiful pages, but if I can’t follow the flow of the story then those pages are useless from a storytelling standpoint…beautiful, but useless. For the record, I’m what you’d call indoctrinated. I’ve been reading comics for decades, and if I have trouble following the story, then imagine someone with less comics reading experience trying to understand the story. They couldn’t. And that would be a failure on the part of the writer, the artist, or both.
And, they’re not just failing the reader, they’re failing the story. You see, it’s the story, stupid (to shamelessly steal from the first Clinton presidential campaign). It’s more important than every individual aspect of comics. Everything, and I do mean everything from the script to the art to the colors to the lettering exist to serve the story. If a reader were able to identify a story as being written by me, that’s fine since all artists have an individual voice, but if making sure a story is identifiable as a “Will Allred” story interferes with the storytelling, then I’ve failed on multiple levels. This will probably sound strange, but this is why my first allegiance is to the story. I take whatever meager skills I possess and whatever tricks I know to tell that story to the best of my ability and hope that it gets even slightly close to the vision I have for it locked up in my noggin’.
I really want to talk about page layout a bit, but I think I’ll save that for next time, but enough rambling for now. Before I finish this, though, I’d like to thank everyone at Heroes Con for all the great discussion.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about comics lately…well, okay, quite a bit more about comics lately. I’ve always loved comics, but it’s only within the last several years that I’ve started trying to figure out why the form appeals to me so much. Also, as a comics writer, figuring out how and why something works or doesn’t work is simply invaluable as I struggle to tell the story in the best manner possible. Anyway, while thinking about this, I discovered that most people can’t even define comics. It ultimately boils down to the ol’ tried and true “I know ’em when I see ’em,” which is less than useless. It’s difficult to use something effectively or to figure out why it appeals to you if you can’t even define what it is. So, I went looking around for a good definition. Turns out that Scott McCloud (in his groundbreaking Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art) has already done most of the heavy lifting (and he formatted the whole thing as a comic, too). McCloud’s definition is…

“juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberated sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.” (Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art Page 9)

After arriving at this definition (a discussion that takes a few pages and is extremely interesting), McCloud mentions a term that comics pioneer Will Eisner utilized in Comics and Sequential Art to describe comics, sequential art. Nonetheless, what’s important here is sequence. Comics are not simply the combination of words and pictures. On the contrary, comics don’t require words at all. What they do require is sequence. In fact, comics are all about sequence and the magic that happens between the panels, something McCloud calls closure. With a sequence of images, a reader is required to perform some cognitive processing (closure) to build a narrative from the disparate parts (panels). Reading comics isn’t like watching a movie which is simply experiential processing. To quote the very articulate and prolific Warren Ellis, comics happen “behind the senses” and require engagement by the reader. Something else important here that I haven’t seen discussed is context. Each panel lends context to the other panels which helps the reader build the narrative. If closure is the act of creating the narrative, then this inter-contextuality serves as the building block that enables it.
I guess what brought this up is recent discussion on one of the Grand Comics Database (http://comics.org/) mailing lists about single panel cartoons. My contention is that single panel cartoons aren’t really comics since there’s no sequence. Sure, they contain both words and pictures, but there’s no closure or inter-contextuality. It’s simply a small piece of art, no more comics than if someone placed a word balloon on the Mona Lisa.
This is, of course, all fodder for my dissertation and future issues of Diary of Night, both of which I am still working on.
Enough rambling for now.