Writing with Pictures

Game designers make better comic writers than novelists for a few reasons - first, aside from maybe Hideo Kojima and the Metal Gear Solid series, game designers must condense their output to fit into set constraints. If I work on a mobile phone game, I've only a few kilobytes-worth of text I can squeeze in, and then there's that tiny screen! Instead of saying "When you pick up the basketball, run towards the basket", one must instead say "Pick up ball, run to basket".

Conversely, when you write a novel, your first instinct is to describe in detail. You set the scene with words, and you have to cater to your entire audience on the first try – as Jef Mallett said, “Being a good writer means never having to say ‘I guess you had to be there’.” This is doubly important with fantasy stories because you – the writer – are the only person who’s ever been to the place you’re describing. With a comic, words take a backseat. Description is no longer imperative, as the artist can show exactly what it is you mean to say.

In this respect, writing a comic script is a bit like writing text for a game. Both comics and games rely on visuals to tell the story, with text acting as a supplement. Crack open any good comic and you’ll see the art is telling the story most of the time – not the text. Because of this, finding the right balance between what you want the characters to say and what you want the characters’ actions to say is a blurry line that I’m still figuring out. As I’ve learned over the last few drafts of the script, when you write a comic, the artist is as much a writer as the writer is. If you believe a picture is worth a thousand words, then that makes the artist even more a writer than the actual writer!

My first draft of the Four Kingdoms script was very much still the novel I had begun to write beforehand. It wasn’t until Rachel laid out the initial thumbnails of the Felis prologue and some of the other scenes that I realized I needed to apply my game designer shtick to the comic’s script. Let’s take a look at the evolution of some scripty bits:

The Lost "Felis Prologue":

In the original prologue, a group of shadowy hooded figures argue around a table in a dusty old library. After some back and forth, a few plot details began to emerge – they were recording some important historical event, a stranger was among them who had been a participant, and the facts surrounding this event were impossible to determine. The scene would have gone on for about two and a half pages, most of it just people sitting around a table arguing.

A snippet of this lost scene:

Shadow 1: This is not another one of your abridged travesties! This is the most important thing that any of us in this room will ever write! There hasn’t been an event like this since the Four Kingdoms War, and that was a lifetime ago!

Shadow 2 (to the others): Brother Camriel is speaking in exaggerations.

Shadow 1: I speak the truth! Our writing of these events will affect our relations with all the races of the Four Kingdoms. This is not some skirmish between Vulpin tribes or Polcan pirates! We write of a world war, and we cannot take that responsibility lightly!

Words and words and words! For a comic, especially a comic that introduces a brand new fantasy world, showing a bunch of shadowy cloaked characters in a library probably isn’t the best way to garner interest. Thankfully we came to our senses and condensed the Scholars sequence into a single page and added some nice visual splendor to pique interest.

My second and last example (since I’m starting to belie my point about being succinct with this post) is a series of panels from Quinlan’s introduction:

Original text:

Quinlan: When my grandfather told me that I needed to join the Tamian Military, he gave me a choice of paths to follow. I chose to be a scout so I wouldn’t have to kill anyone. He was against it, of course. It was the first time we ever really fought.

Janik (surprised): Yeah, but… you’re so good at Tesque…

(Quin collects his supplies and stands up, offering Janik a paw)

Quinlan: Knowing how to fight is a philosophy. The true act of fighting, though, that’s… something quite different. Honestly, I don’t know whether to thank my grandfather or hate him.

Janik: Why’s that?

Quinlan: Well… it’s hard to explain. To him, the best way a warrior’s life could be spent was by constant fighting, risking life and limb. Whenever he tried to explain it to me, I just got… scared. Eventually he stopped trying to explain, and he let me become a scout. I think he considered that his greatest failure.

Janik: And you think that’s why he willed you to become captain after he died?

Quinlan: How could I turn down his dying wish? He got what he wanted, that’s all he cares about, I’m sure.

Janik: Well, he lived in a violent time. Things are more civilized now.

Quinlan (as he and Janik walk away): That’s just what worries me, Janik… I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think that’s true at all.

