10 Things About Breaking Into Comics (That No One Tells You)

9. Write

spidey comics
Marvel Comics

Again, simple, but it's easy to find yourself distracted away from the very act of writing.

If you want to be a comic writer, or in fact any writer, it's not as simple as popping yourself down, firing the laptop up and bashing out that Eisner Award winning OGN script in five minutes like some kind of creative power wank.

Building your writing game takes time, and most importantly, practice.

This is not to say that everything you write needs to be a comic script, nor does the idea that to be a writer you must be writing all the time hold true. People have lives, people get dry spells, people can even get a crippling sense of anxiety over the very idea of staring at that glaring white screen and having to come up with a whole new idea, a whole new concept, and then trying to claw that out of the slimy recesses of your grey matter and onto a page so that people will eventually see it, and oh god, what am I doing? Why am I doing this to myself? Why!

Ahem.

However, there is something to be said for keeping yourself in practice. So one should try to write something every day. It doesn't have to be your next comic, or even a story. Write a review, write a newsletter, writer a blog post. But keep yourself in the practice of actually writing, and it will help your ability to communicate stories incredibly.

Contributor
Contributor

Joe is a comic book writer out of South Wales, writing LGBTQ+ superhero series The Pride and also co-writing Welsh horror comedy series, Stiffs. He's also a comics reporter and reviewer who works with Bleeding Cool and now WhatCulture too. So he makes comics and talks about comics, but there's more to him too. Somewhere.