Creating Graphic Novels Vs Comics

 

                               A page from my Shadow Hill Graphic novel that's currently in the works.

Graphic novels and comics offer readers a chance to indulge in story telling while enjoying a side dish of artwork to compliment the story being told. Without pictures, a graphic novel or comic would be just an ordinary book with text. That would also require the reader to have a good grasp on imagination because when you read regular novels you have to be able to use your imagination to visualize what's happening as you make it through each and every page. But it's boring, so I prefer books with pictures in them vs books without them. That's why I like blogging, without adding the images to these blogs they look so plain and ordinary, boring so to speak. Images on my blog make them interesting to read for both myself and others that come here.

There have been many times when I would go to the library and pick up one of RL Stine's Fear Street teen thriller novels or Goosebumps which was more on the kid friendly horror side of things and you won't believe how often I would say, "if only this book had pictures in it, the story would be even better!" Now that I have learned how to create my own fictional works of art, I love creating graphic novels, and I enjoy telling stories with my ideas.

When I started out, I was doing comics because they were always short and straight to the point. I figured that people had short attention spans to long-winded reading material. There are some artists that will create a bunch of pictures, but they won't even bother to add words with them, and they'll still call it a "comic." You can't create a comic without words.... I don't know of any comic books or graphic novels where there are just pictures only but no text to guide any of the images along.... I remember asking an artist about this, and he would say, "I want the person to use their imagination so I never include text."  Instead of a comic he would just have what appeared to be an image collage instead. A collage is just a bunch of images put together in a portfolio.... That's not a comic. 

 Part of the reason I love to create graphic novels instead of comics is because Graphic novels are a lot longer than comics. Comic books are normally around 50 or so pages in length, and they usually require multiple books in order for the full story to be fully completed but not always. Some comics can get by on one book alone to be complete. Graphic novels generally do the same thing except there are often a lot more pages, you might have a Volume I-III. Graphic novels go by volumes, Comics go by issues. There's not much of a difference between the two. It just means the number of books within a series. 

You often find that mainstream comics like the stuff DC and Marvel makes will have over 20+ or more issues... I never understood why comic book artist and writers needed so many to finish a book. But if a story contains multiple storylines vs focusing on one storyline that needs to expand over 20 or more books that's different. Because not every issue would be the same. I noticed this when I was reading those gory Crossed comics a few days ago out of boredom.

They usually have almost 80 damn books per series. So the publishers behind it have done hundreds of these Crossed comics but every storyline arch is different but the outcomes are always the same. People only read them for the gore, after awhile the shock value wears off when it's so excessive like that with every book they make. Anyway the total number of issues I might do for a particular book would be a about four books... Anything beyond that limit is overkill in my opinion, unless I just have a lot of ideas in which case, I do. I just don't want to spend too much time working on one thing. I'm likely to get bored if I focus my attention on one story idea for too long.

I have to rotate between stories and characters to get something out of what I am doing... Because if I end up becoming bored, there is a chance I could screw up and make a lot of mistakes. I want to make sure that I am always having fun with what it is that I'm doing. That's why it takes me forever to finish at least one book. I have to take breaks in between them. Some breaks will give me about a week or so to recover and then I can continue. Often I will spend maybe a few hours working on something that isn't really story driven at all, then I'll stop and do a side project to avoid burn out.  

But anyway Graphic novels allow me to dive even deeper into the characters I come up with including characters that aren't my own, you know copy righted characters I might take from a video game, or another comic book series, a movie, or television series and then make them important in my own fictional works. Most of the time I use such characters for background characters or supporting roles. Major roles I often reserve for my own characters or mainstream characters I just really like. What most people don't seem to realize is that when I create serious stories I focus on everything, not just the explicit nature of the book but everything else. 

I believe a well-thought-out story is just as important as the explicit material that carries it along. I don't know if any other artist bothers to read erotic novels. But I used to check them out at the library all the time, and one of the things I notice about them is that the authors are very serious writers. I once took a peek inside some of those Dark romance novels just to see if I could get an example on how serious sexual content is suppose to be written.

I realized that finding examples through the number of pornographic comic books on the internet wasn't helping.... For the most part those artist don't write from a erotica perspective, they write from a "porno" perspective you know having characters repeat the same lines over and over, "Fuck me! ahhh! Fuck me harder! ahhhh oohhh!" When someone is doing this for every book they write, it feels redundant. 

There's plenty of erotica and steamy moments in those dark romance books that can give you a clue as to how to write better graphic content. The authors never neglect the story, so you're not going to find sexual encounters on every page either.  I'll focus on the plots and have explicit moments, but once I get to the heavy stuff, I will give it about 50 or so pages depending on how much none sexual content I created from the very start or if I decided to wait later on to start focusing on the erotic elements. 