And now the scene as it appears in a more current draft:

So, getting back to my original point – if you’re a novelist at heart, comic writing will take quite a bit of practice to get right. If you’re a game designer, especially a game designer that constantly has to work within tight size constraints – you might actually want to give comic writing a whirl. Half of the fun of game design comes from working within constraints - so the constraints of comic writing should very much appeal to you.

The Kingdoms of "Kingdoms": Deltrada

To describe the northern kingdom of Deltrada is to describe the whole of the militaristic Canid race – cold, brutal, and always willing to turn a petty fight into a lifestyle choice.

Calling the Canid ‘petty’ is hardly fair, however, considering that not long ago, they were nearly wiped off the map entirely. The Canid once lived in the barren Northern Wastes, struggling to survive off of the inhospitable terrain.  When the Four Kingdoms War broke out and all the seven races in the land were at each other’s throats, the Canid had to make a choice: attack one of the races to the south and take their land, or put their entire race’s future at the mercy of the unforgiving northern winters.  They steeled themselves for battle and attacked their nearest neighbor – the Ermehn.

Things went poorly for the Canid at first.  They lost almost every skirmish against their more experienced and battle-hardened foes, and they were at risk of losing their entire campaign unless they did something drastic. On the eve of the final battle, the Canid managed to convince the neighboring Tamian and Lutren races that the Ermehn race was a threat to them. This alliance tripled the strength of the Canid army, and the Ermehn were soundly defeated.

The Canid named their new kingdom “Deltrada”.  They quickly built a capital city, several military garrisons, and a massive wooden wall blocking off all major paths leading into the Northern Wastes – believing that the Ermehn would attack them the first chance they could.

Deltrada is currently under the protection of the Canid leader, Lord Odrahn, and his three generals: Clovis, Tyril, and Galleon.  In the 85 harvests that have passed since the end of the Four Kingdoms War, the Canid have become a military superpower – their entire society is now based on keeping the Ermehn locked away in the Northlands, firm in the belief that the Ermehn are simply biding their time for one last massive battle to retake their land.

The Kingdoms of "Kingdoms": Sunsgrove

Progress report: Things are moving! We’re hoping to have the first issue’s final script and panel roughs all laid out and ready to go by New York ComicCon next month. At the very least, this will be a busy month in Four Kingdoms-land!

For the next few blogposts, I figured I would go into some detail about the landscape and history of the Four Kingdoms, going into each of the titular kingdoms and their inhabitant races. This post is dedicated to our main protagonists’ home: Sunsgrove.

Sunsgrove is quite the anomaly when it comes to the Four Kingdoms – the other three kingdoms are ruled by dominant races, while Sunsgrove is split in two: Lutren territory and Tamian territory.

Lutren territory lies to the south, snaking its way north along the western coastline. Tamian territory, further inland, makes up the rest of the kingdom. Think of it like this – the Lutren live on the coasts, the Tamian live in the massive forests of the Western Deep. And that’s Sunsgrove!

During the Four Kingdoms War, when racial alliances were forged to battle against invading species, the Tamian and the Lutren banded together to overcome the Polcan race, which was threatening to push them both into the desert-like midlands (now home to the Vulpin and the kingdom of Nessa). With the Tamian’s knowledge of the Western Deep and the Lutren’s seafaring skills, the two races were able to push the Polcan from the coasts and into the Great Sea, where they now live as pirates and bandits.

To this day, the Tamian and Lutren share the land peacefully, with a Lutren queen and a Tamian king representing the continued alliance between the two races. Our hero, Quinlan, serves directly under the Tamian king, Dabheid - so expect to see a bit of this pudgy monarch. Dakkan and Kenosh serve under the Lutren queen, Sorcha - who's a bit of a hard-liner. Dakkan really doesn't like her that much - and rest assured, the feeling is mutual. As the political situation in Sunsgrove deteriorates, expect to see these royal monarchs doing what they do best!

Modern Influences

When I started brainstorming the characters for “Four Kingdoms”, I actually made a point to start in a place very different from where the ‘writer’ part of me wanted to start. When you write a story of any kind, your characters are usually created from archetypes that then become more complex and definitive. To use a cooking example, normally when one creates a character, they pick a main ingredient, and then add other ingredients to accent its flavor. This is usually done over the course of the storyline, and by the end, you’ve got a tasty cake. Or a well-developed character.

