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Want to Know What Mornachts Look Like?

My graphic novel artist, Adam Black, and I are currently in the "concept art" stage of creating the A Prophecy Forgotten graphic novel. Before Mr. Black begins to draw a whole bunch of panels, it's important that he and I agree on what the characters look like. The process:

1. I sent Mr. Black a description of each major character, including height, build, eye color, hair color, and in my case, wing color. I also gave him a short description of each character so he can give the characters, well, character. I also tried to give pictures of actors and actresses that I thought looked like my characters.
2. Mr. Black asked me for quotes from my characters to better nail their personalities. I gave him the quotes, including some quotes in Out of the Shadows, as my characters develop and change through the series.
3. Mr. Black draws up a few quick sketches, sends them to me, and we discuss any changes that may be needed. Our priorities are Davian, mornachts, Gabriella, and Tommy. (Then probably Marcus, Eric, Snead, Josephi, Salla, and Zephor.)
4. Once we get the concept art done, Mr. Black starts drawing the graphic novel, meaning I have to get the graphic novel finished ASAP. (Can you say "lattes" and "late nights"?

Mr. Black and I are still working on Davian. His hair is giving us some trouble. But his first sketch of a mornacht was nearly perfect! Although, I must admit that these mornachts are really scary. It's going to make writing the scenes with mornachts in them just a bit more heart pounding for me…

Here's the first concept art picture of a mornacht. Now Mr. Black is working on the armor.

My job in this whole graphic novel thing (besides providing description of the major characters and, well, writing the story to begin with) is to write the script for the graphic novel–and I don't have much time. Once my artist, Adam Black, gets done with the concept art (that's another blog), he's going to want to get started on the graphic novel.

As I stated in my blog on choosing an artist, I've never written a graphic novel script, but I have written a screenplay, and that's pretty close. I grabbed The Complete Idiot's Guide to Creating a Graphic Novel, read a few of the "greats," and got started.

First, I needed to divide A Prophecy Forgotten into panels. As I explained in an earlier blog, panels are the little boxes on the comic book pages with the pictures. Most comic books have about 6-7 panels on a page. Now, here's the tricky part. Graphic novels are published in color. Color is expensive. The more pages in a graphic novel, the more expensive it gets. Put too many pages in your graphic novel, and buyers will ignore it because of the cost. Therefore, panel count is important. (This is why we've divided A Prophecy Forgotten into two books. It keeps the cost for each book low, and allows me to preserve more of the content.)

Converting a novel into a graphic novel on some levels is easy.

• The story is already created.
• The characters are already developed.
• So are all those little visual details that I spent hours honing when I was writing the novel.
• Etc.

However, there are still some problems I've had to deal with.

• Prose. All those little paragraphs that explain how mornachts explode when they die? Paragraphs like that don't work in a graphic novel. Somehow, I have to show all of my mythology instead of tell it. (I dumbed down Josephi and made him ask a lot of questions so I could get the mythology out in the open through dialogue.)
• Scenes that are just "talking heads." Conversations where nothing is going on in books don't work well in graphic novels. Therefore, I had to shorten a lot of conversations or eliminate them.
• Dialogue. It all has to be shortened. The dialogue bubbles are only so big, and I've still got to leave room for the picture. (I've been told that artists don't like dialogue infringing on their territory. Mr. Black suggests 40 words per panel as an average.)
• Cutting out portions of the novel. This is always the hardest part, but it's got to be done. Unfortunately, it's not enough just to shorten the dialogue. I had to cut out a few subplots, including the possibility of Tommy hardening.

When I first started writing the script, I felt like I was cutting a lot of the things that I felt like made A Prophecy Forgotten good. That, and because I'm not a comic book reader, I don't really know what makes comic book readers go "ooh!" (I can push the buttons of a fantasy reader. I have no idea what buttons to push for a graphic novel reader.) I got incredibly nervous about my panels, and that's when decided to follow my mantra: When you don't know what you're doing, find someone who does. I turned to…

…My TOP SECRET Military Expert (the TSME), who happens to be a comic book fan and collector. (No, I will not divulge his name. He is too imperative to Out of the Shadows and Book III. And no, I will not share. Go find your own TSME!) He looked through my skeleton of a script and gave me some invaluable advice on things such a dialogue, flow, panel condensing, and even a few military terms here and there. (I think the most exciting part about it was that he didn't make that many corrections. He made a few, but not the amount I was expecting.)

Once I inputed the TSME's feedback, I then had to take all my panels and divide them into boards or pages. That is the hardest part. Each page is kind of it's own little entity, so a writer needs to keep the ideas from overlapping.

Now, I'm working on writing description for each panel so Mr. Black knows exactly what I want him to draw. For instance, in the first panel of the graphic novel, one of my villains is trying to get Gabriella to join his group of evil dudes. (Like the anti-spoiler description?) My description for Mr. Black:

INTERIOR, NIGHT. GABRIELLA, holding her helmet, is backed against the wall. Looking over the back of [A VILLAIN] wearing an LAF uniform holding a sword. Don’t show his face. It’s darkened, so I’m thinking a lot of blue, here. Let’s put a window here somewhere so the audience will know what she is flying out of. Show the beginnings of stars through the window, and maybe make the sun almost set. (Like the orange-purple thing instead of lots of orange.)

Like a screenplay, I am capitalizing each character the first time he or she appears. Because only Mr. Black is going to be reading it, I can carry on like a conversation. Since this is the first panel, the audience needs to know where it is and what's going on. I'm going to use two tools for that: Captions and dialogue. Captions are usually in a rectangle box in comics. Then there's dialogue, which is represented by the character's name and is in the dialogue bubbles all of us are familiar with. So here we go:

CAPTION: Heaven’s Realm, The City of Ezzer, Elysia.

