The idea to write this graphic novel series first sprang from my interest in Amazons and the research I found of their tales to help King Priam in his defense of the city of Troy. This lead to further research into developing a story with a female heroine and her side kick. It became a snowball effect for me as I explored the limited array of female and lesbian heroines available. As I developed my characters and plot, I started to realize that I was developing an episodic series that would best be told by a graphic novel rather then a film or TV script. With this realization, I embarked on this journey of writing a graphic novel series.
I started with the obvious, dusting off old comics and picking up new ones to read such as 52, Buff the Vampire Slayer, Black Orchid, Batman, Detectives Comics and any online comics that I could find. But this did not answer my question, how do I start and where do I start writing a comic/graphic novel? Random notes, sketches, character notes… what would it take to organize all this to write a script that would detail what an illustrator would need to know to draw each frame? Fortunately, I found an MFA creative writing program that would allow me to take on the challenging task of writing a comic/graphic novel script.
My first task is reading Scott McCloud’s book Making Comics and Alan Moore’s Writing for Comics. My second is to blog craft annotations about the process of writing a graphic novel, fill the blog with character biographies, detail plot back stories, layout plot outlines and story board the first chapter.
This is beginning of more to come…