The Refund Window Is Now Open
For those keeping score, that’s twice in one month the guy teaching you how not to lose your reader has disappeared. Full tuition refunds are now available.
But before you flood the refund department, hear me out. There were reasons. Week two’s reason was legitimate. Week one’s was stupidity.
On Father’s Day we went up to Redfish Lake, one of my favorite spots out here in Idaho. The newsletter was nearly done, it just needed a serious polish, so the plan was to sneak over to the lodge at some point, buff it up, and hit send. One small problem. The Sawtooths remain magnificently indifferent to cell service and whatever internet the lodge was supposed to have must have gone fishin’. And since it was Father’s Day, I took the hint and took the week off.
No harm done. The newsletter went into my back pocket for the following weekend. What the heck, it’s almost done.
The week that followed had other plans. Two projects running at full boil, commissions to finish, and one small detail I had completely forgotten: I was due in Anaheim for Fan Expo. Still fine. The newsletter’s almost done. Except every night I came back to the hotel room completely spent. And Anaheim didn’t do this alone. It was every convention and business trip this year, stacked one on top of the other, finally presenting the bill.
I simply couldn’t muster the concentration to do right by you and deliver the high-quality, artisanal, free-range, bespoke storytelling wisdom you’ve come to expect. I set the bar high around here. This isn’t one of those fly-by-night schlock operations like It’s Chip Zdarsky’s Newsletter, Okay? or Skottie Young’s Stupid Fresh Mess.
But here we are, back on track. Hopefully. And you picked a good day to take me back, because today we close out Act V of our curriculum, which means next week Act VI begins. Math is funny that way.
Before You Blow It Up, Tell Me A Spider-Man Story
This has happened to me more times than I can count.
Young writer. Sharp. Hungry. You could tell by the way they’d wait for the right moment to catch me alone: the convention floor, during a meal break, outside the men’s room if they had to.
“I have this incredible idea. It would completely redefine Character X. Change everything you think you know about them.”
Or: “I’ve been working on this crossover event concept. It would shake the entire Marvel Universe to its core.”
I would never let them get further than that. First, because I wasn’t allowed to. Marvel didn’t take unsolicited pitches. Second, it’s not what any publisher is looking for anyway.
Did I think those ideas would be any good? Sincerely? I had my doubts. But it didn’t even matter, because their approach was wrong from the start. Also, the bathroom thing is a bit much.
What they never pitched was the one thing that would have shown me they were ready to write for Marvel. A basic story. So I’d always counter with
“What I want to know is if you can tell me a good Spider-Man story. Beginning. Middle. End. Twenty-two pages. Peter Parker. Something happens, he deals with it, and the character’s DNA is intact when we’re done.”
The silence after that was always interesting.
Because that’s the harder task. We have sixty years of Spider-Man stories. Same goes for almost any character worth writing. The readers have been with this character through death and resurrection, clone sagas and unmarrying. De-marrying? Whatever, you get the gist. Can you write something that feels fresh within the construct of who the character is and make it engaging enough that all anyone notices is how well told it is?
If you can do that, you stand a very good shot at getting hired. We may never print that story you pitch, but at least we know you can tell one.
Also, knowing every little nuance of a character, or having read every issue of its existence, doesn’t mean you understand that character. It means you understand every other writer’s interpretation of that character. That’s a completely different thing.
The moment you actually sit down and write the character yourself, not from someone else’s take but from your own gut, is the moment you start to figure out what that character means to you. What their DNA is in your voice. Not Chris Claremont’s. Not Stan Lee’s. Yours.
So ask yourself: do you want to be a clone of the writer who came before you, or do you want your own voice?
Because that’s the actual test. Not whether you’ve memorized sixty years of continuity. Can you sit down, tell a basic story in your own voice, and make it compelling as hell?
And guess what, once you’re in the door and show that you know how to tell a solid story, editors will be eager at that point to hear your big idea that will change everything, because you’ve earned their trust and the right to pitch it.
Artists were the same conversation with different pictures.
Countless times, young artists would show me portfolios full of bold, fragmented layouts. Heavy texture. Pages that were genuinely stunning to look at, as long as the goal was to confuse me.
“This is my style. I want to bring something completely different to the page.”
Okay. But can you tell me a story?
Clean storytelling is harder than chaos. Especially when you’re young and chaos looks like style. Plus, no matter how visually striking their portfolio was, they hadn’t earned the right to break the page yet. The confusion makes this clear every time.
The other type is the artist who’d spent years studying one master. Every page looks like Olivier Coipel, or Todd McFarlane, or Jim Lee. Beautiful. Accomplished. A watered-down version of somebody else.
“Where are you?” I’d ask.
Because studying every page your favorite artist ever drew doesn’t mean you understand how they drew. It means you understand their interpretation of form and space and light. Your own line only shows up when you sit down and actually draw, not copy, not homage, draw. That’s when you figure out what a body looks like in motion to you. What a face looks like under stress in your hand. What the page does when it’s yours.
That’s the trap. You study a great artist long enough, and eventually you start mistaking their solutions for your instincts.
But your line doesn’t really show up until the reference disappears and you’re stuck solving the problem yourself. The shoulder that won’t turn. The hand that looks dead. The face that has to carry the whole panel and refuses to cooperate.
That’s where you are.
