Some thoughts on the current quarantine situation with COVID19, which has shone a stark light on the gaps we have in our society. Co-written with Sheila Pham and Masako Fukui.
Tag: short stories
Short Ghost Stories: The Man with the Axe in his Back
“Short Ghost Stories: The Man with the Axe in his Back” is an experimental book I finished recently, a series of 8 short ghost stories. I first wrote them in proseformat, and then converted half of them into comics-prose. The purpose of this is to explore the best way of creating comics-prose – whether by converting a prose story, or by converting a comics story.
As a result, there are TWO versions of the same book. One with all 8 stories in prose-only format, while the other has 4 of the stories converted into comics-prose. In terms of conversion, it was successful… but ultimately, I found that it’s best to convert a COMIC into comics-prose, as I’ll explain further on in the past.
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BUY AS EBOOK @ $4.99:
(Discounted to $2.99 until 31st August 2014)
- Buy from Amazon, Smashwords (PDF or EPUB), Apple iBooks, or Nook.
BUY AS PROSE-ONLY EBOOK @ $2.99:
- Buy from Amazon, Smashwords (PDF or EPUB), Apple iBooks, or Nook.
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Table of Contents
You can sample the stories on my site. I’ll be posting half of the comics-prose stories up on this site, starting in August 2014!
- The Man with the Axe in his Back – Read Sample
- Cassie and Lassie – Read Sample
- The Hollow Tree – Read Sample
- Civilised People – Read Sample
- Mother and Son – PROSE – Read Sample
- The Hollow Graveyard – PROSE – Read Sample
- Casey and the Dog-Faced Boy – PROSE – Read Sample
- The Man with the Rope around his Throat – PROSE – Read Sample
Thoughts on “Comics-Prose”
I’ve learned more about doing comics-prose through doing these stories, and my conclusion is this: Comics-prose is COMICS. I used to think that it’s 50/50 prose-comics, perhaps leaning more towards prose, but I turned out to be wrong. I started doing comics-prose by taking my comics and turning some of the panels into prose, and I find that this is actually MUCH easier than the other way around.
Turning my prose stories into comics-prose was HARD. Perhaps it was the way I write, but that’s why I managed to only turn half the stories into comics-prose. I found that often times things needed to be rewritten, but most of all, redundancies tended to pile up. There’s also this problem I call “prose-picture” tautology, which is where you have a picture of something, followed by prose that describes what happens in the picture, or PART of what happens. This is normal and not completely avoidable, but it seems to happen a LOT more when I converted prose into comics-prose, leading to rewrites.
My conclusion is the comics-prose is actually a form of compressed story-telling in comics. Manga is the ultimate in decompressed story-telling, and oddly enough, this form of comics story-telling is meant to compress manga-style story-telling.
Thoughts on professional copy-editing
I hired a professional copy-editor that works for a large publisher for this project, and while it was an interesting experience, I’m not sure I’ll do it again. It’s not the price, which was reasonable, nor the quality, which was good. It’s because the copy-editor, while managing to spot a few inconsistencies in the stories, also managed to INTRODUCE inconsistencies.
This became a huge problem between the comics-prose and prose-only versions of the story – ultimately, it became hard to reconcile the two versions using the same text. I imagine in the future, the comics-prose and prose-only versions of the same story will HAVE to be copy-edited separately. Which is too much hassle, so I just won’t bother (for now).
We Are The Pickwicks – Repost
In case folks missed it, I’m re-posting my 10-page comics-prose story from a while ago. It’s a ‘twisted fairy tale’ take on the story of Peter Pan, and it was originally written for a Peter Pan anthology my friends and I put together.
Here I show it again, for your interest. Next week, meanwhile, I’ll be showing the first 3 chapters of “Small Shen.” I’ll be posting 10 pages every Friday (from 22nd Nov 2013 – 10th Jan 2014) in various places such as on my DeviantArt, Tumblr and my Goodreads Account, so hope you guy who haven’t read the extract will check it out!
Click on this page to read “We Are the Pickwicks“!
Comics-Prose – We Are The Pickwicks
Last week, House of Odd was #7 on the New York Times Bestseller List! Many thanks to Landry Walker (writer) and Dean Koontz (original creator)! I should also thank everyone who bought the book as well – I hope you all enjoyed it!
Other news this week will be my new 10-page short story, We Are The Pickwicks. This was done as part of a “Peter Pan”-themed anthology with the folks at BentoComics.com, and this time I chose to do things a little differently. I decided to mix comics and prose together, in a hybrid form I call Comics-Prose (I used to call this ‘Graphic-Prose’, but I realise ‘Comics-Prose’ is a more accurate description).
Click here to read the next page –>
What is Comics-Prose?
It’s a story-telling medium that combines both prose and comics. This is not like a picture book, where there is usually a block of text, accompanied by illustrations that may or may not have anything to do with the text. Instead, this looks to integrate the comics into the prose, to make a single, coherent narrative. Reading both the comics and the prose is necessary.
Now, I’m not the first person to combine prose and comics, but the difference here is that most attempts of this kind I’ve seen have pages of comics, followed by pages of text. This can make for an unbalanced reading experience. In comparison, I did mine with comics and prose integrated on EACH page, which means there’s no prolonged chunks of prose or comics alone. I feel it makes a more immersive reading experience.
How Did This Come About?
In 2010, I was approached by author Kylie Chan, who showed me her (yet unpublished) book Small Shen. It was the prequel to her best-selling White Tiger Fantasy series, and she asked me do something “graphic novel-related” with it. I took this to mean some kind of adaptation. Now, anyone who has ever done an adaptation knows how hard they can be. Generally, it involves taking a hacksaw to the original script and eliminating entire side-plots, so the story can fit under a certain number of comic pages. This has to be done due to time and money constraints, and like film adaptations, there’s little that can help the chopping and cutting.
I’ve always wished things were different, so when I started adapting Small Shen, I tried to preserve Kylie’s “voice” as much as possible, while still bringing engaging art to the story. Prose authors who are unfamiliar with comics can often find adaptations of their work a brutal process – comics can give the impression that it’s 50% writing, and 50% art, but that’s not really true. The real split is closer to 30% writing and 70% art. The reason for this split is because even though you can have the world’s greatest script, an incompetent artist can ruin it with bad story-telling, inexpressive art and paneling that’s hard to follow. Conversely, if you have a good artist, you can elevate an average script into a good story. This difference is even more pronounced when it comes to adaptations – the original author often finds their “voice” reduced to just tinkering with the dialogue, while the artist gives shape and form to everything else. For prose authors, who are used to being masters of their own universes, it can be deeply unsettling.
Small Shen had a lot of un-cuttable conversations, so instead of pages of talking heads in comics, I decided to just leave it in prose. This then led to leaving entire paragraphs in prose, only adding panels and pages when called for, and when I was done adapting Small Shen to script form, I had something that I found quite special. This gave me the confidence to write a short story, entirely from scratch, in such a prose-comics hybrid form. That story was We are the Pickwicks.