In “Four Kingdoms”, I approached things differently. While a lot of our inspiration comes from stories like “Redwall” and “Mouse Guard”, where characters are defined by personality archetypes (the quiet tactician, the brash warrior, the doting Abbeymum, etc), I started as I would start with a video game design: purpose archetypes, not personality. I got the idea from the Xbox 360 title “Lost Odyssey” – for those in the know, it’s very much designed like a classic Japanese role-playing game like Final Fantasy, with lots of story sequences and complex turn-based battles that involve a combination of magical and physical attacks. The characters and their respective roles, however, seemed to have been assembled from a design perspective.

For example, an early party makeup consists of two warriors and a mage. Gameplay dictates that you protect the mage in battle because his spells can turn the tides, and to reinforce this notion, you learn in the storyline cutscenes that the mage character is actually quite a coward – his purpose in the game and his purpose in the storyline are one.

So I approached the main characters of “Four Kingdoms” as if I were designing a game. What would a “balanced” party be? Quinlan is ideal for long-range and very close-range attacks with his bow and tesque skills, making him the ideal ‘scout’ class, while Dakkan’s wooden staff and his strong build make him a good ‘warrior monk’ class, or even a ‘brawler’. Kenosh, being the strong-willed warrior that he is, is an ideal ‘knight’ or ‘paladin’. Later characters will fall into the ‘assassin’, ‘mage’, and ‘barbarian’ classes, and some characters may even switch classes as their personalities evolve.

So what does all this geeky chicanery mean for “Four Kingdoms”? Well, in the end, all it really means for you, the readers, is that the characters will have their own unique and easily identifiable roles to play when they’re in danger. I’m hoping that this more modern interpretation of the character archetype perhaps helps readers identify with the characters quicker – it’s all very much an experiment in narrative design. But then again, I design video games for a living, so if I didn’t approach it from this kind of perspective, I’d feel like I was doing something wrong!

Stay tuned to this blog for more updates about the comic as it progresses – and maybe even another update from Rachel!

The Fated Players

During the initial brainstorming stage for Four Kingdoms, the first thing I wrote down was the following: “It’s a medieval-style world, it’s dirty and grimy. There was a war a long time ago that splintered the races around the landmass, which did not have a name at first, but is now known as the Four Kingdoms.” I spent the next many long days mapping out the world, the races, and the little quirks that would make them interesting to learn about.

Once the world and its races were established (a process that could and probably will take up an entire future blog post), the important thing was then to create a story that showed them all off!

In other stories where the world was created before the characters, the story is usually focused on shuttling the characters from place to place so as to fit in as many cool environs as possible. Lord of the Rings, for example, wasn’t a deep character study so much as it was a simple story taking place in a very complex world. Mouse Guard’s first collection feels a lot like this, though the “Winter” events seem to hint at a greater focus on the characters and less on the world at large. Four Kingdoms was written to skirt the line between introducing a new world and focusing on its characters and their plight, and to ensure that both received the appropriate amount of attention.

Quinlan is the protagonist of Four Kingdoms, and he is the reader’s vessel to the world of ‘good’ in the story. As evil creeps across the land, he is the one we follow. By the time the story begins, he has just been inducted as the Captain of the Tamian Royal Guard, has a war hero grandfather to live up to, has relationship problems with his girlfriend, Janik, and overall feels that the world’s coming down around his ears. If it weren’t for his best friend, Dakkan, he’d probably lose his mind.

Dakkan is a soldier in the Lutren Sea Guard – the carefree and rambunctious counterpart to Quinlan’s occasional over-dramatization. Despite being in the Sea Guard, Dakkan actually spends most of his time on land, ensuring that the catapults used to protect the Sunsgrovian coasts are in peak condition. He and Quinlan befriended one another at an early age, both of them understanding the difficulties of living under battle-hardened veterans. Dakkan’s father, Kenosh, is the Captain of the Lutren Sea Guard. It is Kenosh who learns of impending dangers to Sunsgrove, and it is Kenosh who suggests that Quinlan join him on a peacekeeping mission to Canid territory at the story’s onset.

