Boiling off the Fat

Wow! This adapting is intense.

Comics is really about boiling down the story to its essentials. It's got to be lean. If each page costs $100 to pencil and ink, and, at most, you get 9 panels per page, then each panel costs at least $11.11. Everything has to count--there's too much skin in the game.

As a writer I don't naturally think in terms of plot. I usually write from an image or an idea, and sequencing the cause-and-effect of things comes later. 

Comics is all about plot, cause and effect, one action leading to the next and so on, or it won't make sense. Yet the moment-to-moment action shouldn't be spelled out; you have to trust the visuals. 

I'm so accustomed to looking over the reader's shoulder, that positing a viewer instead of a reader feels very strange. I keep wanting to dive into description, but all that has to go. Death to purple prose.

Adapting turns out to be messy. I'm a messy reviser anyway, so at least this part of the process feels natural. You've got boil off the fat. Comics adapting is a rendering machine.

It's eye-opening to look at a page of my prose and see just how much can be jettisoned. This is the final hour, these are the final cuts. What's absolutely essential?

Here's the first page of the zombie story, a story I thought was pretty lean already in prose form. 

The boxed lines are those I'm thinking should survive. I'll be interested to see how Paul's version compares.