On the Craft of Storytelling

I don't know about the whole 10,000 hours to master a craft, but I do know that between teaching English for 23 years, directing dozens of plays and musicals, publishing hundreds of pages of comics, thousands of pages of RPGs, and a few dozen prose narratives (along with a few hundred poems), I've learned a bit about storytelling. I think I know how to tell a story at this point.

However, I've also spent the same amount of time refining my drawing. Through RPGs, I've made myself strip down and rebuild my art style a few dozen times. For each game I've done over the last decade, I've gone from drawing 'my way' to developing a new style or vibe or approach or whatever that best fits that game. As a result, I've tried on a few different artistic philosophies. 

I'm working on page 8 of my Cupcake Scouts comic, and I can tell you - this is the moment where everything came together. I am stopping to pause for a moment to appreciate what's happening as it's happening. I am a bit blessed, I suppose, at understanding moments as they happen to me. I remember that when I directed my first Shakespeare production, Romeo and Juliet, I stopped the rehearsal during the balcony scene and told everyone to look around and take a mental picture of this moment. We were staging the most famous moment in all of theater history. I just wanted my young actors to appreciate what they were doing - they were in the midst of staging a sequence that the greatest actors of all time have taken part in. We were standing in the flow of theater history.

This is my moment as a cartoonist. I can see in these three panels everything I want to do. I have a variety of visuals. I communicate character through body language (look at the silhouettes of the girls in that bottom panel - I cannot BELIEVE how much a few lines communicate there). I set up the primary themes of the comic - do we control fate, or is fate pre-determined? I set up each of the characters in significant ways that will have later payoffs. I establish several rules for how the world works, and how some of their adventures are going to transpire. I move the story forward one giant step. I have some foreshadowing that you don't see yet, but you will (and some more foreshadowing that you will see even later on). I use a variety of drawing approaches.

Thanks for pausing with me. Now, back to work. This comic isn't going to create itself.

And I wouldn't want it to.