Borrowing from Ganzeer’s (and Warren Ellis’s before him) concept of the Comics Engine – thinking about delivery formats for a comic.
This is one I’ve had in mind for a while – years in fact – and the fact that it still appeals to me implies that it’s a reasonably robust one. I kinda have a story for it too, but it’s been three years and I haven’t written that story, so it might be time to find a new story for the format.
Anyway, here it is:
You make the comic either at standard comics size or, if you’re feeling a bit expansive, at European size. I was going to make it at A4 size, which is only slightly off European size.
Anyway, take the size of the page, and cut it in half vertically. You have a half-page of the sort that used to be published in European comics magazines. In fact, that’s where I got it from, after observing that most of the early Asterix comics were quite neatly split halfway down each page.
Anyway, you do a comic that runs four half-pages a week. That’s two full pages a week. And because you’re composing to half-pages, each of those full pages will end up fairly dense. And you have beats to write to – there’s the half-page, then the full page, and then each set of the weekly two pages.
At the end of a year, building in two hiatus weeks, you have 100 full pages – that’s a graphic novel.
My idea was to do a webcomic for three years that’d end up a trilogy of graphic novels.
As I said, I still really like the format. Just needs a story.