Bonus
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Avoiding Action Overload
We’ve been reading on blogs that some comic book fans (G.I. Joe and some of the Marvel series) are starting to lose faith. In writing, we noticed that we can’t limit ourselves to scenarios in which our heroes confront increasingly large robots or monsters, or face larger and larger armies. We want to avoid the problem that plagued the TV series 24, where, every season, the stakes were higher than in the last. This approach is a dead end. Readers know the heroes will pull through, and they know that there’s a limit to just how big the challenges can get.
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Developing Eva’s Character
We were aware that the world we were creating was almost exclusively made up of male characters. We didn’t want to introduce a woman character just for the sake of doing so. A weak female character would not have made our world more interesting. Readers aren’t stupid. They know right away when a character is only there to fill demographic or ethnic quotas. So we tried to give Eva a personality and attributes that would make her a strong, interesting character, who would contribute to the story and not just be décor for the panels on the page.
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The Inner Voice of the Characters
When we launched the project, we soon came face to face with the issue of dialogue: how to prevent the conversations between characters from all sounding alike. We decided to consult books on writing. They covered the issue of dialogue but in a disappointing way, advising writers to develop the characters’ inner voice. Gee, thanks, we couldn’t have thought of that on our own! This led us to set the question aside. We agreed that strong characters, with well-defined identities would act (words and gestures) more consistently. But how do you go about creating these strong characters? Our solution was to talk it over with friends and to find answers to some basic questions: Why is the character acting this way? Is it because of recent events or much earlier events? How did the earlier occurrences influence those that followed? And quickly, a sketch of the character begins to appear, and he or she takes shape.
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The Consistency of the Caracters
Creating a character that will evolve in various environments is definitely a challenge for a writer. His or her reactions have to respect his own nature, which, inconveniently, can potentially make him predictable and therefore less interesting to the reader. At the same time, however, time is an important component in our stories. This means that characters can learn from their past experiences and, consequently, adapt and evolve. Naturally, this is much easier said than done when one is sitting in front of a blank computer screen.
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Archiving and timeline – Part I
Since our stories aren’t published chronologically, we thought of putting in place the timeline system to position the different comics in time.
