All language subtitles for MasterClass Neil Gaiman Teaches The Art of Storytelling - 15Comics

When you get an idea and you start

turning the idea over in your head and

inspecting it and trying to figure out

what the strengths of the idea are and

what the weaknesses of the idea are.

A lot of the time that's when you start

to figure out

what medium

the idea would work in best. When you

get to comics,

you have a whole different area of

territory. We get to use

the pictures and the words to try and do

things inside the head of the reader

that you might never be able to do in

pros or in film.

For example,

why don't I take you through the process

of plotting a comic and not just

plotting a comic, but of taking an idea

through to a script. Um, now bear in

mind that one of the strange things

about writing comics is, as far as I can

tell, there are probably as many ways to

write a comic as there are people in

history who have written comics. Um, I

do it my way. I'm sure everybody else

does it their way. But I can give you

how I do it and how I did it.

Saman 19. In Samman 19, this is uh the

first of the absolute Sam Man volumes.

It is huge. It is very heavy. You could

use it to stun a burglar if necessary,

which has always been my definition of

art. I had been to a performance of A

Midsummer Night's Dream.

I'd loved it. I'd forgotten how funny it

was. And it was an open air theater. And

there was something very strange and

magical about being outside as the play

began in daylight and moved into night.

What would be interesting

about Midsummer Night's Dream? How could

I do this? I thought, well, the the

first performance

of Midsummer Night's Dream outside with

Shakespeare

and Shakespeare's men, putting it on

before an audience

consisting of Oberon

and Titania and Puck and the fairy

creatures who would all be a little bit

more dark and dangerous than they are in

the play as a gift.

And I thought, I like that. that feels

like it's about something.

And it also felt

dangerous, felt odd. Nobody had ever

done anything like that in a monthly

comic. So then I reread the play, A

Midsummer Night's Dream, just made

notes, just put little pencil marks

where I thought lines would be important

because

I realized, of course, I was going to

have to have various layers of action

going on through the story. There would

be the play always ticking on. There

would be the front row of the audience,

which would be Morpheus, the Sandman,

the Lord of Dreams, and Oberon, and

Titania and Puck. There would be the

back row of the audience. I love the

idea of just a bunch of idiot fairies

commenting on the action and explaining

it to each other. I thought that'll be

fun.

And then I began.

The way that you begin, if you're me,

is you take some paper. You take a bunch

of sheets of paper. You staple them

together. I fold them over.

And I knew I had 24 pages. So, I

numbered 1 to 24.

And actually, all

I needed to know, I didn't fill in very

much detail in the middle. Normally,

I'll fill in roughly what's happening on

each page, but all I needed was starting

and ending on this. I knew that

everything else was going to be dictated

by the pace of the play. So, page one is

traveling. Page two, meet the Sandman.

Page three, set up. Wendle, open the

gate. Page four, the fairies are there.

And that's my first notes to myself.

So, as I begin,

I draw out roughly what is going to be

in each panel. And I'm not doing this

for any other reason than

because what I want to do

is know

how big a panel,

how much information I can ask an artist

to put in a panel. You're not going to

say, "Okay, this is a 12 panel page."

And on page seven, I want the entire

uh Plutonian space force coming in while

down on the earth, we can see uh little

Rodney and his dog running away and his

dog has got a flower. And you're going,

"No, you can't put all that information

on a 12 panel page. You have a very

small amount of information in each

panel. The panel here is the unit of

information

and they're small.

So, I begin

by just roughing things out for myself.

What you can see here is an ox pulling a

wagon and up on the hillside is the long

man of Wilmington and he's standing

there and he's holding a stick. And I

thought, what if it isn't a stick? What

if he's a gatekeeper? What if he could

open a door? And that's how the fairy

folk come out of the hill. So that's

already a visual for me, which means

we're planting it there right from the

get- go. So my little stick figures are

instructions to me. They are only seen

by me. If you do it like this, your

thumbnails will only be seen by you. You

don't ever have to show them to anybody

else. You definitely don't have to show

them to an artist who can actually draw.

And the dialogue that I write down here

is dialogue for me.

