Home » Writing & Publishing » Writing Comic Books/Strips » Comic Realism

Comic Realism

© Dave A. Law

The wondrousness of comic book stories is that you can write about anything – a space adventure, someone leaping over tall buildings, or a simple story of two people falling in love. However, whatever happens within your story has to believable within the context of it. You can’t start writing a story that is set in the reality of today’s society and then in the middle of the story have a dragon appear out of nowhere and eat a car because you can’t think of anything better to do to keep the story interesting. You will lose your audience because you have broken away from the reality you have created within your story.

Within the first few pages of your story you need to create the reality and setting that readers are going to expect through the rest of the story. If for say you want a dragon, to appear in the story, you have to foreshadow the possibility early on. Readers will allow you to get away with virtually anything within the first part of your story, but after that they will expect the story to exist within the reality you have set for it.

Simply writing a story in a certain genre immediately gives the story groundwork for the reality you are going to create. In a super hero story readers wouldn’t be surprised to see someone fly. In a science fiction story readers may expect to see aliens. It is important to know the boundaries that the genre gives you and if you need to expand those boundaries than you need to do this early on in the story.

In simple terms comic realism is putting together the setting your story takes place in and how things work within your setting. Some of this may be simple, other parts may be more difficult, but if you intend to tell a believable story it is very important that this framework is in place, especially if it is used to resolve the story. For example, your main character cannot cast a spell that saves everyone at the end of the story if there was no indication earlier that he was a wizard or that magic even worked in your setting.

The comic realism is what keeps the readers attention, especially with a continuing series. Readers want to be able to know your world and imagine themselves within it, interact with your characters. The popularity of some stories may be as much the stories themselves as the rich and believable world that, you, the writer have created for them. Readers want to be able to imagine a school full of wizards, or being part of a quest to save the world. The key is to create the reality so that they can imagine stories well beyond the stories that you write.

The copyright of the article Comic Realism in Writing Comic Books/Strips is owned by . Permission to republish Comic Realism in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.