And for the record, I say that as someone who spent plenty of time trying to disappear inside someone else’s shadow. Remind me to tell you about the first time I met Mike Mignola.
Anyway, that was the view from my side of the table. Now let me show you what it looks like from yours.
The Invisible Language of Visual Storytelling
Part 22: Break It Like You Own It
You’ve felt it. A story where the creator tried something experimental and it didn’t land.
Maybe the page layout was fragmented in a way that felt confusing rather than exciting.
Maybe a character got picked apart, deconstructed, and instead of feeling bold, it felt thin.
Maybe a whole run tried to redefine something beloved and just left you cold, even though you could see the ambition in it.
You probably couldn’t name what was wrong. But you felt it. The story was work to read. Not good work. Just effort with no return.
I’ve been on both ends of that feeling, as a reader and as an editor. A creator pitching something radical. The craft is there. The ambition is real. But something in the transaction isn’t right.
The creator was trying to make a withdrawal from an account they’d never deposited into.
Every Panel Is A Deposit
Every convention in visual storytelling exists because it works.
Panel reading order.
The 180 rule.
Balloon placement.
Page turns at moments of anticipation.
Scale that earns its real estate before it takes it.
These aren’t arbitrary rules. Each of them is a promise the creator makes to the reader: I’m not going to lose you. I’m not going to ask you to work harder than the story is worth.
Every time a creator keeps that promise, it goes into the account. The reader feels it, not consciously, not in a “this is technically correct” way, but in the way they know where they are on the page, they follow the eye path without fighting it, they feel the rhythm instead of counting beats. The story flows.
That accumulation is equity.
Issue one, the reader gives you the benefit of the doubt.
Issue three, they’re starting to relax.
Issue seven, they trust you.
Issue twelve, they’ve handed you the keys.
Something has been built. Not from a single brilliant page, but from the consistency of doing it right long enough that the reader stops evaluating and starts following.
In 1984, Alan Moore came to Swamp Thing with a plan most writers would be afraid to attempt. He was going to tell the reader that everything they knew about the character was wrong.
Moore has always been a meticulous researcher, and whatever he did before he typed a word of this legendary story is clear: he understood that character’s history better than most people who’d been buying the book for years.
Then in issue 21, “The Anatomy Lesson,” he revealed that Swamp Thing was never Alec Holland transformed into a plant monster. It was a plant creature that had absorbed Holland’s memories at the moment of his death and believed itself to be human. The origin story the character had been built on for thirteen years.
Wrong.
It should have felt like a betrayal.
It didn’t.
It felt inevitable. Because Moore had done the work first. He understood the existing character better than most people reading the book. When he made the move, readers didn’t feel like a stranger had shown up to blow up something they loved. They felt like someone who understood what they loved had found a way to make it more of itself.
The account was full. The check didn’t bounce.
Every Break Is A Withdrawal
The technique itself doesn’t change.
Every move that makes Moore’s Swamp Thing work exists whether or not he earned it first.
Redefining a character’s origin.
Subverting genre expectations.
Making the reader question what they thought they knew.
Any writer can attempt those things.
What changes is what the reader brings to them.
When the account is full, the reader extends trust into unfamiliar territory. They feel, even without knowing why, that there’s a hand guiding them even when the path isn’t obvious. The discomfort is productive. They lean in.
When the account is empty, the same techniques read as a mistake. The redefinition feels like a retcon. The subversion feels like the writer didn’t understand what they were subverting. The reader doesn’t think “this is bold.” They think “this person doesn’t know what they’re doing.” And they’re right. The technique isn’t the problem. The trust isn’t there.
Same technique. Completely different read.
Every Balance Is A Guess
No certificate exists. Nobody stamps your hand after issue twelve and says you may now subvert.
Here’s what makes this harder than it sounds: you can’t perfectly assess your own account from the inside.
The creator who thinks they’ve built enough equity sometimes hasn’t. The one who’s actually built more than they realize is often the one still making deposits, unsure if they’ll ever get to spend any.
External feedback helps: what readers say, what editors respond to, what collaborators bring back. But even that’s incomplete. The account isn’t transparent. You feel for it more than you see it.
What you have is a read on the work itself. How many clean pages have you turned in? How many times has the reader been right to trust you? How often have you done the difficult thing, the page that was confusing on first pass but rewarding on second, and had it actually pay off?
The question isn’t “can I get away with this?” Anyone can try anything once. The question is: “Have I built enough that when this doesn’t immediately make sense, the reader will stay with me?”
If the answer is yes, make the move.
If you’re still not sure, that uncertainty is data. Not a stop sign. Data. Keep making deposits. The right moment will become obvious.
Next Week
In seven days (yeah, I know), Act VI begins. The final act of this series. It opens with one of the most complicated relationships in comics: writer and artist. Two people. Two languages. One page. How the best ones work, and why the ones that fail always fail the same way.
Thanks for reading.
You’re AMAZING!
JQ
A.I. image heading?
I suspect this is part of why some TV shows have been having more problems in the streaming era. Much shorter series/seasons mean that they don't get the chance to build up the credit that they need to be able to perform the dramatic twists and bombastic presentation that a finale is seemingly deemed to require.
Of course that's on top of a lack of balance of emotional storytelling and spectacle, and the chance to develop nuanced characters and relationships thanks to the shorter running times too.