PJ Holden's Blog

So here we go again. Had the first of the six week creating comics class at the Irish writers centre in Dublin. I enjoyed it, hopefully others did too.

Week 1 was about creating stories. Specifically Future Shocks. 2000ad’s short sci fi stories with a twist.

The basic format of a future shock is pretty simple – four pages. One twist (though the more twisty the better). The twist really needs to come out of the story though, no “suddenly they all became aliens!” It helps if it’s an ironic result of the protagonist’s actions. 

There are lots of ways to come up with ideas for stories, anything should be able to inspire, the trick is to tease a story out of that inspiration. 

During class we used a bunch of words to suggest stories, here’s one such:

The word scar. This suggest a scar in the landscape. From that we talked about a planet that’s ripping itself apart. The visual of a giant planet starting to gape with a scar across its entirety suggested the idea of two factions who believed that that the other side was the cause of this. And what if those sides fought and had a battle, only for the planet to fully split because it’s giving birth to giant indifferent God-creature.

(Look, it was made up on the hoof).

We talked about theme, and figuring out what the theme of the story is/was – is the story about how God is indifferent to suffering, or is the story about how two sides can disagree over stuff that’s utterly immaterial. (Trump leading on faction, Ian Paisley the other suggested some nice visual humour – always good in 2000ad)

Irony, humour are very important to future shocks.

We then burned through a half a dozen different ideas for stories, taking each and teasing out bits that felt unimportant – is this really a sci-fi story? If that laser was a Tommy Gun would it change anything at all? 

Identify whether you’ve written a future shock (sci fi story with twist) or a horror story or time twister. Depending on what you’ve written you’ve got to go back and start pulling it more into that shape.

The four page format of a future shock is interesting too. Each page will have, roughly, 4-5 panels, and the last panel of each page will be a little cliff hanger (or a twist or at least something to hook the reader, a reason for them to turn the page)

Broadly speaking the four pages become:

Page 1/ Setup 

Page 2/establish the stakes/escalate

Page 3/escalate

Page 4/ironic twist

Using that four page format to fill the sorry out – if the idea isn’t big enough, expand it, if it’s too large start to figure out how to cut it short.

We don’t have a word count, but we have a page count.

We want to build world, introduce characters we’re interested in and make sure our ideas have visual hooks – a disease that leaves characters with sense of melancholic ennui isn’t as good as a disease that gives characters giant spines poking randomly from their bodies.

One of the suggested story ideas came from “witness”

A child taken in to an interrogation room to be interrogated about his parents murder,only for it to be revealed the child to reveal he’s the murderer and kills the cops.

We taking this idea, visually it’s weak – and for a horror story (which is it’s closes fit) it’s not really horrific.

So what if the child is actually some sort of monster? We get to see the child describing the monster eating the parents and then the cops are killed by the monster.

Better. But still a little obvious.

But what if, instead, the make the good cop the monster. Bad cop interrogates the child, child describes seeing the monster. Bad cop isn’t having any of this shit. Good cop turns up to placate the child. Good cop leaves. Bad cop turns into monster eats child (or, at the very least we see bad cop running out, saying the 10 year old just had a heart attack)

Ramp up and ramp up again. Figure out your theme and embed it in the story. If it’s horror what’s the most horrific it can be.

Anyway, there was more, but that was week 1.

Next week script writing!

Tomorrow I start teaching my six week course on creating comics (in Dublin). It’s all built around creating future shocks, but filled, I hope, with interesting/useful observations (and really it’s about any sort of short story writing). Each class is two hours long, and, with the exception of week 5, it’s really a 2 hour lecture and q&as sessions.

This is my second go at teaching this course, and it was interesting to see how it evolved from my first ideas. 

My initial pitch looked like this:

Week 1: Coming up with ideas (what makes a future shock, mining ideas, turning those into stories with a twist)

Week 2: Writing a script.

