I was contacted out of the blue this week by a comics student who had picked up some of my books at Dundee Zine Fest last month. He wanted to ask me a few questions for his research.
James Ingle: What aspects of an image/ a story do you think comics or graphic novels are able to convey better than plain text?
David Robertson: Better than? I’m not sure it’s better, but something that comes to mind is in text you are able to very effectively build a picture in the reader’s mind cumulatively through evocative language and passages. In a comic you can aggressively startle the reader by presenting an image that was unexpected. This is typically done after a page turn, but can be done all in one page if the balance is properly calibrated (see “Hoovering” Of course, I’ve maybe lessened any intended surprise by telling you look for it). This comics process is perhaps more brutally effective in a particular instant.
JI: When you have an image in your mind that you wish to convey in comic form, how do you think this process differs to if you were writing it down?
DR: It’s completely different means to achieve a similar end. If I want to draw a building, I imagine what it looks like, or get reference materials, then use lighting, or other visual effects to set the mood and scene. If I want to write about it, I start making up sentences, with varying levels of metaphor, description, poeticism, whatever, depending on the purpose.
JI: I understand that some of your publications feature comics that are written by you, but drawn by other artists. How often do you feel the images you have outlined are recreated as you had them in your mind’s eye? Is this ever the case or is everybody’s interpretation different to your own?
DR: There is often a case of the artist’s interpretation being different than my own. What I’ve learnt to do is let go of specifics of how things look and convey only the information in the script that is necessary for the storytelling. So putting it crudely, if I want James Ingle to cross the street waving to someone, that is what I will write. I will leave what the street looks like and other details open to the artist’s preferences. If it is important that the street or James look a certain way, or something happens in a certain fashion, I will be clear about that. I try to dictate nothing that is outwith the purpose of the story.
One thing that is a balancing act is that I like to sometimes have the subtextual point of a story come together in a reader’s mind as they take in the panels. This is often controlled by what is drawn and how it’s drawn. Now, I like to have the artist experience the story and “get it” in a similar fashion, to hopefully enthuse them about drawing the story. However, I also have to explain what I’m up to to them, and there’s a kind of “spoiler” that comes about there. These kind of processes are continually being refined.
JI: Thinking especially in terms of adaptations of novels, do you think it’s possible to assign a figure of exactly how many words of plain text a particular comic panel is worth, in terms of recreating the original setting description/action/dialogue or anything else that occurs in the original story?
DR: No, it’s going to be different and vary wildly depending on level of detail and purpose of the adaptation.
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