Warren Ellis para mi es poco menos que dios. No solo porque escribe comics geniales, sino porque dedica una gran cantidad de tiempo a analizar el medio de los comics, como y porque funciona.
Esto es una reproducciòn textual del mail que recibi de su
lista de correos. (En ingles. Si alguien quiere me puedo sentar a traducirlo despues)
bad signal
WARREN ELLIS
Assume for the purposes of this
that the 22pp unit inside the 32pp
format is a hard limit and I can't do
any funky formatting stuff. It's
your basic commercial format circa
2006.
* A regular comics page can hold
about 220 words. In theory, it can
hold a little over 225, if you use the
Stan Lee rule of thumb that a single
panel on a nine-pic grid can contain
26-28 words of dialogue/caption
without crushing out the art. You
need some variation on the page --
so assume 25 words tops per panel
on a 9-grid and allow for cutting at
least one of those per-panel counts
for getting a little quiet in there.
* Use of silence is crucial. The
unscripted pause in acting is, I seem
to recall once being told, only a little
over a century old. Beckett remains
a central playwright not just because
of his themes, but because he knew
when to cut and wasn't afraid to
cut hard, in all things. Study the
stage play a little bit. I always tell
new comic writers to read everything,
not just comics, because comics are
a little bit of everything. People
sometimes squint at me a bit for
that -- but it's no accident that
Grant Morrison is also an award-
winning playwright and Alan Moore
is a successful performance artist,
nor that John Cassaday used to
work in television.
* Wow, went right off the rails there
already.
* Comics can be many things. Never
lose sight of that.
* A SIN CITY page -- and I'm thinking
primarily of the early ones -- can
hold 180 words. Any more than
that clearly encroaches on the
effect of his panels.
* A trick I lifted off SIN CITY for
HELLBLAZER is pushing the captions
off the panels into negative space
beside them. It's a trick of
accessibility -- it makes comics
easier to read. I've been wanting to
go back to that for years.
* Narrative limitations force
lateral thinking. A big part of the
engine behind V FOR VENDETTA
was David Lloyd saying to Alan
Moore, no thought balloons and
no sound effects. (Thought balloons,
pretty much a dead tool today,
were still a part of the daily toolbox
in 1982.) That limitation kept them
thinking about what could be left
out and still have the thing work,
and kept them thinking about what
could be achieved and communicated
within the limitation.
* SIN CITY reads fast because
Miller rarely uses his 180-word
limit and because there's a reduced
amount of information in each
panel. Therefore, 22pp of SIN
CITY (beyond the first book, when
he was still transitioning out of the
more European style he'd developed
for ELEKTRA LIVES AGAIN, still his
most beautiful book) pretty much
whip by. But these things are there
to be adapted. A stronger
narrative voice, utilising the 180
words in captions, and a richer,
more illustrative style (placing
more information about
environment, tone and theme into
the panels) would slow down the
reading pace of the pages. A Geof
Darrow page, for instance, takes
infinitely longer to fully digest than
a Frank Miller page -- and when
Miller wrote for Darrow, Miller's
minimalist underpinnings of dialogue
and plot were completely
overwhelmed by Darrow's madness.
Fugue-state comics.
- cont later -