Week 3: Thumbnails

Week 4: Pencils

Week 5: Inking Comics.

Week 6: Cram lettering/colouring in to one week.

Not being exactly sure who would attend such a class, it turned into a “how to write stories for artists” class. While touching on broad drawing techniques (which were heavier on storytelling than actually drawing).

I maintain you don’t need to be a “good” artist to be a good storyteller. You can tell some pretty good stories with stick figures (or just cutting out  collages).

I blogged the course as I did it week by week and I intend to do so again. Those blogs will remain free (I’m not a monster!) but I will encourage you to sign up to patreon for any extras!

Tomorrow, week 1, will be about coming up with story ideas, and types of futureshocks/stories and why short stories are the best place to learn. Using some simple word-seeds (I pluck a bunch of nice random words and we start burning through story ideas) the class is pretty packed though so it’s going to be a learning experience for me too.

So, here’s something I’ve literally just finished – it should be spoiler free, you’ll see it in 2000AD eventually.

Page 1, panel 1 (I’ll paraphrase the script here) Opening page. Establishing shot of the exterior of a large refinery (smoking chimneys, filthy) in the middle of a snowy landscape , bad guys 1 have breached a wall in the side of the factory, they have a pair of giant ballistas (for hurling massive sticks like crossbows) Gunfire from inside the refinery as they engage in battle.

All comic drawing is about problem solving. Some writers will have a very clear vision of what they’ve written, some will just know they have stuff they want happening. Sometimes the writers with a clear vision are actually harder – because they’re describing what they see  and you’re reconstructing that picture for them (like those puzzles you get where you have to describe the shape you’ve just made to someone who has the same pieces but no idea what you’re looking for).

Breaking this down: 

1. 2 x Ballistas (important)

2. Exterior of the filthy refinery, with wall removed.

3. Armies engage.

4. Wall removed.

First thing is, the best way to show this ALL is to get some distance, but with distance it can be hard to show armies (you just can’t draw physically distinct little soldier men) luckily gunfire, s/fx and a general melieu will probably do this job for us.

We want the readers to focus on the battle, while noticing everything around them, and suddenly a solution seems obvious. Sketching it out as a thumb it looks like this:

We’ll put the ballistas either side, drop low to the ground (making it feel like we’re involved, despite the fact the action is happening in the distance) and centre all the action.

Pencils look like this

(digital pencils, thank god for Clip Studio’s perspective rulers, too!)

Inks look like this…

And the draw over (for fans of that kind of thing) looks like this:

The ballistas – at the script reading stage – were a headache, but suddenly they’re doing the job of directing attention in to the battle scene. 

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing today. Hope you like it! (and I remind you: shhh! secret!)

(Looking at this again, I suspect the skys behind the mountains really need to be black to help pop focus, but hey ho!)

Page 1! This strip has only appeared in the irish language, despite the fact it was written in English and stuffed to the gills with puns.

In about a year I think I get the rights back and I can do an english translation. This was cowritten by my sometimes co-writer Scott Ferguson, hopefully the visuals carried enough of an idea that the dialogue didn’t need all the puns.

Page 1: , yo yo and kid yoyo are here to see the man frozen in a block of ice. YoYo demonstrates how stupid the frozen man is, and how much superior he is with his yoyos.

Page 2 Professor time and his time-lards (they’re made of lard!) turn up, they intend to steal the frozen man’s dna to create an army of cavemen! 

YoYo isn’t going to let that happen!

Page 3-yoyo and kid yoyo defeat the various timelards (who are all historically accurate recreations of histories greatest warriors … and Albert Enstien) BUT! Prof Time zaps Yoyo back in time! OH NOES!

Page 4: Back in the past, Yoyo is confronted by the ICE AGE! (it’s freezing everything in it’s past) and he finds himself frozen solid, we cut back to Prof Time cutting into the block of ice, ONLY TO DISCOVER THE ICE MAN WAS YOYO the entire time! HURRAH!

