Alan Moore's Writing for Comics

Cover of the book

Alan Moore's Writing for Comics is a book published in 2003 by Avatar Press. It reprints a 1985 essay by Alan Moore on how to write comics successfully that originally appeared in the British magazine Fantasy Advertiser (four chapters from issue #92, August 1985, to issue #95, February 1986).

The book consists of four main chapters, it also includes an additional essay by Moore and illustrations by Jacen Burrows.

Chapters

The first four chapters are dedicated to establishing a beginner guide about writing, storytelling and plotting a comic book script. The last chapter however, written in 2003, aims to provide an X-Treme writing for comics course and advices; "never to get stuck in one writing style, always be open to try new things."

• Chapter 1 The Basic Idea: Thinking About Comics focuses on the idea behind the whole work of art. What the writer intends to express in his/her work.
• Chapter 2 Reaching The Reader: Structure, Pacing, Story Telling is drilling into the readers skull and gives tips on how to keep the reader focused on the comic book.
• Chapter 3 World Building: Place and Personality suggests to possible comic book writers; to examine real life characters, persons one know throughout their life in order to create real characters. This chapter also gives hints about how to create a detailed universe,even if it means to start from creating economic structures.
• Chapter 4 The Details: Plot and Script aims to demolish the misunderstanding of the importance of plot. Moore delineates plot not as a list of things happening but more like a concept of time, contributing to the other elements of the art.
• Final Part Afterwords is more like a sum up and a confession of all the wrong things Alan Moore told the readers about "how to be a good writer". Moore suggests writers who already started their career, to "simply try new and hard things they didn't think they could manage" in order to become a better writer.

References

• 'Alan Moore's Writing for Comics' at the Comic Book DB

External links

• Review at Comics Bulletin
• Review at Philippine Online Chronicles