![]() Here’s the thing, though: the comic you choose has to be one that strongly demonstrates the skill you are trying to learn about. Of course, you have to pick a comic to study if you’re going to going to write an annotation about it. This one seems like a no-brainer, right? Well, it is and it isn’t. I say this because if you spend your time learning to write great dialogue, but haven’t put in the hours to learn about story structure, you won’t have a story to put your dialogue into, right? Choose a comic to study, carefully. My advice, though, is to start general with some of the larger-scale parts of telling a comic book story, like story structure. Off the top of my head and in no particular order, here are a few important ones: There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of writing skills that go into creating an epic comic book script, so pick the one you think will move your writing forward and get started. The first, and most important, thing you have to decide before diving into annotation writing is what it is you’re trying to learn. Choose an aspect of comic book writing craft. Still, there is loose template you can follow to get started. ![]() How you write your annotations really comes down to how your organize and process information. So, rather than write up an annotation on all of the moving parts of a comic, I would choose one aspect of craft (pacing, dialogue writing, characterization, etc.) and I would write an annotation about how the comic did that specific thing, with special attention to how it did it in a way only a comic book could do. Waters’ method, while incredibly useful, needed some adjustment, a little bit of laser-focusing. And my early annotations were chock-full of good information, but it was all over the place and fragmented-discussing pacing, dialogue, structure, and a lot of other important stuff. When I first started out writing comics, the first thing I did was write annotations. The idea of an annotation is to look at what you want to study (in our case a comic book) and to dissect it, to see all of its moving parts and how they work, so that you can take that knowledge and apply it when you go to create your own comic books. For every class meeting, he would assign a selection of poems for the class to read, and our homework assignment would always be to choose one of the poems and to write up a two-page analysis of the poem’s craft. Waters, and he imparted the concept of an annotation unto me. When I was in graduate school studying creative writing, I had a poetry professor, Dr. One way, and by far my preferred way, is to learn by writing annotations. So, how do you learn to write comic books? There is no grade at the end of the semester for you to measure your progress by. There are no homework assignments to reinforce the lessons you’ve learned. There are no teachers standing at the front of classroom and filling your head with knowledge. What this means for the beginning comic book writer is that your training is largely in your hands. But unlike creative writing or painting, comic book writing is still very much an emerging art form at the academic level (though, it is steadily growing and becoming more accepted). Learning to write comic books is like mastering any other art or discipline-it requires study.
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