Hardin is the reader’s vessel to the world of ‘evil’ in the story, though I use the term loosely, since ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are very much a matter of perspective in Four Kingdoms. Hardin leads a tribe of Ermehn barbarians called the Sratha-din across the frozen tundra of the Northlands in hopes of a better life, though many have long since given up hope. Driven by desperation, Hardin and his fellow warriors turn south to the Four Kingdoms, hoping that somehow they will be able to right the wrongs of the past and secure a future for their kind.

Hopefully in a week or few, I'll be able to talk a bit about the various inspirations for Four Kingdoms, from the aforementioned fantasy stories to the Xbox 360 title "Lost Odyssey"!

Tesque (and a Status Update)!

The first issue of Four Kingdoms is getting closer to completion! Rachel’s finished up most of the page roughs, with inking and coloring marking the next steps in the process. One guaranteed rule of the universe is that when you’re in college, you will have at least ten years’-worth of assignments to do in the two months before winter break. I remember it like it was yesterday, and Rachel’s living through it right now, so between my nightmares about finals week before winter break and Rachel’s inability to find enough time to sleep in order to have nightmares about finals week before winter break, the next couple of weeks will probably be a bit slow on the production front. Because of this, I figured I would treat you to a new post that goes over a unique part of Tamian society – TESQUE!

One thing that I’ve learned from many years of history courses is that every group of humans, from every time period, has their own unique form of combat. It truly is an art form that transcends time and place – from kung fu to bare-knuckle boxing to fencing to pistol duels – combat may not define a group, but it does reveal a lot about them. When I was brainstorming the various races of the Four Kingdoms, I realized that a group of squirrels would not simply stand around and punch each other in the face, and a group of wolves would not be hopping around the floor like Bruce Lee; each race would need to have its own combat style that takes a bit from our reality, and mixes it with the unique advantages of their kind. Tesque was the first of these combat styles that I came up with – a kind of combination of Tony Jaa’s Muay Thai style and a squirrel’s natural acrobatic ability.

Tesque was created long before the Four Kingdoms War, long before the comic’s story begins – back when the Tamian was a group of scattered tribes living in the trees. Their entire lifestyle depended on their ability to maintain a height advantage over their foes, and so when two Tamian warriors battled one another, they did it high in the treetops, using their natural acrobatic skills and razor-sharp claws to flip and jump between tree limbs while delivering attacks to their opponent. The loser of the battle either lost their footing or was knocked off of their tree limb – but either way, it was always a long way down.

As time went on, the Tamian began to encounter the other races of the land, many of them land-bound, which required them to adapt their multi-leveled fighting style to the ground. Many rare and unique maneuvers were lost in this transition, but the basic three tenets of the fighting style remained: Always keep moving, Know the ground and feel the air, Everything is a weapon.

These three tenets form the core of basic Tesque, emphasizing speed over power, an understanding of your environment, and the ability to use every body part during battle to maintain the advantage. The oft-used Trainer mantra is, “From your teeth to your tail!” These three tenets are still taught in Sunsgrove to this day.

Every Tamian in Sunsgrove is trained in Tesque from a very young age, it being considered one of the most defining aspects of their racial heritage.

Quinlan, the protagonist of Four Kingdoms, is a Tesque Master – the highest level that can be bestowed upon a Tamian. There are four levels to the understanding of Tesque:
The Student is the lowest level, where they become familiar with the basic moves and the three tenets.
Acolytes form the second level, which involves learning some of the more complicated acrobatics and movements, and is usually where trainees experience their first major accidental injury.
Trainers make up the third level of Tesque, and these Tamian warriors are used to train the Students in the basics of Tesque.
Masters are the fourth and final level – these Tamian having perfected all of the most complex Tesque moves. Masters train Acolytes and Trainers alike, grooming them to become Masters themselves. The path from Student to Master typically takes around 10 harvests – or years, to us.

In the first issue of Four Kingdoms, you’ll be treated to a short spar between a Tesque Master and a Tesque Trainer. This, however, is only a first glimpse at the complex Tamian fighting style. As it is a deep-rooted tradition in Tamian culture, you can expect it to come up in many different ways over the course of Quinlan’s adventures!

