THE WORKING WRITER'S GUIDE TO COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS

THE WORKING WRITER’S

GUIDE TO COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS

By Nick Macari

Panel to Panel Publishing

90 pgs

Every once in a while loyal readers to this blog know that we’ll step outside the pulp fiction lines to put our spotlight on other kinds of books we think deserve your attention. Such is the case with this new tome on writing for comics and graphic novels by Nick Marcari.

Over the years, in our forty-five year career as a comic scribe, we’ve encountered lots of books on “how-to” that range from the sophisticated and complex, to the cheap and poorly presented titles. We’ve even done a couple of similar projects ourselves. Thus we were really curious about Macari’s take on the subject.

First of all this is a really beautiful book, extremely well designed and laid out. Much thought was given in adding the appropriate graphics to each chapter and thus better illustrate the technical points Macari makes. Whereas his own writing is very clear and precise and he adeptly covers all the important aspects of writing a decent comic script, regardless of its length.  If we had any critique at all it would be that the book itself is geared for adults, i.e. college age readers and above. Put in the hands of younger creators, we believe the breath and scope of the material in these pages might actually scare off inexperienced readers.  But then again we note, part of the title is, “The Working Writer’s Guide..” strongly suggesting the target audience is for folks who have already dabbled in comics and now want to amp up their participation.

In the past we’ve taught many workshops on writing comics.  Had this terrific book been available to us then, we’d have put it to good use. This is clearly the kind of helpful title any new writer should have in his or her comics reference library.  Well done, Nick Macari, well done indeed.