But mostly what it does is tell me what

the dialogue needs to do. It doesn't

need to tell me what the words are.

That's not what this is for. What this

is for is breaking down

the beats of the story for me.

It's telling me that my method of

storytelling, getting from one panel to

the next with a story, making something

that somebody who can read comics can

read as a story is going to work. That's

important.

If I have an idea for what people need

to be saying in a panel exactly, I'll

I'll note it down, but I will spend no

time at all trying to get it exactly

right because that's when you write the

script.

People ask how you write a comic script.

And a comic script is much more

complicated than a film script. In a

film script, you just say what happens.

And the director and the editor and the

storyboard artists, the camera people,

they're all going to decide how that is

told. That's not up to me as a script

writer. And in fact, if I give them too

much detail, they will probably get

grumpy. Um, in comics, nobody gets

grumpy because the function that you're

performing

as a writer of comics, of graphic

novels, in film terms, you're the

director

and you're the writer and you're the

editor and the artist gets to be all of

the actors, the director of photography

and the cameraman and the production

designer.

And so together you were a full team and

and finished off by the uh the letterer

who in this context I suppose would be

the sound person um and the colorist who

would of course be the grader. And now

we're getting silly. So

um for me a script is a letter. When I'm

writing a script I'm writing a letter to

the artist. I want that letter to

inspire them. I want that letter to

infuse them. I want that letter to

describe what we're doing and why we're

doing it and what this is about. And I

want to make them complicit in

everything that we do.

So, uh, fortunately in this Absolute

Samman volume 1, the script is actually

printed.

So, we begin with me just trying to set

the scene

for Charles Vess.

I set the scene. I say hello. I describe

some of the characters we're going to be

meeting. The Sandman, very tall, very

pale. If you like the goatee he had the

last time we saw him in this time

period, then keep it. I don't mind one

way or the other. And a little note to

the letterer. I said, Todd, this story

is going to be lettering heavy. I know

before starting. So, if you can letter

it slightly smaller than it's your

normal practice. Thank you. Ready? Me

neither. Here goes. And we begin just

with page one, panel one.

So, here I've got my little doodle to

myself. And one of the things I know is

I need more information in this panel

that I could fit into a smaller panel.

So, it's across the whole of the top

tier. And I describe it here. Long shot,

large panel, the South Downs on a late

summer's afternoon, fine weather. In the

background, small on a hillside, we can

see the long man of Wilmington. He looks

like he does now, except he's wearing a

hat of some kind or the outline of a

helmet. Originally, apparently, he had

one. A white chalk figure outlined in a

doorway cut into the turf on the side of

Windover Hill. Coming toward us,

following a rough path in the turf,

trotten to mud, is a procession of four

rough wooden carts. Three drawn by huge

Shia horses. None of your thoroughbred

Arab steeds here. One possibly drawn by

an ox or oxen. I've described this in a

certain amount of detail here, but you

don't need to cram it all in. Just bear

it in mind. So, at this point,

we get to page two, panel one. Long

shot. Shakespeare has turned to the

procession of people and carts hand on

his hips shouting hold fast we stop here

my friends Hamn go and wait with Condle

and the other boys but father

page two panel two Shakespeare walking

up the steep and grassy hill probably

from behind he's sweating if we can see

his face no dialogue Hamnet his face

slightly unreadable but definitely not

looking very happy fills the panel one

of the things I love about comics is the

silent panel

Um, in pros you cannot have a silent

panel. You are talking. But in comics,

you get moments when nobody is saying

anything, where everything is still. And

they act as punctuation.

They can act as a beat. They can act to

underscore something. They make your

audience, they make your reader

contribute. They bring themselves to a

silent panel.

What are the people saying? What does

this mean? How do they feel? When I was

reading out the script for Charles Vest,

there were things that fascinated me

that I put in there for him.

Lines of of things that are actually

impossible to draw. Even, you know, his

his

cloak is blowing in a non-existent wind.

Tell your artist things that

they can't draw, but they need to know.

And you can describe

all sorts of emotions, describe how

people look, describe how they react,

describe what they're thinking

because the artist knows. And that will,

with luck, make it through into the

pictures and into the story and into the

world.

