Chewing Pencils

Establishing a Plot

Single gag cartoonists can take a bit of a break here. While many will say the single gag cartoonist has lost the plot anyway (grin) an ongoing story line is not something they need to worry about. Establishing a plot, however, is a major thing for comic book and comic strip artists.

The dictionary defines ‘plot’ as the plan, scheme or main story of a play, novel, poem or the like. I guess we cartoonists fall into ‘the like’ category!

The comic book artist comes up with a plot in much the same way as any other author, as the story is contained between the two covers of the book. The comic strip artist has a few added obstacles as the plot must be revealed in installments, with no real idea of when the story will come to an end. I’ll focus on plot development for comic strips, as this is where my experience lies.

My two attempts at comic strips were more or less disasters in the financial sense. My first attempt was called The Wuragag and was about a family of hairy creatures that basically did nothing but tell hair jokes. I think I made it to about twenty strips before calling it quits. It was fun to draw and seemed reasonably popular on the web, but there was no plot whatsoever! The story was going nowhere and all it became was a series of single gags that were totally unrelated to each other. While others can, I’m simply not clever enough to continue that for too long!

My second attempt was called Reverend Evans, about a pastor of a small church and some of his congregation. In my mind, there was more of a story, characters were a bit more developed and there was even a setting! Evans was published in church magazines and bulletins all around the world, but quickly suffered the same fate as the Wuragag. The story wasn’t strong enough to hold my attention or that of my readers.

It was only now that I appreciated just how hard the comic strip was to create, and how important ’story’ was to the ongoing success of a strip.

If you’re into anime, you’ll be familiar with Ghost in the Shell, one of the main inspirations for the Matrix movies. Ghost started it’s life as a single movie, but then was turned into a TV series called Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. The title of this series reveals something about how comic strip artists should approach the plot for their work. Obviously, a TV series such as this has a number of stand alone installments that people could watch, and understand, without having seen the show before. But there is also a complex storyline or plot which flows right through the series, that is added to in small pieces each episode. Hence, a series of stand alone stories that combine to form a complex story. In literary terms, we have a main plot made up of several sub-plots.

The new series of Battlestar Galactica (ok, I’m a Sci-Fi geek) uses the same formula. The survivors of humanity are on a search for a mythical planet called Earth and safety from the Cylon enemy. But each episode covers things like their search for fuel and water, political games amongst the fleet, enemy infiltration and the like. Each week the fleet gets closer to Earth, and each week we are told another story that happens on the way to Earth. A main plot and a sub-plot.

It might seem like overkill for a comic strip, but for your work to be long lasting (and to keep you challenged and motivated) you will need to put some thought into what your main plot or story will be, before starting to tell some of the subplots or single stories that will be contained in your individual strips. For instance, your setting might be in the Australian outback. Your characters might be a family of Kangaroos. Your main plot might be the family’s search for water and food during one of the worst droughts in Australian history. Your subplots or individual strips might concentrate on things like thoughts on life from the shade of a tree, sharing rations of food, lots of sun stroke and sun burn jokes, and, of course, a good deal of humour aimed at how political decisions make no difference to those doing it hard in rural areas.

The hard part is always how to end it. Often a publication will dump a strip without notice and so there is no closer at all. Other times, the strip goes much longer than you expect and another main plot needs to be developed as the previous one draws to an end.

I’ll talk about starting new strips in the next installment of this series, but for now, make sure you give the plot of your strips some serious work if you want them to be successful and long lasting. Your readers will connect with the story if there is a story to connect with!!

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