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The Writing Show (WS): This is Paula B. What could be more fun than comic books? In this high-adrenalin interview, comic-book writer Buddy Scalera reveals insider secrets of the comic book industry and explains how you too can write comics. Beware! You may be so inspired that you drop everything and start scribbling madly.

Buddy Scalera is a professional comic book writer and journalist. He’s the author of Seven Days to Fame, a comic book series about a reality show in which contestants win by committing suicide. He has written stories for the comic book series Deadpool, X-Men, Marvel Knights, and Marvel Millennial Visions, as well as more than hundred articles on the topic of comic books. He also wrote and hosted Comics Vision, a cable-access television show that explained the comic book hobby to mainstream viewers. With his partner, Darren Sanchez, he has released the graphic novels Necrotic and Celestial Alliance. Buddy is also self-publishing Visual Reference for Comic Artists, a series of multi-media art reference CD-ROMs, and I didn’t even put everything in there, Buddy. Welcome to The Writing Show.

Buddy Scalera (BS): Thank you, Paula. I love the show. It’s a terrific show.

WS: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to have you here and not just because you said that.

Buddy Scalera (BS): Actually, let me just add one extra thing to that. I have published my Photo Reference for Artists on CD-ROM, and this month, we'll be seeing the release of a book of photo references from a respectable publisher called F & W Publishers. They are putting out a book for me called Comic Artist Photo Reference – People in Poses. It will be a book and CD-ROM combo for which I did all the writing and all the photography as well as all the multi-media programming.

WS: Congratulations!

BS: Thank you.

WS: Why don't you tell us about your comic books?

BS: I write comic books for the mainstream, for Marvel Comics. But my most recent project was an independent project called Seven Days of Fame. As you noted, it’s a comic book about a reality TV show where people go on live TV so they can become famous. People are so desperate to become famous they're willing to kill themselves. I just felt it was an idea I wanted to tell, and I don’t have access to making movies or anything, so I told it in a medium I know.

WS: I love that series. It’s three separate comic books, and it is really funny.

BS: Thanks. It was fun. One of the reasons I contacted you was that I really want other writers to know a little bit about comic books and how we comic book writers approach comic book writing. I’ve done a lot of writing in other media as well. I have been a newspaper reporter, I’ve been a magazine reporter, I’ve written some for television, so I’ve done a lot of different kinds of writing, but comic book writing has its own unique challenges.

WS: What are the characteristics of good comic book writing?

BS: The characteristics of good comic book writing are the same as with any other writing: telling a good, tight, concise story that has only the good and relevant details appropriate for the story, and making sure that you have the right kind of introduction, conflict, and resolution. We work in a three-act structure similar to that of movies and television shows. The good comic book writer just tries to tell a good story. There are nonfiction comic books as well as fiction ones, and the same principles apply to them.

WS: How common are nonfiction comic books?

BS: Not very. Actually, I've been working on a proposal to put out a nonfiction comic book series. There’s not a lot out there. There were probably more when I was younger. Now you’ve seen it come full circle; you're starting to see more good stuff. I think this company called GT Labs--I'm not sure where they're based--they specialize in doing science-based comic books. There have been other nonfiction comic books recently too. They're just not as common as fiction.

WS: Obviously there are unique challenges in writing comic books even though stories can be told in many different media. Can you tell us what is unique to comic book writing?

BS: What’s unique to comic book writing is that there is really no motion. There is the suggestion of motion, and people fill in the blanks for things like sound effects and motion. Where you see a guy shoot a gun, you see the other guy fall, you make the assumption that someone pulled the trigger, the bullet flew, the guy fell. Or you see a guy running and then tripping and falling. You don’t actually see any of these things. You see static shots representing a point in time in all of those motions. So what’s unique to comic books is we suggest that there is motion, but really what's going on is the mind filling in the blanks.

Same thing with a sound effect. You see someone punch someone else, and you see “pow” or whatever and you’re filling in that blank; or with an explosion you see “blam,” and you’re filling in that sound effect in your head. Comic books are an active medium as opposed to other media like television and film where it’s sequential and the audience just sits there and listens and watches.

WS: How do you decide what to show and what not to show?

BS: It’s a weird challenge because a lot of times, you want to show more than you really can, and you try to find unique points [in the] action that will give the most amount of message. If it’s two guys punching each other, you don’t need necessarily to show the guy cocking his arm back. It’s better to just show the guy connecting and punching the other guy. You’ll choose the most exciting panel. At least that’s what most writers do unless you have a different goal. If you want to stretch the action, you might show the arm cocking back, then in flight, the other guy’s reaction, and then getting hit. You have a lot of control over what action to show in your key frames, which are your panels.

WS: You just mentioned something that sounds almost like slow motion. So you can control the pace of a comic book the same way you can tell a story with a camera and pace your movie?

BS: Yes, very much so. That’s a great comparison because there’s a lot of expanding and compressing of time in a comic. We're able to control how long a single moment lasts. I think television accurately demonstrates this in the show “24.” We break our conception of what a unit of time is. On “24,” we have a season that lasts twenty-four hours, but in other shows you see a lifetime, and the same thing can happen in a comic book. You can stretch a page to last a second in time, or you can stretch that same page to span an hour or a year. Just like in any medium, time passes and you can control and expand it, but in comic books obviously we have to do it in a visual way.

WS: Is it a fair comparison to say that a comic book writer is analogous to a director, or are you more like a screenwriter?

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