From SHOWCASE 24 ©1959 DC Comics Inc. Story by John Broome, art by Gil Kane and Joe Giella.

Other once common features of comics that have faded into the background include sound effects (still in use but frowned on in many circles), omniscient narration captions (ditto), flashbacks (more prominent but still frowned on by many editors and readers), and the footnoted reference is pretty much extinct.

From GREEN LANTERN 1 ©1959 DC Comics Inc. Story by John Broome, art by Gil Kane and Joe Giella.

Which, when you think about it, is a pretty strange thing to eliminate in an era fixated on ever-increasing connections between different comics and ever more complex internal continuity within comics.

There are a few reasons all these went out of fashion, and curtailing the use of the various techniques was, at least for a time, absolutely necessary for the medium. Cutting the umbilical cord, after a fashion. Most of these techniques were used to dumb comics down and keep them down. More than anything else, the '66 BATMAN TV show made us aware how embarrassing sound effects could be, to the point they became emblematic of the mindlessly juvenile nature of many comic books, and the constant presence of WHAM! BIFF! BAM! in the headlines of any newspaper stories about comics since has just hammered the very dull point home. The omniscient narrator became a deus ex machine for exposition and background, while footnoted references started overwhelming panels. (When you've got four different footnotes for a single thought balloon, someone's not doing something right.) Thought balloons have had their uses, but more often than not they've been used for mere idiot exposition: Spider-Man swinging over a scene of Dr. Octopus beating up some cops, and Spider-Man has the thought balloon, "There's Dr. Octopus - beating up some cops!" Well, duh, genius.

As comics started attracting more adult audiences, many of these techniques were viewed by talent, editors and publishers as embarrassments, vestiges of the juvenilia they were trying to leave behind, and you can call that pretentious if you like but it's true that the medium did have to start growing up, and still does. Those elements fading into disrepute and limbo broke the stranglehold of house styles, and opened up possibilities for experimentation with and exploration of other techniques, many of which, like the first person narration caption that supplanted the thought balloon, are now also, and often inappropriately, overused. The other factor in the downplay of old techniques and the elimination of others was the new coziness to (some may say jealousy of) film that the medium's been promoting since the '70s. From the moment comics started being reduced to "storyboards on paper" (though there are stories that function best if approached that way, and I still believe a beginning wide audience can best be attracted by "gateway" comics produced to be as similar in effect to the more widely familiar medium of film as possible - but they'd also have to feature material as least vaguely familiar to moviegoers as well) the techniques that are functional strictly in comics - the thought balloon, sound effects, etc. - have fallen into disrepute because they were reminders that, when all is said and done, the comics medium is not like film. Certainly as comics companies have gravitated toward film as a revenue and promotion source and a talent pool, trumped up similarities to film have worked to our field's interest.

We haven't lost anything because those techniques haven't been lost, only dismissed. It was necessary to throw them to the side to rid ourselves of bad habits (not that others haven't taken their place), to demonstrate that we could be part of the "cultural community," to mollify the pointless hunger for "respect" that affects so many in the comics community, both pro and fan. To prove that we weren't "just comics."

Well, guess what? That Rubicon's been crossed. There will always be people who dismiss the medium as intrinsically worthless, but so what? Sure, there's still plenty of stupidity in comics to apologize for - there's plenty of stupidity everywhere - but it's not them we need to apologize to. Screw 'em. Comics are as accepted as they need to be, and if we want more it's time to stop trying to make them acceptable and start behaving as though acceptance of comics is the most natural thing in the world.

And it's time to recover the "lost" techniques that work only in comics, and put them to use again, and better use. There's nothing inherently diseased about any of them; the only real problem with them was the way they came to be customarily used. It's the same principle as the multi-title crossover event, which became overdone and, worse, progressively badly done, until they were no longer salable, and companies steered away from them. Now they're back, and the question isn't whether they should or shouldn't be done - they are being done - or even whether their resurrection represents a paucity of imagination on the part of talent and publishers. The question, and the challenge, is whether they can be done well enough to maintain or even grow a readership over a period of time. There's no reason there can't be good crossover events, even if we aren't used to them anymore. Likewise, there's nothing about thought balloons that automatically makes them bad. A traditional argument against them is that we can't read people's thoughts - and it isn't done in the movies either - but all that is, really, is an argument that comics are neither real life nor film and can accomplish things neither of those can. (Lord knows there are plenty of things film can accomplish that comics can't, but things aren't entirely unbalanced against us.)

