132,585
edits
Changes
From TheBookbag
Jump to navigationJump to searchJames Donald Talks To Bookbag About The Death Of Norman Breyfogle (view source)
Revision as of 08:19, 1 October 2018
, 08:19, 1 October 2018no edit summary
Quite aside from all the creative choices that Gibbons had to make stylistically in order to develop the tale, he was also highly engaged from the start. Those dense scripts were write ups of long conversations that the two of them had. Watchmen is a tour de force because of the synergy between the story and the medium delivering it. Repeated motifs, colouring decisions and even the angle at which we view the image are all as integral as every word spoken by a character. This created a masterpiece that taught others what was possible in this medium. Neither the writer nor the artist could have produced this without a strong collaboration.
[[image:galactus.jpg|left]] At the other end of the scale we have Stan Lee... at the height of Marvel's popularity in the 60s Lee was writing practically every book the company put out. This feat would have been impossible if he were producing a script of Alan Moore-like proportions. It would have been impossible, in fact, if he were producing any script at all. Stan developed the ''Marvel-Method'' of storytelling. He would phone up Ditko or Kirby and talk about what he would like to see happen that month. They would draw this, and he would add a script for dialogue after. Often the discussions would end up being as detailed as any script would be but as the pressure mounted Lee got desperate. Famously he once just barked at Jack Kirby ''The Fantastic Four meet God, they fight and win''. What was produced in the end was one of the most influential stories in the modern era. The coming of {{amazonurl|isbn=130291331X|title=Galactus}} marked a huge step forward in what comics could do... but very little of it came from the writer. Lee had no idea where this strange surfing figure, made from chrome had come from. The giant purple figure with a TV aerial for a hat wasn't his either. It is true that he took these images and formed a story from them with dialogue but can you truly say it was just his tale alone?
And so we come to Norm Breyfogle and Alan Grant. Alan Grant was part of the second wave of UK talent poached from British comics like 2000AD in the 80s. Before becoming a writer Grant had edited girls' comics for DC Thompson in Dundee and when he decided to write for himself he used a sparse style of script. When I interviewed Grant several years ago he told me about how much he trusted his artists. Back then he could never be sure who would be illustrating his scripts so he couldn't play to their strengths. He decided that he would just trust them, and the editor, to ensure that what was produced would fit.
