100 Blogs (Give or Take): FIGHT!
Hello!
Welcome to my 100th* blog!
*Or, rather, blog week 101 over on my website. In terms of actual blogs, I'm probably more in the 70s-80s? I try to update as much as possible, of course, but some weeks things've not uploaded properly. Occasionally, I've had just too much life stuff or I haven't really had much to write about. And sometimes, on the extreme ends, I've had way too much to write about and have been overwhelmed at trying to parse out everything I needed to. Last week, when I missed the actual week 100, was somewhere inbetween those: feeling uninspired because I was so tired from both stuff in my personal life and the many many many things happening in the world at large.
I've, unsurprisingly, still got a lot on my mind. Like 200 organizations have pledged their support for KOSA and sounds like they might not all understand exactly what they're supporting (but you can still make your voice heard on why not to let it pass, namely the continued safety and security of LGBTQ+ folks online who might otherwise get explicitly banned from the most public online spaces, or at least implicitly banned through shadowbanning--as well as all the kids that could be harmed from the inability to access information that they might actually need.).
The U.S. blocked a U.N. call for ceasefire singlehandedly, despite the rest of the security council (minus abstaining U.K. and... that was noticed, guv) being in favor and, of course the overwhelming national and international support for a ceasefire (one progressive thinktank's polling suggested around a 60% US support for ceasefire, to whatever extent those kinds of polls can be trusted, however, the feet on the ground at protests, making calls, sending emails, trying to get into Senatorial offices with ladders, etc show a pretty vocal support for one).
The website formerly known as Twitter gave me just another reason to leave with their new AI. I don't want to see anything about it because I, y'know, get that it's like dunking on the people who wanted to use it for evil and that's funny or whatever, but it's also another AI system that's almost certainly just regurgitating things actually people said and thought and made and ought to be given credit and/or money for the use of. We shouldn't be letting our guard down around an AI just because it's telling transphobes to go fuck themselves--this is still the same shit that is stealing from artists or denying people their medical coverage!
And, also mostly on Twitter because it's a bad place (and I'll remind ya now, I'm leaving by the year's end. I'll be here on the blog and you can find me on Bluesky and I have a couple spare invites if you might need one, but my Twitter's coming to an end soon and I think my Facebook/Insta aren't too far behind...) multiple dirtbag comics guys decided to make the rounds again. They've had their airtime and I have no interest in giving them a platform, but boy, they sure were around.
Plus, y'know, all the other stuff that has just been continuing, from the continued assault on Ukraine to Covid hospitalizations and deaths going up again.
It's the end of the year and cha'boy is tired. It has been a long, long year and I'm very much looking forward to it ending for whatever that is worth and the time of relaxation I get to have around that end. And so, I wasn't really feeling like writing... but then, I saw a post on Bluesky from Marcus Jimenez asking all comics folks about crafting fight scenes. And so I wanna talk about that this week because I don't often get a chance to talk about the mechanics of comics within comics, and that can be really fun!
Squaring Up
As someone who has written and edited a lot of fight scenes, there are a lot of different ways to go about it. As I think I've said before, in my own writing, I tend toward a little more description and full dialogue so the artist has those space considerations in mind when working from my scripts. As an editor, I've worked the "Marvel" way where pages are more plotted with with less dialogue and specific action. I've worked with folks who do more of a rough pass where they focus on the concrete smaller moments and then leave a lot of the action up to the artist. I've worked with folks who're even more prescriptive than me. And there's something to finding the right balance on all sides with all these folks--from the writer and artist meshing in terms of what sort of detail they want from each other to having complimentary colors and letters.
But for myself, and something I have sometimes talked to creators about, one of the first things I focus on when it comes to an action or fight scene is the specific things the character(s) can do. When I think about some of my bigger fight sequences in say Transformers vs. the Terminator or Transformers Wreckers: Tread & Circuits (both available from my webstore, hint hint), one of the most apparent things is that I loaded them with a lot of characters doing a lot of things, so... sorry to my artists (no, I know Alex and Jack loved working on them--again, if you can, write to the artist's strengths and I happened to work with guys I knew were excited about these sorts of big scenes). But in that, there are a lot of characters with specific abilities. Generally speaking, right, in TF/Term, we've got three different types of combatants: Sarah Conner is a human, the T-800 is a Terminator, and the Transformers are Transformers. So the skills Sarah has are different from all the robots and, obviously, the Transformers have the ability to convert modes which is something unique to them as characters that can make for really exciting sequences. And even within the Transformers, there are different combat capabilities: Skywarp can teleport. Soundwave has sonic attacks. Megatron has a huge arm cannon. Optimus has an energon axe. The Seekers can fly. And characters like Velocity are medics, who she doesn't really shoot to kill, she can hold her own after millenia at war, but she's not a fighter first and doesn't wanna do terrible damage to anyone.