The page for me in comics

is

your unit.

It's a unit in a way that it isn't

normally in pros. In pros, it doesn't

really matter how something is

pageionated.

And the reason that I sit here and I

break everything down, the reason that

all of what I'm doing here is to tell me

what fits on a page, how it works on a

page, when you're turning the page, when

you're not turning the page, is so that

beat forbe

I'm in control and I go, good. The page

is the unit. The panel in comics is a

single illustration. you need another

illustration next to it, another panel

in order to make it comics.

It only starts to become comics at the

moment where the reader begins to fill

in

between what happens in that panel and

what happens in the next panel.

Sometimes

you can use the page in an incredibly

powerful way. You can surprise people.

Um, you can make somebody see something

that they haven't seen before.

For example,

in Sandman number 7, probably the

nearest thing to a classical

superhero versus super villain battle

that there ever is in the entirety of

Sandman, where Dr. D this this skeleton

headed monstrous creature

has the Sandman's ruby

in which the Sandman's power is and he

says this is your life and I'm crushing

it with my hands and he crushes it and

destroys it and there's a huge explosion

and we go over the page and now there's

just a tiny figure against a completely

white background. And we move in and

we're still in this completely white

background.

And Dr. D says, "I did it. I killed him.

Whoever he was, whatever it was, it's

dead. The ruby. The ruby's gone, too. I

feel so strange." He does a little

speech about how I rule it. I'm I'm the

king of dreams of everything. It's

funny. I always thought when I became

king, I thought there would be applause.

I thought somebody would say something.

and he's standing there floating against

this pure white background. And we go

over the page

and we go over the page and we realize

that he is standing and the palm, the

white white palm of Morpheus, the

Sandman's hand. And that's what we've

been seeing. And Morpheus says, "Thank

you, John D."

And I had forgotten how much of my power

I'd placed in that ruby. And when you

you smashed it, it all came back. And

it's a moment that I could not do. I

could not pull that off without being in

control of when the pages are turned.

And actually, when we did the the

graphic novel version of this, we then

had to create this one page where you

get the tiny tiny figure of Dr. D

hanging in the air.

because we needed that page turn always

to exist. The problem

with comics is you cannot put something

important

on a right- hand page or you can't put a

plot surprise on a right- hand page

because people are going to see it as

they turn the page.

They may not be looking at it. They may

not be trying to see it, but they will

kind of see it. So, if it's going to be

a surprise, if it's going to have

impact, put it on a lefthand page. Let

people turn the page and find the thing.

So, there are there are geniuses in

comics who write and draw and letter and

color and do everything themselves. uh

people like Chris Wear who you look at

or or Art Spiegelman um

they are brilliant.

I am not that brilliant. So in order to

create comics I need people who can do

things and I have collaborators and we

all work together. We all work together

to create something. Let's let's look at

Sandman 19 again. It's a a lovely

example. Now the way that comics

traditionally are done was it would be

drawn out first of all in pencil and

once penciled it would go to the

letterer and the letterer in ink would

letter

draw the word balloons put the lettering

inside them and then that would go back

to the artist or go to a different

artist to ink and inking is not

coloring. Inking is the process of going

over the pencil lines in black India ink

in order to create something that is now

reproducible. Shooting from pencils

never really works because you lose a

whole lot of detail. So the first and

most important collaborator on this uh

which is Charles Vess and Charles

pencled and Charles inked and

fortunately we have some of Charles

beautiful pencils here and he uh part of

the fun of Charles's pencils

is looking at how he laid something out.

We have the the oxen. We have the four

carriages here. We have uh one covered

up some with people in them. You can't

really see what the props are. They're

walking alongside a wall. It definitely

looks incredibly Sussexy. He then took a

much smaller version of what I did after

that was tell the next four panels in

evensized panels. And Charles

being an artist and having much more

design sense than I do just told this

little sequence.

He puts one panel smaller in set. We see

Shakespeare and Hamnet walking ahead of

the oxen and Hamlet says, "But father,

you said that we will be performing the

new play tonight. Where shall we play it

if not in an inn? I have no idea, but we

will know soon. Keep your eyes on the

road ahead, lad. but father and sooner

or later

it would be colored in and would look

look like this. And then you do have

another artist working on this page. In

this case, it's an artist named Steve

Olif.