An old friend of mine used to teach a comics aesthetics extension course, and was fond of saying that black and white wasn't really possible - in either film or comics - before color was introduced. Obviously black and white existed, but what he meant was that black and white can't stand out or be used as a special technique until it's no longer the dominant technique and has something to stand in contrast to. When color became the dominant technique, black and white was suddenly available for a special effect, but, before color, it wasn't. And suddenly filmmakers or cartoonists were able to invent new uses for black and white that weren't open to them previously. It became not obsolete but another tool in the toolbox. Like the exclamation mark. There was a time when publishers insisted on exclamation marks at the end of every sentence, because printing processes were too crappy to guarantee periods and exclamations were clear marks of sentence endings. When only exclamation marks (or question marks) were available, exclamation marks were essentially meaningless. But printing has improved, and the exclusivity of the exclamation mark shattered. And now when you see an exclamation mark in comics, it means something. Unless the author doesn't understand the use of exclamation marks.

Recently I began doing 'Weird Date' stories for Michael Chabon's ESCAPIST at Dark Horse, and investigated '50s romance comics for research. What's most interesting about them are various storytelling techniques that were mostly abandoned as superhero comics overwhelmed the market, though one used to show up in superhero comics when I was a kid as well, particularly those like THE FLASH that were edited by Julie Schwartz: a separate panel that was essentially just a narrative caption - with one small, simple illustration included to punctuate it. The juxtaposition could serve various purposes: to punctuate a thought, set up a transition, put across a necessary point or action that nonetheless required no more elaborate illustration, or denote the passage of time. Just that one technique opens up all kinds of possibilities - and, yet, it's abandoned, unused and all but unknown.

Writer unknown. Art by Alex Toth and Mike Peppe.

I'm not suggesting that any of these techniques be simply reinstated. As with crossover series, simply repeating the stupidities of the past is a recipe for eventual disaster, no matter how much some of us might like to revel in watered-down imitations of the way things were. But it's time not to abandon everything we've learned from film but to return to many of the things that comics can do that other media can't, to find new uses for old techniques and redeem them with imagination and creativity. To celebrate comics as comics. To use everything we have to go another step forward.

It's not the techniques that are inane, it's the way they're used. The answer to that isn't to abandon them but to use them better, and it's time to prove we can do it.

This is a down and dirty series on making comics step by step, from conception to post-publication.

Before you sit down to write that plot or script, there are a few little rules of thumb and shorthand notations to get straight. While there aren't really across-the-board standards of any kind in comics, except what sells sells, there are a few things you could stand to know about.

If you're pitching to a comics company, the editor and/or publisher are likely going to want some outline of your idea before you begin. Even if you're your own editor/publisher, it's usually worth it to at least lightly sketch out the direction of your story. I reiterate: you can't really know what a story is about until you know how it ends, and you can always change your ending in process if something better occurs to you or if you have a revelation about the hitherto unknown true meaning of your story, and knowing how it ends will at least provide you with a direction to move in so you can prevent your story from meandering. Don't get me wrong: there may have been excellent comics stories that were created on the fly (I can't think of any off the top of my head, but my knowledge is hardly encyclopedic), but usually the opposite is true. If you're determined to "free your muse" and go structureless, at least take some good improve classes to learn how that sort of thing works. (Yes, there are rules.)

Plots are just plots, a listing of the events of a story. If an artist will be drawing your story from a plot (known as 'the Marvel method,' even though even Marvel doesn't employ it much anymore), include all necessary action and as much emotional behavior as necessary to get the story across. Depending on the artist; some work much better in this method than others, and it may take some trial and error to figure out how elaborate you have to be. Plots can be broken down by page -

Page One

A subway station somewhere in New York, where COMMUTERS wait impatiently for their train, though they don't mingle, and a Rasta-style black man, SOAPY, in jeans and an old army jacket sits on a bench, reading a tabloid, the Manhattan Guardian. Soapy lowers the paper a bit and sniffs the air, his eyes darting warily down the subway tunnel. The headlights of a train approach, but no one reacts, because it seems to be any other train. Until it gets closer, and then we can see a grinning white skull painted on the front of the train, between the lights. From inside the train, we look out - past the silhouettes of men with cutlasses - at the startled commuters, including Soapy, waiting on the platform outside.