To me, it's the same thing as a fight with Spider-Man. You know he's got the proportional speed, strength, and agility of a spider. You know he has web-fluid (unless he doesn't and that sort of circumstance is interesting in a fight). He can stick to things and sense danger and all the standard Spidey tricks. And if you want a scene to be engaging, you wanna know what your characters can do in it that is unique--either to other characters and stories, or within this specific scenario. Seeing Spidey use his webs or his wall-crawling or his spider-sense is more interesting on a page than him just swinging his fists (generally). These are all sort of tools in the toolbox that determine what they can do in a fight. I also think that when you combine them with the circumstances of the fight, you start to see how they'll act in a fight. Why they make the decisions they do.
So, to use TF again, in TF/Terminator, let's talk about the set-up to the big fight that runs through issues #3 & #4. It starts out with Bumblebee and Sarah scouting out the Decepticons who are up to no good. And the instigating question is, if Bumblebee's a good scout, how does someone sneak up on him? Well, Skywarp is a teleporter. So he just appears! But he's also maybe a little dumb, so he announces himself. Bumblebee's first priority is protecting Sarah, so the best way to do that is for him to shift modes around her as a running shield. They'll go faster. If he gets hit, it'll reduce the impact on her. Etcetera. He could do other things--he could stay and fight and blast at Skywarp, but because the option is open to him to change modes and to drive away, he's going to because that's fun and it makes sense with his character. Then he tries to do some fancy driving to trick Skywarp into ramming into Megatron, but because Skywarp can teleport, hey, he gets away in perfect position to take another run at Bumblebee. But because he teleported higher to get a better position, it also left him more open to get shot by Optimus in the heroic arrival of the rest of the Autobots. The characters' abilities made a really clear picture of the sort of action that could occur with the setting and are reflective of why they act the way they do.
Throw a Punch
A lot of the action is going to flow pretty naturally, from a writing standpoint, once you've got it started. If I know who my characters are, what they can do, and the basic scenario they find themselves in, as long as I've got that in my head, I can just sort of play them off each other and see how the action goes. But there ar some other practicalities I try to take into account as I go.
1. How many characters do I have to keep track of? Like I said, a lot of my fight scenes have been bigger. I've got groups fighting each other, with civilians to worry about. And while you don't need to show every beat of every action, you do have to keep roughly in mind how everyone is reacting and to what extent you do want to switch between POVs and protagonists. I tend to measure my beats to either pages or page turns, rather than doing too much action switching on a single page unless I'm trying to convey just how hectic things are and just how simultaneous actions are occuring.
2. How fast is your action moving? Two things I think about a lot when I'm writing action are that a round of combat in Dungeons & Dragons is supposed to be 6 seconds, and that the coolest fight I've ever seen on film is the almost 6 minute fight scene in They Live. (6 minutes later...) I'm back! Okay, so either way, I think what both of those are very representative of are how quickly action occurs in a fight and how much of the time in a fight is the other stuff. It's the non-combat movement. It's catching your breath or setting a trap or focusing on another problem or putting sunglasses on a guy. And in comics, you have the ability to dialate time as you'd like, so each panel can be a second or a matter of seconds, with the gutters allowing time to pass out of frame. You want your action to be logical and continous, but it's okay to have other things happening in the flow, and maybe more importantly, to chose which moments have the most impact. In D&D, 6 seconds can take like 6 minutes. And on film, you're getting so many constant frames. Comics lets you be a lot chosier in how you expand and contract the time around those moments.
3. How text heavy is the fight? Here's the other side of things. I know that I tend to be a talker. I mean... look how long it's taken to get to this point! I like dialogue in my comics and often have characters trading verbal jabs during the action. And that takes time and space. As do sound effects. So, I try to balance my fight scenes to the essentials. Much the same as the issue of time, I'm trying to select the moments of greatest impact with what we're "hearing". The more that's being asked of an action panel, the less text I try to give it. Let the art take over. But if I can use the action as a punctuation: If Optimus or Thunderclash or whoever is giving his hero speech and can toss a punch at a baddie to make his point, I'm going to use it. And if action is the visual punctuation to dialogue in this way, SFX are the visual punctuation to the action. They're an exclamation point on what sound is important. A lot of the time, it'll be no sound. But if it'll clarify the action or if it'll enhance the mood, go for it!
