Time for a magical meandering THREAD, delving behind the scenes of comicbook-makery process, with an eye on narrative tricks in ALIENATED. Buckle in, get your extraterrestrial buzz on, and joiiiinn ussss… 
“US”, incidentally, being yours truly (writer), @MrRiktus on art, @CampbellLetters on, um, letters, and Andre May on color (but not, I think, on Twitter?). ALIENATED’s one of those books where all these roles are crucial to the storytelling, in some weird and wonderful ways.
So. Herein you’ll find some waffle about idea-creation, developmental stages, and some granular funtimes to do with combining art, text and color to achieve some sneaky stuff. There will be pics, oh yes.
BUT FIRST: context! ALIENATED is the tale of three outcast teenagers who stumble upon something not-of-this-earth -- something ALIVE -- on their way to highschool one day. (It’s already sold out at distribution level, so get your butt to your L.C.S EARLY this Wednesday.)
I’ve been toying with the core concept -- what would you do if you had the power to change the world? (And, p.s., what would a smartass teenager do in the same situation?) -- for ages.
(In fact I had a whole miniseries that pondered similar questions, albeit with a VERY different setup and story, all written and paid-for, with a publisher which went down the toilet before art was completed. Comics!)
Anyway. PITCHING! I’m privileged to have worked with @boomstudios often enough that they’ll always consider my ideas. And lucky enough to count @eharburn - one of the best editors in the business - as a friend.
He is always right. Which is extremely annoying. For instance, when I pitched “what would happen if the kid in E.T. had extreme views and an attitude problem?” he nudged and lead me gently off piste into far less obvious, and far more nuanced territory.
Kids: get yourselves a good editor. You will throw many tantrums along the way, but you’ll never look back.
So: we’re off to the races. And Eric knows I’ve been itching to work with @MrRiktus since I first laid eyes on the exquisite PORCELAIN, which I’m assuming you’ve read because you’re not a fool. Are you a fool? No. Get it.
Christian’s first characters sketches blew open a box of possibilities for all of us. What COULD have been a straightforwardISH story of ambition and corruption became something far richer. Why?
Because in a flash we realised we didn’t have one main character and a couple of sidekicks, but three living, breathing, likeable, horrible, amazing, complicated, entirely REAL protagonists. (Oh, and an alien superpredator. I’ll come to him.)
Gratuitous ART INTERLUDE! Here’s the two variant covers that go out alongside Christian’s main one, by the bonkers-good @bengal_art and @mckelvie. Pretty, no? (There’s a 2nd-printing cover coming down the pipe in a while too.)
Anyway. Here we are then, with three amazing and very distinct teenagers, and we very much want to get into ALL of their heads. Cue a gigantic can of worms marked INNER MONOLOGUE TOOLS spilling all over the floor.
One thing I knew I wanted to use from the getgo was a trick I call “text blocks”. They have other names. Essentially they’re empty, frameless panels where narrative text floats without caption boxes. I’ve been playing with them since the old Simping Detective days.
Like so many of the space/time tricks in comics, context is king. Eg, these things can speed up OR slow down the reader’s perception of the story, depending how they’re used. (They're also great for making wordy moments and infodumps feel stylish and pacey instead of clumsy.)
In ALIENATED we use them to imply the deepest (though not necessarily truest) of thoughts. Shorn of all visuals and distractions, deprived even of a frame, they act like a sudden musical silence, to heighten the importance of the words within.
But, uh oh, we’ve got three different kids here. How the hell do we open a door into each of their minds without it becoming a big mess of unassigned and unattributed text? Answer: COLOR.
In essence we spend some time in issue 1 introducing each of our stars in such a way that they are each introntravertibly associated with one color in particular. And we rope in elements of Christian’s design and Andre’s color schemes to really sell it.
For instance, SAMUEL. A kid “who wants to be seen, but dreads being known.” In spirit and in dress sense, there’s always something blue about him. So that becomes the tone of his inner monologue.
Then there’s SAMANTHA. A fallen It-Girl, hiding from a shameful past. Her arc speaks to growth, new beginnings and that old idiom about the grass on the other side of the fence. Green it is.
And then there’s SAMIR. A bundle of chameleonic warmth and enthusiasm whose extroverted exterior conceals some dark and burning depths. For him it could only be red.
Why go to all this trouble? Well -- because Alienated is a sci-fi-by-stealth tale, and - only mild spoilers here - within a short time these three kids find their minds inextricably ENTANGLED in an unbreakable telepathic bond. (Which, at first, isn’t super welcome for them).
Readers are gonna totally flummoxed if you have three separate inner monologues all yammering away at the same time. Unless…? Color!
Another gratuitous interlude! This time it’s the 2nd Printing cover, by series artist @MrRiktus. Isn’t that a cracker? If you can’t track down a copy of #1 this wednesday (Feb 12th), don’t worry -- this will be landing in backup on March 3.
@MrRiktus (Ha. Interesting. I appear to have hit Twitter's Maximum Number Of Waffly Posts In A Thread Maximum. Bolting on the last few thoughts manually now. Appreciate those of you who're still with us. xx). Here we go...
@MrRiktus Okay. One last fun thing. There are SO many different ways, in comics to imply thoughts and feelings. I’ve touched on our inner-monologue captions and those odd text-block beats already. But there’s one other which I love to bits.
@MrRiktus I refer of course to the humble Thought Balloon.
Whole papers could be written on why these lovely tools - once so ubiquitous - fell out of favor. At some point they got tainted by nostalgia -- even silliness -- and usurped by those oh-so-sensible little narrative boxes. Totally arbitrary.
(One thing I’ve always loved is moments where a character thinks one thing then says another, with the two differently-styled balloons connected. But that’s so rare I can’t even find an example. Anyone?)
Anyway. I really wanted to use thought balloons throughout Alienated (a contribution to their rehabilitation) but, as it turned out, we had to use captions AND thought balloons in concert. Telepathy, guys. Telepathy complicated EVERYTHING.
Basically we needed a way of differentiating between moments when our characters are alone with their own thoughts, and moments when they’re deliberately SHARING them.
Long story short, we got ourselves vibing on Professor Xavier PSYCHIC THOUGHT BALLOON funtimes.
And - again - colors! Because if Professor X is the only psyker in your tale it’s a fair bet readers will know who those disembodied wibbly balloons are coming from, but when you’ve got 3 telepaths on groupchat?
And no way can they all be in the same panel at the same time. So we’re essentially using colors as an analogue for the sounds of their voices. You always know who’s talking, even when you can’t see them.
Anyway. I’d better wrap this up and do some work. Just wanted to give you a little taster of how easily comics can make something that could be a bug - ie potentially confusing dialogue - into a feature.
The toolbox is wide and wondrous, and it expands exponentially when you remember the prime collaboration involves not only an artist and a writer. Color and text aren’t just stylistic choices, but narrative mechanisms in their own right.
And, oh heck, I haven’t even got INTO our story’s alien superpredator, or its own insane paintpot of communication tricks.
Like - if I told you @MrRiktus designed an entire RUNIC LANGUAGE to denote the alien’s emotions, you probably wouldn’t believe me. You’d be wrong. The ones on the IFC are just the tip of the iceberg:
He’s called Chip, by the way. For reasons. He’s hungry, he’s terrifying, he’s conceptually ineffable, and he really really likes to cuddle.
Okay. Enough enough enough. ALIENATED drops this Wednesday - Feb 12th, from @Boomstudios. There’s a bunch more details - and very sexily made TRAILER - right here. Don’t miss it, yeah?
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