[A Bad Idea]

I was thinking of doing another entry on the Hero's Journey, but I decided to do a piece on something people don't think about often, but sometimes are in DIRE need of help in: planning dialogue for comics.

Dialogue, plain and simple, is a tool of storytelling. In storytelling your goal is to communicate ideas, and dialogue is but one of many tools available. However, as most things go in the art of communication, it shows in the end product when you use dialogue carelessly.

When broken down into its base components, dialogue exists for two things:

It is used either...
I. To move the plot along.
and
II. To show character.

it may be debated that dialogue has a third function in the realm of comic relief (i.e. your character suddenly cracks a silly line), but this lends itself only to a few forms of storytelling; for example, a non-sequitir piece. Otherwise, I believe that having a character suddenly break character just to say a joke is bad form. If you can deliver humor in dialogue and still keep your characters in-character, that also serves to expose character, albeit in a humorous way.



In this page, Marley takes a dip into the 'scripted' end of dialogue by having Ayumi say something relatively unrealistic for the situation, but offers a healthy piece of humor while keeping Ayumi in character. This serves to strengthen Ayumi's cynicism towards the situation, and in a rather comedic fashion.

When we write dialogue for stories, we want to place our mark somewhere in the spectrum between conventional speech and scripted speech. There are many space to fill between each end of the spectrum, and each can convey a different style of communicating.



For example, Monday's comics lean more towards scripted speech, shying away from conventional speech. In doing so, he allows himself to use colorful language and eloquent speech to paint Black's vision of the beautiful and grim Void City. When I say 'scripted speech', I mean it as though the characters speak as though they were reading from a script because NO ONE would every say the things Monday's characters say in real life; that's fine for Monday, because his comics always invoke a witty and sharp sense of dark intrigue in the way his characters speak. Monday's dialogue and narrative can be boiled down to "colorfully descriptive language used to invoke the grim nature of Black's reality, with the occasional side-serving of non-sequitir commentary by the artist", and that is how he chooses to tell his story.



The way 4AM writes Shrapnel Girl leans far towards conventional speech. In SG's lines, there are those inconsistent breaks of "Like", "So", and "Yeah" that is present in real conversation. Even in narration, 4AM writes SG to be casual and loose in her speech. In storytelling, this lends itself to a number of inconsistencies that I will describe later, but for 4AM, this is a method of exposing SG's character.



Jho places her foot in a comfortable spot in between scripted speech and conventional speech. Her lines come out elegantly like a script, but there's enough breaks in between phrases to make it feel like a real conversation, invoking a quirky, witty tone to her comics.

Let's take a deeper look into the facets of scripted speech and conventional speech, and analyze the aspects of each.

SCRIPTED SPEECH

When speech is scripted, it is engineered to drive a certain purpose without much consideration for finesse or balance. It emphasizes the purpose of the text to its placement, creating very characterized speech that doesn't sound quite realistic, but still plays its part (in acting, this is called "Technical Acting", the practice of emphasizing function over finesse when delivering lines). A common sample of overplayed scripted speech often occurs in noir stories; the classic example being Sin City, where every line out of a character's mouth at any given moment is the most badass thing they could have possibly spoken.

Let's look at a sample scene I will write out. In this scene, investigator Jones reports to his partner Casey about a witness he tried to interrogate, regretfully carrying no further information on the case.

Jones: S'no good. Kramer won't talk, the guy's clammed up s'good as I figured they'd have wanted him to be. Poor guy, I'll bet Don Tonio had him pretty spooked to keep'm from spilling anything. I suppose I should congratulate the don for doing a bang-up job of fucking us over, eh?
Casey: Dammit Jones, we don't have time to fuck around. This is our only witness that knows enough to end this case and he's shaking like a leaf in the wind, and dammit if we can't get him to tell us what he knows about the syndicate then Don Tonio will run off with the money and the chief'll drive an iron spike up both our asses unless we get in gear.

