3. It's Not Just Having Ideas
Marvel/DCComics as an art form are great, and can do things that no other narrative medium can manage. In comics you can control time in a more complex way than employing slow motion in a film, and you're not hampered by a budget or the limits of special effects. You can tell a story using not only the prose of a novel but also pictures, and those stories are bound only by the limits of your imagination. And with fantasy and sci-fi works in the melting pot of influences over comic books, people have let their imaginations go completely hog wild, spinning off into totally insane and amazing worlds, plots and characters the likes of which we've never seen before. Having a good idea is very different to writing a good story, though, as many early issues of your favourite comics will attest to. You've probably got a few bouncing around your head, too, vague sketches of characters you hope to bring to life, or one-sentence log lines that you reckon an editor would commision if only you could pitch it to them. Which is good! That's certainly the start of bringing a story to life, and as we saw above, comics are one of the best places to tell such stories. What you need to be able to do is follow that up, though. Because a good story isn't just a core idea, it's everything that surrounds that idea. It's compelling characters, it's a narrative structure that works without being rote, it's good dialogue, it's panels that flow logically from one to the other, it's legible art and good colouring, it's inks that don't muddy the fluid pencil work. Working in comics or any other entertainment industry, you need to not only have ideas but also follow them through, and make sure they end up as great as you first imagined them. Which means, yet again, you've gotta work hard.