Tag Archive for kamics

Untalented

December 19, 2012 BC Holmes Comics 2 comments

So there I am at the sports bar, surrounded by televisions. I sooo love being surrounded by televisions. Televisions barfing out sports.

But one of my colleagues recently resigned — he’s one of the long-time folks, so there’s a do. At a sports bar. I show up because it’d be crass not to, but it’s basically a social event, and I kinda suck at those. I figure I’ll show up, put in twenty minutes of face time and then sneak away.

“You know that there’s no hockey on, right?” one of my colleagues says to me, to make conversation. I figure the sports-themed surroundings have infected him.

“Hockey. That’s the one with the sticks, right?” I reply, dryly. I’m accustomed to people rolling their eyes at me.

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Conversations with my annoyance

December 12, 2012 BC Holmes Comics No comments

I’ve been trying to think through why it was that Monday night’s class annoyed me as much as it did.

Perhaps it all boils down to jarred expectations. I went away and did what I thought was our homework: I took my selected pitch, I fleshed out the characters and considered the stuff that I’d need to address in a first issue, and developed a story that, I felt, gave a useful introduction to the setting, the characters, and the overarching themes, and also had a bit of action/adventure for fun. I broke down my story into a story map — I know exactly what’s happening on each page. I’ve already had to hack and slash some of the stuff that I wish I had room for. But I was really happy with the story and wanted to feel good about it a bit.

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Man, that was really irritating

December 10, 2012 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

After being so excited to get to class tonight, actually attending pissed me off. Mostly because I feel like we were asked to do a bunch of prep that never got used. And I think I’m going to hate next week — it sounds like we’re being asked to work out partial scripts in class. I’m beyond the point of wanting to toy around with structure and skeletons; I want to do the hard work of actually bringing the story to fruition now, and I doubt that working that out in class is a productive way to do that.

Bah. I want real homework.

Barely sit still or hold a thought in my head

December 9, 2012 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

I must have really turned a corner on my apprehensions of my Writing class because I’m really excited about tomorrow’s class and I CAN’T WAIT.

Pitch Night

December 4, 2012 BC Holmes Comics 3 comments

Tonight was “pitch night” at Writing for Comics Part 2. We were instructed to bring 3 ideas for new on-going series (or, perhaps, a longish graphic novel), and we’d each pitch our ideas to the class. Ty gave us a bunch of key things that our pitches needed to cover off, and he’d critique how well we “sold” the ideas, and the class would ultimately vote on one of the three pitches. The winning pitch essentially becomes the idea you hafta run with for the final two classes (and final writing exercises).

Some of the ideas were grounded in exercises we’d done in other classes. For example, one of my favourite ideas from a classmate involves a group of Catholic priests/exorcists who fight demons and perform martial arts. The guy who presented this idea had sketched out elements of this particular story world in the world building exercise, and fleshed out some characters for the world in our character archetypes exercise. Tonight, he pitched it, more formally, as “The Exorcist from U.N.C.L.E.” and it’s the one I voted for (and, conveniently, the idea of his that “won”, so I look forward to seeing the actual story).

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Questioning Content

November 19, 2012 BC Holmes Trans No comments

Interesting… We’ll see where this goes.

World Building

November 18, 2012 BC Holmes Uncategorized 2 comments

The course description for my Monday night “Writing For Comics, Part 2” class reads thusly:

A master class on practical writing. Students will learn the standard applications of tropes and genres, the rules of pacing and scene work, the secrets of world building, character bibles, supporting casts, sub-plots, comedy writing, ongoing series and much more.

So. “Standard applications of tropes and genres.” That could be a very freighted thing. Last class we were freighting World Building.

As I said, before, Ty’s approach to teaching writing is very much about, “here is the template; fill it in, and you’ll have a sturdy foundation for your story.” His approach to world building for stories is no different. We spent the first third of the class working on the Successful World Building Formula. He wrote nine points on the board, and said, essentially, “make interesting decisions around these nine points that really speak to the story you want to tell, and you’ll have a compelling world.” Points number four and five were the ones that I thought were interesting.

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Word Balloons as Art Form

October 22, 2012 BC Holmes Comics 2 comments

I’ve been taking this course for the last few weeks: Writing For Comics Part 1, taught by Ty Templeton. Ty used to do this gig as part of the Toronto Cartoonists Workshop, but he’s now put out his own shingle that reads “Comic Book Bootcamp” at the new Comic Book Embassy in Chinatown.

The course has challenged me, I must confess. Not in the sense that “it’s hard” but rather that what he’s teaching feels very formulaic. His style is very much about teaching these template structures for different story types: Plot-driven stories, Character-driven stories, etc., and then explain to us how to fill in the details. For my part, I find that my brain wants to resist these structures as somehow a dumbing down of the writing process.

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Jack Kirby versus Picasso

October 7, 2012 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

They call him “King” Kirby!

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