102 Class 4 Reading Materials

Hey guys, it’s Scott.

It is Friday, May 5th. Happy Cinco de Mayo to everybody celebrating! I’m starting to become human again, I feel a little bit more whole. Anyway, I just wanted to bring you all the info that you’re gonna need for the next installment of Comic Writing 102, our live comic writing class! As always, it’ll be ~2 hours long and it kicks off at 9:30pm EST. And I look at some work by you guys, submitted by aspiring writers students in the class, and then I look at some published materials and cover a certain writing topic. So this upcoming session, which will be Thursday, May 11th (so this coming Thursday), it's all going to be about scope. That's kind of the big topic for the next couple classes. But within that umbrella topic, we're going to be talking about world building. It's a topic that you guys are a bunch of you have asked about multiple times, I think it's going to be a really fun class. So we'll we'll look at different ways of communicating to readers all the sorts of backstory about mythology and fantasy and character backgrounds that you kind of need to convey whether you're doing you know something in the Sci-Fi/horror/fantasy genre, or honestly something just in drama or superheroes or whatever. You always have some kind of world building to do. But we'll look at examples all across the spectrum.

So all the materials we’ll be covering are available to view in the hyperlink at the bottom of the post. And I’m happy to announce that the student work we’ll be looking at this class is Crescent City Monsters #1 by Newton Lilavous and Gian Carlo Bernal…

…and a short story called “Kalibus” by Yusuf Artam and Bora Orcal.

And again, before some of the family emergencies delayed us, we were originally going to have the class on Star Wars Day, May 4th (which was and is Quinny’s birthday, like I said!), But we wanted to stay fully on-theme with this one, and Tyler reminded me to say, also, Happy Revenge of the Fifth, everybody! Because we're such nerds. So in addition to the students submitted stuff, we're going to be taking a look at some of the Star Wars comics that we love best over here. So the 2015 Star Wars relaunch for Marvel, specifically the first issues of Jason Aaron/John Cassaday’s Star Wars and Kieron Gillen/Salvador Larroca’s Darth Vader.

We’ll also be looking at a short story called “Unseen, Unheard” from one of the Dark Horse Star Wars Tales anthologies by Chris Avellone and Dustin Weaver.

So there’s some really, really, really good stuff. I think it's going to be an incredible discussion, again, all about world building. You can check out all the stories that we'll be reviewing in the link that Tyler posts below. And honestly, meanwhile, just COMMENT with any questions you have for me to answer on anything that has to do with it within reason, and I'll do my best to cover those throughout the session. But it will be a live discussion, so you can come and ask anything you want! If you're not signed up for the class yet, give it a try. It's $7/month, and within that month you can essentially look at every one of the 20 classes that we've done so far in our archive, and get all kinds of other cool stuff. So I hope you'll give it a shot. Thanks, guys. Looking forward to next week!

S