Should have cut this by 50%, easy.

Last Updated on Thursday, 4 December 2008 10:51 Written by Brian! Thursday, 4 December 2008 10:48

I don’t know if I’m qualified to talk about writing comics, but that’s never stopped me before.

Major Spoilers had a very favorable review of Dogs of War #3 (and another excellent review of #4 even if his reaction to the layout is a little silly). But in the first link there he says…

I don’t want this to come off as a dig on Clevinger, because it totally isn’t, but I find Atomic Robo stories are better when the dialogue is kept to a minimum.

I can’t take that as a dig, as it’s my opinion you should keep your dialog to a minimum. That doesn’t mean shaving lines you need or going out of your way to make characters silent. It means making sure that every line of dialog has to be there. If you don’t need it, or if you can say the same thing in fewer words, hit that backspace button and make it happen. Characters who speak in big clunky expository blocks of text are my biggest pet peeve in comics writing. People do not speak in paragraphs. There’s a handful of fan favorite creators I simply can’t stand because of their tendency toward that kind of writing. No one talks like that, why are you writing like that? Those aren’t characters, those are loudspeakers through which the author explains what just happened and what’s about to happen. ARGH.

Of course, I say all that, but I’m the guy who wrote page 12 there. How do I live with myself! Well, partly because everyone in the world believes their rules apply only to other people, but also partly because it fit the character. Ivan’s been isolated for 30 years and he’s a little crazy. Crazy people ramble. Plus, it’s balanced by Robo’s follow-up dialog. Robo’s line is there for everyone whose eyes, like mine, glaze over and roll like rocket powered pinwheels when they see that much dialog spewing out of one character. It’s a one-line summation of what Ivan is too insane and egotistical to say in so few words.

So, basically writing for Ivan was a simple matter of focusing my blogging style through the lens of an insane nuclear scientist HACHACHACHACHA.

Okay, I guess there’s exceptions to minimalism, but you need a reason to indulge in verbosity. Like with Ivan, he’s full of himself, a little crazy, and who knows when he last spoke to someone. He’d built up a lot on his chest, you could say. If you’re doing these huge wads of text all the time and/or for a variety of characters, you need to ask yourself if it’s really the characters who are talking like that or if you just like the sound of your keyboard.

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