When we analyze this scene, we can immediately pick up details of the situation, as well as something about the characters themselves. We can tell the Jones is a slack, sarcastic and cynical guy who slurs his S's, and that Casey is hard-boiled and determined, and clearly can't tolerate his partner's attitude. We understand that they are tracking the leader of a syndicate through a key witness they managed to get their hands on, but for one reason or another is too frightened to speak. These are the trademarks of scripted speech; clear and direct communication of the ideas present.

When you strike heavily into scripted speech, however, oftentimes your pacing will be heavy and lofty. Note that in that entire dialogue, Jones and Casey have only one line each, but each line is something like a paragraph each. Because scripted speech is so direct, there is little time for exposition and plot details are often glazed over in single sentences.

Quintessentially, scripted speech sacrifices realism to communicate ideas directly and forcefully.

CONVENTIONAL SPEECH

When we speak to other human beings in real life, it's usually fast-paced and spur of the moment. Lines aren't prepared, and you'll more often than not find yourself stuttering on various "Um"s and "Uh"s as well as other various phonetics that we humans tend to linger on while thinking of the next thing to say. When transposed into dialogue, you can relate the mood of a scene to the audience through the familiarity of common language. Let's take the scene above and transpose it to conventional speech:

Jones: Uhh...yeah, s'no good. Kramer's not talking.
Casey: Ugh, dammit. I figured.
Jones: Y'think the don, like, shook'm up to keep him silent or somethin'?
Casey: Hell I dunno...
*beat*
Casey: God damn it...if we don't pull this off we're boned.
Jones: Yeah...

In this variation, the lines are kept short and simple. No fancy lines for forced exposition, no super-detailed plot summaries, just two guys talking as they would. Quite obviously, this scene lacks the integrity of Jones and Casey's character that the last scene had, and is sparce in plot detail. However, reading this you can almost feel their frustration as it is being spoken in a familiar lingo. It also helps the pacing to have Jones and Casey speaking back and forth as a real conversation progresses, as opposed to the example before this, where they were practically spitting monologues at each other.

FINDING THE BALANCE

So where is the in-between? Where's the fine point where you can push on the strong aspects of both without losing any of the good stuff? That lies in how you pace and break the dialogue. You'll first want to think as though writing a script: define the purpose of the scene and the objective of the characters. Once you have that figured out, find a way to break the lines well enough to create a working conversation out of what you have. The end result is a streamlined, evenly-paced conversation with enough content and exposition to leave a lasting mark. Let's revise the Jones and Casey scene one more time...

Jones: S'no good, Kramer won't talk. They clammed him up pretty good.
Casey: I figured that was the case. Don Tonio wouldn't let a key witness into our hands without some sort of contingency plan.
Jones: Grand way to fuck us over, eh?
Casey: Dammit Jones, I don't know about you, but I don't intend to let Don Tonio run off with that money.
Jones: Easy pal, we'll get'm. Just give it time.
Casey: We don't have time, Jones. We've got a key witness back there that's not talking that could close this case for good. We can't afford to fuck around here.

This variation offers equal parts character exposition, plot details, pacing and tension. While retaining the sharpness of the scripted variation, I broke the lines evenly between Jones and Casey to create a 'call and response' effect that makes it feel as though they are speaking to each other instead of laying out fat lines one after the other. The dialogue moves back and forth quickly, but with enough content and character to keep it from getting bland and streamlined enough to keep the speech from getting inconsistent.


I don't intend to instruct you on how to tell stories, because that's entirely up to you. However, knowing how to variate dialogue methods can be key to defining your storytelling style.

[Monday]

Dialogues also serves a third purpose i believe,

establish setting.

But since it is Void it's kind of the understandable why this one could be overlooked altogether.
However, since it IS VOID, it is just as important since the setting in question is always subject to various interperetation.

Thanks for taking the time to make another entry Zato. I'll be sure to make a balance for my future works as well.

[A Bad Idea]

Well, like I said, I don't intend to enforce any one method of writing, just to help others understand how the spectrum works and how certain methods can effect your storytelling.

As for establishing setting, that part is linked to showing character. A character's world should definitely reflect on a character in how they act and how their exposition is handled. If you think about Joss Whedon's Firefly, not much is directly told to the viewers about the " 'verse", but the way the characters act can define the 'verse just as easily as they define themselves; it works synergetically.