And Steve colored this comic. And one of

the things that he was doing was make

everything darker as things went on. It

starts on a glorious summer's day. It's

going to head into dusk and then into

darkness.

And Steve Olaf's coloring

was really elegant. It just he didn't

work on Sandman for very long, but when

he did, what he gave us was absolutely

magic. It was lettered by Todd Klene.

Todd is a glorious letterer. I think he

now has won more awards for lettering

than any other living human being. Uh he

won them, a lot of them through Sandman.

And what was what was almost cruel of me

was when I discovered everything that

Todd could do, I'd make him do those

things. So we got to the point where

every member of Dream's family of the

Seven Endless had a completely different

lettering style. So many of the

characters who turn up would have their

own lettering style. Um, I like the idea

that you can kind of hear the lettering

in comics. You're having to do a sort of

moment of sinthesia there. Any sound

effect you see, whether it's a flack or

a plop, um, it's going to be written and

yet you're taking it as a sound.

and that you need somebody like Todd to

actually pull off for you.

And then there are invisible

collaborators. There's my editor Karen

Burgerer. And Karen was a fabulous,

fabulous editor. She looked at the

script. She normally didn't have much to

say about the scripts.

um because she liked them. Saman 19 her

reply to me was look I don't understand

Shakespeare particular I'm not a big fan

of Shakespeare

I'm not sure what the heart of this

story is

and I thought right okay

and I had to stop and think between my

first draft on the script and my second

what was the heart what was it really

about and you can call that theme

but Really, it's just what's it about?

What does it mean? Why is this story

important?

Theme at the end of the day is just why

should we care? Why should you care? And

I had an editor whose opinion I trusted,

loved, and respected who was saying to

me,

why should I care about all of this?

And I thought, well, actually,

the heart of this story is Hamnut. is

this eight-year-old boy who I brought

onto the stage who's watching his father

having this wonderful successful

career but isn't really connected to him

who's going to be seduced

by Tatana and who dies a few years after

and who maybe I can if I write it right

I can leave his death almost ambiguous

as if maybe he was taken away by the

ferry

And I wrote a conversation.

I took one page. I only had really one

page left to do things in. So I took

that page and I wrote a conversation

where one of the actors who's playing

Hermier says, "You must be very proud of

your father." H proud. I suppose he's

very distant, Tommy. He doesn't seem

like he's really there anymore. Not

really. It's like he's somewhere else.

anything that happens. He just makes

stories out of it. I'm less real to him

than any of the characters in his plays.

Mother says he's changed in the last 5

years, but I don't remember him any

other way. Judith, she's my twin sister.

She once joked that if I died, he'd just

write a play about it. Hamnut.

Come on, lady. I'm back on in a minute.

Mother ordered him to have me for this

summer. It's the first time I've seen

him for more than a week at a time than

I remember. But we live 5 days ride from

London up in Warikshire and see him

seldom.

All that matters to him. All that

matters is the stories. And the actor

says, "I would be proud of him if he

were my father."

And just that moment of heartbreak at

the center of the story is what gives it

its drive. It's why should you care?

Because at the end of the day, you're

seeing this beautiful, wonderful thing.

The first ever performance of Midsummer

Night's Dream, a play that has given joy

to hundreds upon thousands of people,

probably to millions of people. One of

the greatest beauties of the English

language. And you're also watching the

sorrow of a small boy whose father is

out of reach, who isn't there. He's down

in London making plays.

And if he died, his father would just

make a play about it and call it Hamnet.

And that

that was Karen. That was Karen as a

collaborator who is invisible just

saying, "Why should I care about this

story?" And I thought about it and that

was what I gave her. And if there's a

reason why it won the awards, it's not

from the technical cleverness. It's not

Charles Vest's beautiful drawings. It's

not the wonderful Steve Olaf colors.

It's that moment where everything comes

together, where Charles Vest draws,

Steve Olaf colors, Todd Klene letters,

that little six panel conversation

and we break everybody's heart.