HOW TO GET THE MOST BANG FOR YOUR BUCK

As a competitor or perhaps as a potential competitor on Zuda one thing you might be struggling with is how to fit your story into such a small space. You only get eight screens to tell your story. Or at least the first part of it. If you lose that’s probably the only part anyone will ever see. Part of the answer lies in compressing the story and compression is just not something the American audience or American creators will be as used to as we are here in the United Kingdom. You are used to thirty pages or more (although it’s more like twenty now I think) while we are well used to getting our stories in bite sized chunks. Eight pages to us seems a luxury since many of our greatest strips only ever needed two! Now obviously you’ll say that two pages equals four Zuda screens and maybe I’ll accept that for the sake of argument and that four pages equals eight screens. Maybe so. That still leaves me with my British sensibilities thinking – what are you gassing about? It’s still plenty of space.

Bear with me on this point though. When you are asked to write a synopsis for entry into Zuda, you are not being asked to cut things out of your story. You are only being asked to set them aside, so that you are left with the very essential elements needed to explain, not the subtlety, but the basic facts. The set-up. Take a look at the following pages. These are small scans and you can’t read all the text, but you can see the set-up, the amount of action and incident, and I’ll bet you can even fill in most of the story just by looking at the pictures.

Our hero, our villain, their motivations, the exciting backdrop and the force of nature that is out to destroy them both. In the text boxes we even get some of the shark’s motivation – kinda. Four pages equals eight screens. What – you don’t want life and death struggles between desperate men, a bloodthirsty shark, on an oil rig about to blow? There’s something wrong with you. I know times and tastes change and this is nothing but a Jaws rip-off. But what a rip off it was. No body was reading anything else but this in 1976. Thirty six issues of pure excitement until we had our own little witch-hunt and 2000AD was born along with Judge Dredd. Without Action and Hookjaw it might not have happened at all.

My favourite scene in Hookjaw, by the way, is the one where the plane ditches in the sea after hitting the oil rig and the stewardess goes to check on the pilot only to find Hookjaw with his head in the cockpit having bitten the captain’s head off! Comic gold. They don’t make ‘em like that any more. And the indirect follow up to this appeared in 2000AD called FLESH! It was cowboys from the future vs dinosaurs. Show me me the boy who doesn’t want to read that!

You’ll say this is a dumb empty story – just macho posturing and violence. Canned stupidity. I say it’s comicbook Hemmingway. Live first – apply subtlety later if at all. That’s my theory. I don’t suppose anyone will listen to the ramblings of this madman any time soon, but compression. Try it. Boil your story down to what has to happen and then go back and see if there’s any room for flourishes and subtleties.

I’m not being entirely serious you’ll guess, but it’s a reaction against the current trend of comicbook slow-motion. “I must show my character’s head as it turns” even though no one gives a shit! I’m tired of seeing every step of a walk down a hallway. I want shark eats fisherman. Shark eats diver. Diver blows up. Protagonists fight. Helicopter fights shark. Shark fights other sharks. End. And you might notice too that although it’s all mindless violence there’s still plenty of words to read. Words. Pictures. PACE. Ah COMICS! You see what I’m saying.

And if you’re crazy enough to want to see these pages full size. Just let me know via email and I’ll send ‘em over.