And we all agree, that yoyos are the very pinnacle of human civilisation!

Hope you enjoyed that!

More tanks.

Books like this are probably better for writers than artists though. I have a couple of big difficulties with drawing tanks (beyond all the normal difficulties of actually drawing). They are:

How big are people in relation to the tank (3d tank reference objects are brilliantly useful for what the vehicles look like, but useless at giving you a sense of scale) and what the hell is going on inside the tank. As it happens there are some pretty good videos of people exploring the inside of (some) tanks – some of the more well known vehicles have videos touring the crew components. But give me a well drawn diagram everytime.

Anyway, this is gonna take up a fair bit of the next six months… hope you like tanks!

Ah, my dudes, been so busy – three different projects have accidentally collided – it’s a pain when two do, I actually have four but managed to push one back a week or so. All TV storyboarding today (it’s a very weird job).

Again, nothing I can show, so instead, here’s some storyboards for a short film I did a while ago, the film never got funded, but I think the director’s still hoping to go ahead and make it from his own funds. (local amateur film group, nothing big time for me!)

(I hate that I’m sort of half boasting about being busy. I promise, my favourite kind of busy is a single job that lasts for decades, this three jobs nonsense is just awful. Tomorrow the storyboarding is done though – until they last minute rush me. Monday I start teaching in dublin, expect updates about that!)

Comics on hold for today as I ended up doing some TV storyboarding, more of that maybe in my future. Quite enjoy the process of sitting down and figuring out story telling, rather than the usual thing of receiving a script and just going from there. Sadly can’t show you any of it!

Is having nothing to do.

This weekend finished part four of the Dredd story I’m doing (it’s six parts – two more to go! Always excited to finish something, a final sprint towards the end) it started with me determined to do the entire thing with a brush, but, frankly, my hands and eyes and possibly glasses aren’t really up to it. It went to half brush/half pen, and finally all digital.

I think everything is now likely to be digital (though I’m aware, I’ve been here before).

Managed to wrangle it back on deadline too.

Did a couple of pages of a pitch series too – three pages of that to go.

And just started a new thing. Five issues, 20 pages per issue.

There’s an unfortunate bit of overlap, but hopefully it won’t be too bad – now kids are back in school and my wife’s arm is healing enough to get some work done.

Tomorrow I head off to a local TV company to do some story boarding, tbh I could do without it – but it’s hard – impossible even – to turn down work, especially when I came into this year with nothing at all lined up, except bills.

The five issue series should see me through to the new year with work (sept/oct/nov/dec/jan) and after that, who knows? 

Hopefully one of the random pitches will find a home. I’d like more american work, this five issue is with a US company but I struggle to get US work (I want to say I’m a poor networker, but I’m good at meeting people I’m just horrendous at follow up, and it’s follow up that gets the work – there’s a part of my brain that just doesn’t do well at contacting people after a few months and saying “Oh hey! Remember me!” but we all gotta do it.).

And that’s the news…

Everything has to be designed. EVERYTHING.

Here’s an attic sketch. It starts with a quick google sketch and then picking some elements of an attic I think will quickly distil the essence so we can see it’s an attic from multiple views. It also needs to break a couple of rules (gotta be taller to fit in what I need to fit in). Then you play a game of “how many things can I think of that will fit in here” (and you amaze yourself with how limited your imagination is). Try it!

Attic: boxes. Big bags filled with stuff. Old mirror. Bird cage. Rolled up carpet. Stacked newspapers of a specific date. Brush. Light bulb hanging from ceiling (which means you need to figure out where the electric is coming from, so probably visible cable of light bulb tracing down to either a wall socket (unlikely) or a cable trailing behind a bolstered wall), a entrance (is it a side entrance? unlikely, from below? probably, trap door like thing) more boxes and er… oh god.. 

And then you try and not draw all of that stuff because the story isn’t about that (unless there’s a specific prop you’ll need later)