Page Two

DOUBLE PAGE SPLASH. PIRATES, reminiscent of traditional Caribbean pirates in their dress but also wearing more modern clothes and a couple carrying semi-automatic pistols instead of the cutlasses the others carry, flood off the train in an orgy of ecstatic violence: running commuters through, taking women executives prisoner, terrifying the other commuters who break and run in sheer panic, as a newspaper is prominently swept toward us. (It's on the newspaper that we'll put the title and credits, and whatever else we feel like.)

Etc.

I was going to run several e-mails I've gotten over the last week - during which my email program has been going haywire - and when I open the file...

Nada. They were some good e-mails too.

If you sent me e-mail in the last seven days, you might want to resend. Sorry about the mess. It's more or less cleared up now.

I've just started reading Gerard Jones' MEN OF TOMORROW, the story of the secret criminal underpinnings of the original comics business, the rise and fall of Superman creators Siegel & Shuster, and numerous other stories from the origins of comics. In the meantime, I can recommend two other books: Kent Harrington's novel RED JUNGLE and THE DC COMICS GUIDE TO COLORING AND LETTERING COMICS by Mark Chiarello & Todd Klein. Chiarello's section, on coloring, is direct, simple and comprehensive, with plenty of illustrations and suggestions, and Klein's, though much shorter (the principles of lettering are much easier to grasp than those of coloring, particularly computer coloring, which at times can be fairly counter-intuitive, is also strong. The best thing is the techniques they describe can be applied to pretty much any comics, not just the mainstream DC books that seemed the main beneficiaries of earlier volumes in the series. Just one thing: I dare anyone to explain where the light source is for the Wonder Woman figure on the front cover. Since light sources are an important aspect of coloring these days, that strikes me as a pretty severe gaffe.

Mystery writing Harrington has sworn never to write two novels in the same style, and after doing Jim Thompson, Richard Condon and Alfred Hitchcock in earlier novels, he tackles Graham Greene in RED JUNGLE, about a Guatemalan-American man's return to the land of his mother's death and his involvement in Guatemalan politics, CIA mischief and an insanely dangerous love affair as he attempts to make his fortune finding and smuggling Mayan antiquities. The first half of the book is a bit slow and spends way too much time on setup, but the second half rolls breathlessly along into a host of twists and surprises, with a lighter touch than Greene himself ever applied to his quasi-mystical political thrillers. RED JUNGLE may not be a great thriller, but it's an entertaining one, and worth a summer's read.

The network season finales dropped like flies, with VERONICA MARS and CSI among the best (though nothing compares to the almost transcendental, mischievous DEADWOOD on HBO). 24 was oddly unsatisfying, the conclusion of the season's arc almost a footnote to the sudden rush to escort hero Jack Bauer off to a new life after a faked death. THE O.C. and DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES just sort of petered out in all the rising soap suds. But the worst season finale had to be the jumbled CSI MIAMI where the hero's supposedly dead brother suddenly reappears to reveal he faked his death to work undercover for the Feds. Which is why, I suppose, they send him to a town where everyone knows him. There's one baffling scene where hero and brother invade the den of mad bombers to save brother's kidnapped son, and brother is supposedly shot down, only to reappear at the end on an airplane that will carry him, his wife (regular Sofia Milos) and their son to a new life in Brazil. So apparently the point of that shooting scene was so the Feds would think the brother was dead, and forget about him. But... the only witnesses are the bombers, both of whom die without ever telling the Feds about the killing. When they're alone, the only other witness, the show's hero, checks brother to make sure he's okay - bulletproof vest, of course, so it's good no one thought to shoot him in the head - then tells brother to get out of there before the cops arrive. So why the shooting if there are no witnesses? Are the Feds going to take Hero's unbiased report at face value, with no body to show for it and no one to have gotten the body away from the scene? What on earth? Not to mention what mother's going to abandon her home and everything she has to drag her son off to a foreign land where her refound husband has no visible means of support? Huh?

I guess we just weren't intended to think about this stuff.

At least we've still got THE SHIELD. For another two weeks, anyway.