Most important to a fight scene is that generally they're supposed to be fun. They're moments of fantasy where a side that's in some sort of right and a side that's in some sort of wrong clash and there's a victor and we all cheer because it's entertaining to see Rowdy Roddy Piper get his ass handed to him up until the end, but when he finally gets one over on Keith David, you know it's because he was right. So while you're thinking of all this stuff, if you give in to the fun, it'll propel you through a lot of it. Now, there're obviously also moments when the fighting is supposed to be building tension or showing the horrors of violence, but I think that goes to a lot of the same mentality as we've already got. It's about making the characters respond to the situation of the fight and if their responses fall in line with that, it'll still be smooth sailing because it'll be what makes sense.
I think that's it for me for this week, but maybe in a coming week, I can do something like a mini-version of something I did on my Patreon when I did an annotated version of the Wreckers #1 script and do sort of a practical walk-through of a new original fight scene.
Until next time. Happy Hanukkah to those that celebrate!
What I enjoyed this week:
Blank Check (Podcast), Dungeons & Daddies (Podcast), Reverse 1999 (Video Game), Nancy (Comic), Lego Masters (TV show), Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror (Short story collection), Factory Summers by Guy Delisle (Comic), It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth by Zoe Thorogood (Comic), Slaughterhouse-Five (the Comic adaptation by Ryan North & Albert Monteys), being almost done with all gift shopping and wrapping 2 weeks early, Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Links (Video Game), Dandadan (Manga), our little mall Model Train Museum, Fire & Ice: Welcome to Smallville (Comic), Blue Beetle (Comic), Birds of Prey (Comic), Christmas lights, finding a good deal on a present for myself (I found the G.I. Joe Bishoujo Scarlett statue for a mere $40 at a local secondhand store and I think she's really pretty), not getting sick even tho Becca was, and I guess The Killer (Movie). Not my favorite Fincher by a lot. We're tentatively gonna see Godzilla: Minus One tomorrow, so looking forward to that and will try to figure out seeing Boy and the Heron, Eileen, Dream Scenario, and maybe The Marvels (tho it being a Disney film makes it a tougher sell) before they're out of theaters... and maybe Priscilla... and maybe FNAF on the big screen since Becca's really into FNAF right now. Too many movies! And I love movies!
New Releases this week (12/6/2023):
Sonic the Hedgehog #67 (Editor)
New Releases next week (12/13/2023):
Sonic the Hedgehog: Winter Jam (Editor)
Announcements:
Look for a kind fun thing I contributed to this week! I'll share it when it's live!
The Cartoonist Cooperative is still doing E-Sim cards for Gaza. You can donate a digital sim card so that residents can get access to the internet and have more functional phones and, in exchange, get some comics or a drawing or whatever else is available from the many participating artists. You can also give more directly. If you don't have money, and I get it, you can call or fax or email or show up at the offices of your representatives. There are a ton of demonstrations happening this weekend and you can see if you can put your actions in on one of those!
If you aren't a Patreon backer yet, remember, it's a great gift for someone or yourself. At my $10 tier, last month, I got Becca to record an Adults-Only podcast called "Abandoning the Premise" with me. You should be able to hear a short sample at the link. And if that seems cool to you, you can get the whole episode, but a bunch of other weird stuff on my Patreon! This month's "Something Weird"s are going to be a root beer review (I bought 6 different root beers and Becca suggested I talk about what I thought of them and there'll be a little more to it that that) and hopefully posting next weekend, a Holiday Gift Guide written, chosen, and designed by me (be careful if you're a person who might get a gift from me... you might see your present in there)!
And keep an eye out for more news soon. Really hoping to have some cool news in the new year if not before!
Pic of the Week:
So, last Wednesday, I made a trip up to the IDW Los Angeles office. Because we have a lot of people spread out, we have a couple office locations. But the LA office happened to host some friends from SEGA and, specifically, some visitors from Sonic Team! We gave them the tour, talked about the comics, gave them some to take home, all the good usual visiting stuff. But Karasuno-san, Kanemoto-san, and Hoshino-san very generously did some sketches for us before they left. So, should you get a chance to tour the IDW offices in the future, you might see this sketch page hanging on the wall.
