Behind the Scenes of the Comic Book Biz: Anda’s Game
Tales of excitement from the comic book business! One of my first professional gigs, adapting a Cory Doctorow short story to comic book form.
Although I had several short comic book stories and self-published comics under my belt in the early 2000s, my first truly professional graphic novel was Lifelike, in 2007. It was a collection of a long-running webcomic I had been doing, and Chris Ryall, who was the editor-in-chief of IDW Publishing at the time, took a chance on me and published it. I owe him all my successes in the comic book biz, as he not only got my foot in the door, but also continued to offer me fun projects, like this next one:
IDW was adapting 6 of renowned author, blogger, and activist Cory Doctorow’s short science fiction stories into comics form, and Chris offered me the opportunity to script 2 of them (later expanded to 3, when his busy schedule kept him from adapting one of the stories himself). I was already familiar with Doctorow from the group blog boingboing (“a directory of mostly wonderful things,” still going strong, although Doctorow is no longer involved) and had read a few of his stories, finding them very smart and well crafted.
My first adaptation was Anda’s Game, a story about a young girl who loves MMO games, and becomes embroiled in a profiteering scheme that spans both the in-game and real worlds. It features insightful commentary on friendship and compassion, while addressing the topic of video game gold farming and how it relates to labor exploitation.
Side note:
Doctorow has made his prose version of Anda’s Game available for free on his website, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license. Click here to read it.
As I went about the task of deciding how to fit a prose story into a mere 22 page comic book, I luckily had the opportunity to contact Doctorow himself. He was gracious with his time, and encouraged me to make the decisions I felt were right to present his story in a new medium. I remember asking him about his favorite emotional beats from the story, and what he would like to ensure I captured, and was surprised when he mentioned a quiet character moment between Anda and her mom, rather than one of the story’s more exciting passages.
One of the fun challenges of this adaptation was deciding on how best to represent the narration and character dialogue that took place in both the “real” world and the world of the computer game. To this end, I even created a color-coded lettering guide, which letterer Neil Uetake adopted for the comic.
I was fortunate to be paired up with artist Esteve Polls, who turned in some spot-on character designs and fantastic finished pages.
My philosophy in adapting material is to generally hew close to the source material, especially when it’s not as dramatic a shift in media as, say, prose to film. Thus, I was able to capture most of the original story’s elements, and used dialogue and narrative descriptions straight from Doctorow’s original text.
The icing on the cake was a cover by comics superstar Sam Kieth!
Even though I wasn’t writing an original story, the lessons I learned through this project, at this early stage in my professional writing career, were invaluable. It was a crash course in identifying important plot and emotional beats, pacing, page density, and more. And in reading and re-reading Doctorw’s story multiple times, I was able to dissect it from a craft point of view, seeing how he wove together the various story elements, created suspense and action while simultaneously building characters we were invested in.
It truly was an exciting and amazing experience, and helped build my confidence in my craft.
Here’s a sampling of more art by my collaborator, Esteve.
