Thoughts on writing: Novel vs Graphic Novel

I received some interesting feedback from reddit user deviantbono the other day about the amount of text on the first couple of pages. Essentially, he thought that there was a ton of text, making the pages too full and busy.  This isn’t the first time I heard it (my wife said the same thing), but multiple people saying the same thing means I should really pay attention.

The big problem for me is that this story began as a project in a creative writing class I took in undergrad from fantasy author Brandon Sanderson.  Our only real assignment was to write 50000 words of a story.  As I did this, my brother and I decided it would be fun to make a graphic novel out of the story, because it could look hecka sweet.  That’s what we’ve been working on the past several months, turning my story into a graphic novel.  Because of that, the story so far is very text and dialogue heavy, because that is how I write.  I’m not an amazing author, and I’m working on that (when not studying for medical school), but I was getting pretty good feedback and approval from both my writing group and Brandon himself on the quality of my writing, so I know it’s not horrible.  At least not for a full-text novel.

That said, I’m going to be constantly working on improving my craft, and at better applying it to the graphic novel medium.  This isn’t going to be just a web-comic, with little text and a punchline each time.  It’s an adaptation of a novel, with a very large story (see the web graphic novel FreakAngels for what we’re kind of aiming for)  Just what I have written already in the story will take us a couple hundred pages of graphic novel in all likelihood.  There is so much awesome story to get to that I’ve been trying to make the first bit happen quicker, with more panels per page and lots of text to help you get a feel for the characters as quickly as possible.

As I get better at writing and as we get farther into the story and the action, the pages will shift to having much less dialogue and more visuals to show the story.  You won’t have to peak around huge text bubbles during a battle sequence, but when the main character is having an internal battle with his past and memories and internal demons and such, and another main character is trying to talk to him and help him feel better, there will of necessity be a lot of dialogue.  It’s a balance that I’m still working on, but I know with time we’ll get it figured out.

Anyways, we’re excited about some of the increased interest from readers.  We are in fairly beginning stages of the project still, but we’ll be uploading new content almost every day.  Check the Science and Lore sections for articles on the technology and history of our world (updated on Tuesdays and Wednesdays), and the Novel section where I’ll be uploading the story in novel form (updates on Fridays for the story told that week in the comic).

EDIT:  This feedback led us to make a prologue with less dialogue and more action to be a good lead in to the comic.