Animal Characters: Striking a balance.

Hiya, Rachel here. I'm the artist for Four Kingdoms, doing my best to bring Alex's story and characters to life.

I've always adored animal characters in stories and film, ever since I was little. Even today, I still find animal characters to be (almost invariably) more interesting than human ones. But why should that be, if I'm human myself and respond to humans more than animals in real life? The thing is, these characters are essentially human, for the most part – they have human personalities and character traits, and some even walk on two feet, talk, and wear clothing. We can identify with them just fine, even though they're animals on the surface.

I also think that there's a certain freedom to working with animal characters – since they're not 100% realistic humans, you're already expecting the audience to suspend a little disbelief to accept and empathize with the characters as they are. Suddenly if your character needs to accomplish a deed outside the capabilities of a regular person, he can do it because he's not a regular person anyway – he's a cougar or wolf or mouse or whatever. This especially helps when the character's animal traits work with their accomplishment (such as, a squirrel character climbing all the way to the top of an monster oak in minutes – which no human could believably do).

These animal traits can also enhance the experience, especially when it comes to animal gestures that we as humans still understand. When Ren the Fox feels sad, his ears may droop. That would be a ridiculous thing to happen to a sad human, but it is a foxlike gesture we can take advantage of... especially in a comic like Four Kingdoms where we experience the story visually. Animal gestures (like all the hairs on a tail standing on end, or a whisker twitch) can add a new level of expression to the human body language the character is already exhibiting, and makes it even easier to avoid stupid, lazy “telling not showing” dialog such as “Sob! I'm so sad!”

So for me, it all boils down to the human/animal mix that's so intriguing about these creatures. Animal-humans act like us, but are not restricted to purely human mannerisms. This principle also drives the way I've handled the character designs for this story.

One of the things that drives me crazy about a lot of the “furry” characters I've seen around the internet is that there is often way too much “human” thrown in the mix. Say we're looking at a fella known as “Simon the Wolf” ...who is basically a wolf head on a fuzzy human body with a tail. Or even worse, maybe Simon's head is actually humanoid with a small black nose and wolf ears. It's only slightly nonhuman, so it looks really weird and creepy to me – like the “Uncanny Valley” concept that deals with only-slightly-off humanoid robots. If it's 99% human, that other 1% creeps us out because it looks wrong. The less human it looks, the less we expect it to look and act like a perfect human... making it easier for us to accept it for what it is. Making sure there's a healthy dose of “animal” in there also makes the use of animal-specific talents a lot more feasible. If a bird-man just has a beak and no real wings, can we really accept it if he suddenly flies off into the sunset?

So for the Four Kingdoms characters, it was very important to me that they still read as a definite animal, rather than as a weird human with fur. The otters have long bodies and shorter limbs, while the wolves have more shoulder and neck mass than the others. The tails are not just cute little animal “souvenirs” pasted on so much as a definite part of the characters and their overall gestures. All the races' legs are a pretty even blend of human and animal – they walk on their heels, but the leg bones and muscles have a more animal look than human. There's also the matter of female anatomy – due to the high percentage of "animal" I want to retain in the characters, this can make specifying gender a little tough. While the surface anatomy can be treated in a more human way and still not be creepy, I prefer to let the facial features and general body shape do the feminizing. Clothing can help too, of course.

The end result of all this is a cast of characters I can do a whole lot with when it comes to expression and acting. A wolf guard can do much more than curl his lip and lean forward to be intimidating – he can bare his razor-sharp fangs, hunch over his victim, neck-fur bristling, and speak in a literal growl. An annoyed feline scholar can let one of his ears tilt back, unaware that he has lost the illusion of calm stoicism. An ermine's already long and limber body can be forced into an even more exaggerated cringe under the angry Wolf's eye, or be exploited for more impressive-looking acrobatics than a human could manage.

I say, if you're going to make the leap and make the characters non-human: use it! Keep them identifiable with the audience, but take full advantage of their non-human qualities. And that's what we're striving for with our characters in this comic.