Stan Lee's How to Write Comics by Stan Lee

Author:Stan Lee [Lee, Stan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8230-0086-9
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

TRANSITIONS

Now, we have a plot, a three-act structure, and a setting. You need to get us from point to point, and that means transitioning from scene to scene. It used to be a simple caption reading, “Meanwhile, in a hidden laboratory beneath the unsuspecting city …” and you go to the next scene. These days, film and television techniques are borrowed to take us from point A to point B, and this can be done cleverly.

Let’s say your hero and villain are duking it out on the Golden Gate Bridge. The fight is out in the open and is being covered by a television news crew. We can go from the fight to a television screen image of the reporter on the scene with the fight in the background, and then the next panel pulls back and we see the hero’s boss watching the news report from his office. TA DA! We have now gone from San Francisco to New York in three panels.

Many writers will use dialogue and captions to carry us from scene to scene, so, for instance, someone may be saying, “I will never, ever be late again!” and then the next panel is our hero’s mother sitting at the table, dinner cooling, and her thinking, “He’s late again.”

You need a way to move from scene to scene that continues the mood or feel and absolutely advances the story. It also allows you to control the pace of the story. Rather than have an eleven-page second-act fight scene, you can break it up and cut to your hero’s supporting cast reacting to the battle or, ignorant of the battle, dealing with some other issue that lays the groundwork for the next story. That’s sub-plotting, which we’ll get to soon enough.

Another thing to keep in mind is when to begin and end scenes. The rule of thumb for screenwriting—and it applies here—is to begin a scene as close to the action as humanly possibly and get out of the scene just as quickly.

Imagine, if you will, Dr. Donald Blake is at his office and a patient needs to be given a grim diagnosis that will prompt an ethical debate, putting him and his nurse, Jane Foster, at odds. Do you open with Blake arriving at work, reading the lab results, putting on his lab coat, walking down the hall to the exam room, and then talking to the patient? Or do you open the scene as Blake enters the room, lab report in hand, and the nervous patient sitting there?

Now, imagine the diagnosis being given, treatment options discussed, and the ethical disagreement begins. The argument escalates until Jane storms out of the exam room and we’re left with Blake and the patient exchanging shocked glances. Would it not be stronger to end with her slamming the door behind her?

An even shorter way to convey action could be this:

Rather than going from Bruce Wayne seeing the Bat-Signal, walking down to the Batcave, putting on the costume, grabbing the keys,

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