CAPTION:Graduation is complete. Elysia’s newest female guard retrieves helmet from the shower house, but finds something more sinister lurking inside.

[A VILLAIN]:I’ll make this simple for a new runt like you, Gabriella. You will join us, or you will die.

You'll notice that I've changed the beginning a bit from the novel version of A Prophecy Forgotten, which begins in a hospital room. They say you should begin graphic novels with a bang!

While I'm hurriedly finishing up the graphic novel "script" for part one of A Prophecy Forgotten: Book I of the Elysian Chronicles, I figured I would share a bit of the process of creating a graphic novel–or in my case, adapting a novel into a graphic novel.

Once Wandering Sage Publications, ArcheBooks, and I came to an agreement that Wandering Sage would produce a graphic novel adaptation of A Prophecy Forgotten, we needed to find an artist.

Well, you don't just copy a page of your novel and throw it out on the Internet. You've got to tell the artist what to draw. The more detailed you are, the easier and faster it is for the artist. My job was to write a "script" for one page of a graphic novel. Here's the part where the vocabulary comes in–Wandering Sage had to teach it to me. I guess in comic book lingo, a page usually has 6-7 panels. (A panel is a box with, say, Batman and Robbin running and a dialogue bubble coming out of Robin's mouth with the words, "Holy toasted popcorn, Batman! The Joker almost killed us!")

That meant I had to try my hand at writing a graphic novel script for one page of A Prophecy Forgotten–6 panels. Honestly, choosing which scene to write about was the hardest part. Originally, I considered using a high-octane scene with lots of action, but Shane Moore (a fellow author and VP of Wandering Sage's graphic novel division) suggested I do a scene with high emotion because action is easier for an artist to draw.

So I chose my climax–the scene right before the villain is revealed. (If you're going to make it difficult, make it really difficult!)

My biggest problem: I have never written a graphic novel. I've also never read comic books. The only thing I've done remotely close to a graphic novel was a full length romantic comedy screen play that I wrote for the original Project Greenlight contest, which I obviously didn't win.

Freak out! I'm a perfectionist, and I want to do things well. It's really hard to do things well if you have no idea what you are doing!!

My first objective–get my hands on some graphic novels. I borrowed V for Vendetta, 300, and The Dark Knight: Batman Returns from a graphic novel loving friend, and read them. (Well, I skimmed Batman.) I focused on dialogue, how scenes were set up, and how everything seemed to flow together.

My second objective–get professional advice on how to write a graphic novel script. That involved a trip to the bookstore and a $20 purchase of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Creating a Graphic Novel by writer Nat Gertler and artist Steve Lieber. I read it through, cover to cover (and I also read the aforementioned graphic novels) over Memorial Day weekend in Texas.

I created a script for a page using Mr. Gertler's format, sent it off to Shane, and waited while Shane sent out an all call to artists and sent them my page. (Now, to be fair, I also created a very lengthy description of each of the characters in the scene, as well as the armor. If you've read A Prophecy Forgotten, you know how important the armor is.)

Then, I waited until Shane received submissions and forwarded them to me. We chose Adam Black for a few reasons. First, he had a bit of a resume, meaning he has a pre-existing audience. This will help graphic novel sales. Second, Adam was able to put several details into his drawing that showed intangible emotion. That's really the only way I can describe it. It's like, you look at a scene and feel something more than just what the scene is supposed to show. (300 is a good example of that.)

I can't show you the full script for the page that I wrote, nor can I show you Adam's whole page–as that would give away too many spoilers for those of you who have not read A Prophecy Forgotten. I will give you an example of the first panel and what Adam did with it.

What I wrote:
(1)
Interior, night. Glow torch sconces illuminate the Command Bunker’s stone walls. Stars peak in through arched windows. Maps, drawings, and tables lay strewn across the floor. Camera angle looking above torso of a dead LAF SOLDIER lying face down on a table with a sword sticking out of his back (where his wings hit) and focusing on the door, where DAVIAN, MARCUS, TYCE, and THEO have burst in. Door slams against the wall. Davian is in front. Marcus stands behind his left shoulder. Theo & Tyce stand behind his right. They are all grungy, with scrapes and bruises from fighting for four hours.

1 CAPTION: The Command Bunker
2 MARCUS: What happened?
3 DAVIAN: Where’s Zephor?

Yes, the dialogue is a little cheesier than I prefer, but remember that this is a graphic novel. It's about the pics.

Adam's Panel

I like the armor, here. (I hope Adam likes drawing it, because he's going to be drawing it a lot!) I also liked Davian's wings as he came running through the door. You'll note that Adam didn't draw everything I said to draw. There's no Theo and Tyce coming in. But he's the visual guy–he figured out that Theo and Tyce just wouldn't fit. I respect that, and I want that in an artist. This whole thing is about making the graphic novel look good. Not about me getting my way.

Here are some more of what Adam drew and why I liked it.

Dude, Adam nailed Marcus–don't you think? (I'm sure all of you can see why I'm so excited to be working with Adam.)

Here, my villain has just finished killing…someone… Sorry, gotta keep the spoilers out. I loved this drawing because it's shows motion. The sword is mid-swing, and it looks like it's moving. I also like the villain's pose. It's so high-testosterone, and you can tell the villain is angry and bitter. There is emotion in his stroke.

This one was amazing. (It's part of the above panel. This actually was the clincher on the decision to go with Adam. Notice the soldiers' wings, and look at the difference in wings here from Davian's wings above. Adam made a subtle change in the wings, almost making them stick up straight, which accentuates their evil look. I just thought it was brilliant!

I hope that you all have a better understanding of why we chose Adam and why I'm so excited about this whole thing!

Stay tuned for my next blogs about concept art and writing the script.