I forgot to mention, but one of the important reasons to carefully consider dialogue choice in comics is because unlike a screenplay or a book where you have an open-ended space for text, in comics, placing dialogue on a page is also a matter of graphic finesse. Again, it depends on how you want to tell the story; if you like to have long blocks of text for your reader to linger on and absorb, or you could have quick and easy streams of text that flow gracefully down a page; either method could work towards your goal in storytelling. However, I personally think it sort of messes things up if you try to just mix and match the two; you can't have a long block of meaningless banter, because its not worth lingering on; similarly, it would be difficult to communicate a sort of poetic monologue throughout small lines at a time, but in both cases it CAN be done with careful planning.

Looking at the examples we have above, your comic lingers on its lines to better invoke the dark theme of your comic. Conversely, in the SG comic, SG's casual tone was meant to be spoken in short invervals interchangeably between another person, but because it is written in big blocks of narration, they tend to just drag out pointlessly.

I'm glad you liked reading through it.

[jho]

Haha oh wow, I'm honored you picked one of my pages but that battle had the worst handwriting ever. thanks tho.

Though I was wondering, as far as those styles of writing go-  the way it's applied depends on the material or the theme no? There's alot of ways you can make them respectively works well, and it also contributes to the fact of what kinds of audience you're expecting/you're trying to get/trying to pull in. It's one of those things that I think works as a controlling device (aside from artstyles). it's really a wide subject to cover.

Though I'm basing my thoughts purely from observations so this might be highly biased, but I'll try to dish my point out.

Basically, writing-wise comic and novels are essentially the same. Novels use descriptions (and dialogues) to establish settings, characters personalities, atmosphere or whatnot. Comics, however, visualize those elements. But how much?

There's alot of styles. I mean, ALOT. And they're extremely fun (and hard) to cover but for now I'll just give you a couple of styles that I could think on top off my head



(that dog knows his fucking business)

This golden age of writing style for me really resembles a storybook rather than a comic book, with each panel explaining what the characters' doing or whatnot. There's often a description in each panel describing the visual elements as well as the dialogues.  Same goes for the dialogues, they often re-describing the visual elements (on top of the already existant description). I think this style leans far into the scripted speech style. The meat is not the visuals but rather the script or the writing, and the visuals act as the secondary object (a prominent secondary object, that is)

I find this style still exist in alot of marvel/dc comics, but it's not as packed with writing like in the old days, but they still tend to use the scripted speech in their dialogues. I find quite a bit of people who like this style often read more books (text) and they could identify with alot of it, and wouldn't mind this type of comic since the beauty of the writing is still there with the art as the beautiful bonus.

(though my example surely will appeal to everyone.)

Now the counterpart of this is the often so-called 'manga' style




granted, since most of these are translated, the writing style might be not accurate. But as for mushishi (a faux mythology-japanese folkloric tales), the original style of writing mostly falls to the scripted speech due to its poetic nature, but often whenever two characters met in casual manner, they'll fall back to a more conventional speech.

But the biggest difference in this example from the top one  is that it rarely describes the setting (except when explaining a mushi nature), and heavily relies on the visual elements and and it's up to our eyes to move around to see what's the characters are talking about or what's currently happening in the story. SO the visual acts as the meat of the comic while the dialogues/texts are the secondary (prominent) element.

In my opinion, the reason why this type style is  popular (especially among young readers)/attention grabbing is because of its visual elements is much stronger/prominent, and the text is often easier to swallow (especially when skimming)

that's why I think styles of storytelling/writings also contribute into the marketing elements (on what kind of comic readers you'll get)

These are just a smidgen from alot, I mean ALOT of styles you have to consider when mixing visual elements and dialogues/scripting/writing styles since we're talking about comics here so naturally we have to really consider both elements when doing your comics to achieve what you want.

I would continue but since I have a memory of a goldfish, bad grammar and structure I'll just stop there before I confuse people  and I'm sorry if this is not relevant to your thread Zato, feel free to delete this if you find this inappropriate.

[Inferno]

i think ur right
thnx cuZ this will prolly help me a lottt