Pierre Speaks: How Do You Write

Jim asked that question some time ago.

When it comes to writing them Blogs… It often turns into a multi-headed Hydra.

Too often as I write these Blogs, what starts as one Blog becomes two. Then four. Then six. So that most of the times I am writing at least half a dozen Blogs in parallel.

As I write one Blog, I will get an idea that I will explain briefly, but that will need another Blog all of it’s own to try to explain properly. Then as I keep on writing… what I am writing will take me in another direction, and that too will end up requiring it’s own Blog.

So before long… I can end up with 2, 4 or 6 Blogs in progress

For example, I could have half a dozen Blogs about various aspects of an animation production. Or half a dozen Blogs about the transition of going from drawing on paper to drawing with the computer.

So often what starts as the idea for writing ONE Blog, turns into many.

Although when it comes to writing comic book stories… I use a trick/technique used by many artists when they “pretend” to be writers… I “write” by drawing rough sketches of my comic book pages.

Usually rough sketches only as detail as I need them to be, so sometimes it can be little more then a few lines unrecognizable to anyone else but me. But detailed enough so that I know what is on the page.

By keeping them pages/sketches rough, it allows me to do them fairly quickly. So if I decide to, let’s say, discard one page for some reason…. I did not waste too much time putting details on my sketch/drawing.

Once all my roughs are done… if I need to show the story to someone else… like in this case, Jim, I then make my sketches more detailed so that Jim can understand what is going on.

An example of that could be when I came up with the story that became our Flashback Universe issue featuring the Paladin.

It started with me trying to come up with a FBU character with some sort of “domino mask”.

Love that kind of mask for some reason.

So as I was trying to come up with such a character, I had the idea that we could give a WW2 sidekick to Paladin.

And the more I developed the character that became “the Squire”, and later in the story, “the Knight of King City”, the more the story started taking shape.

I was possessed.

The story started taking on a life of its own.

I spent the next 2 or 3 days sketching like a madman and shaping the tale of the Paladin and his “kid sidekick”.

I used various names as little more as place-holders trusting Jim to come up with some cool names for the characters.

Jim had expressed some concerns that our stories always seemed to end on a sad note. And heck I would have been tempted to do the same. But then I added an epilogue that not only made use of a twist that Jim had come up with concerning who Paladin was (if you do not know what I mean…. Go read our Paladin comic), but also that ended on a hopeful note. We were also fortunate to get Chad Bowers to write all of the dialogue. He did an excellent job in keeping the darker tone of the comic compartmentalized.

That ended on some sort of “new beginning” (again… if you did not read it yet…. Go read it now).

And there you had the rough foundation of what became the tale… “I Paladin”.

Until next time.