So that gives the reader about 20+ pages of story in the beginning and 50+ sex scenes near the end or in the middle… You know, I keep it balanced out. And if need be I will expand upon the plot and story. I do whatever I can to successfully blend both elements together. About 90% of explicit rated comics you come across on the web are 97% pornographic and the rest is story material... You don't get to learn about the characters, or anything and most of my fans are aware that I care a great deal about my characters. I treat the ones I create that aren't copy right owned by anyone like Capcom, Konami, Netherrealm, etc and I turn my own characters into mainstream/important figures.... If I were going to make anything short-sighted, I would just stick to making single image renders where the whole focus is on the pornographic aspect of the image if that's what I'm doing. 

I believe that 120 to 150 pages are good enough for graphic novels as far as length goes. It's a lot of work, so usually I render about 200 or so images to create a full book. So even if there are about 120 pages, there are at least 200 or more images due to the number of panels that are created. I don't do single page only comic strips. Sometimes I'll do that, but graphic novels require a lot more effort, time, energy, and investment in ideas. I actually get something out of that... I just hate the amount of time it takes to complete them.

Over the years, I have tried to make both comics and graphic novels, but I was always disappointed with the outcome... Today, I'm currently working on a few that I know I won't be disappointed with. And ever since I did that Shadow Hill poster featuring Tiffany from those Childplay/Chuckie movies, people have been asking "When are you going to make Dollhouse II and is there a Dollhouse part I already?" 

Because I never did one that was simply called "Alyssa's Dollhouse" the first one was titled "Alyssa's Dollhouse II." It was never intended to be an actual comic or a graphic novel of any kind. It was just an advertisement for a series of work I was planning to do with Shadow Hill, but then I started thinking about it... And I reflected on the idea I've had about doing something involving dolls which was planned some years ago but I never bothered to get around to doing it. 

 I can already tell that there is a demand for something like that, and no one else could pull it off other than me anyway. I am the master of the Dark Arts after and the creator of the Dark Arts Clock Tower. I like to think of creating graphic novels for mature audiences like the Japanese hentai movies. 

Hentai films aren't just all pornographic, they always have plot devices to carry them. In fact I don't think there is a single hentai movie where it's just 100% sexual related, you have to wait for the erotic moments to happen, they build up to them unless it occurs in the beginning like Bible Black New Testament where we see the ritual in the bathroom before Imari sees a virgin woman bleed between the legs and loses her mind, becomes possessed by Kitami. She then sprouts a massive dick about 12 inches in length and breeds the hell out of that banker by erupting inside of her multiple times trying to impregnate her. Or so many of us loved to believe that's what happened to her when watching that vicious dick girl on female assault segment. That's what I do with my graphic novels, you may have to wait for one of the great sex scenes but once you get there, to that part of the story. I normally will make sure to have at least 30 or 50+ sex scenes waiting for your viewer pleasure. 

Sometimes I might do one from the beginning of the book, that's what I did with the remake to Outerheaven The Little Red Fox , although it's actually a reboot since I scrapped the original plot. I'm just not so sure if I want to finish it anymore though.  What I have learned throughout the years is that, if you want to become a very good writer you should study how serious authors write. Most of the artist creating explicit content are horribly bad at telling stories because they don't care about them, their main goal is the sexual stuff.

Because of that reason you learn little to nothing about any of the characters they are using. I put a lot of effort into these sort of things, I don't want people to think of my characters as "Daz characters" I take offense to that if they do... Nothing I create today is half done. It's difficult finding a wider audience to market my work too outside of Pixiv in these trying difficult times where everything is watered and dumb down for the sensitive overprotected Generation-Z crowd, and the generation coming up after them is going to be in a much worse shape....

Hell some of us Millennials turned out to be soft and too sensitive for our own damn good.  Twitter would probably reject a vast majority of my ideas because of the violence in some of it involves non-consensual encounters. Not everything I create include this, but a lot of it does. I remember reading an article that said 90s erotica thrillers are dead because hardcore porn killed the genre in 1999 when pornography started becoming a lot more extreme. I replied "that's alright, I still love creating them among other things I enjoy producing. But you know what else? I'm fusing those hardcore elements with it! I may not popularize the genre in the 21st century, and I don't intend to. I feel special reinventing 70s, 80s, and 90s erotica thrillers. I also create Horror eroticas and action erotic thrillers too!"

This had the potential of being a great comic....
But it wasn't, such a shame too because the sex scenes were very good. A lot of potential there... The setting, the cultist, it could have worked. But the artist didn't include any dialog or moments that lead to Ada getting destroyed.

Oh well... Story telling isn't everyone's strong point. To some people maybe writing up text or doing more that leads up to the explicit encounter is too much work... But for me? I would have taken full blown advantage of this.