The Führer and the Tramp

STORY STRUCTURE

Today I finally finished my first, complete story arc. That’s five issues consisting of a total of 169 pages penciled and inked by Dexter Wee, with additional grey washes, graphic design, lettering and coloring on the covers by myself. It’s a magnificent journey that took three and a half years to complete. It included a full year of research; reading the biographies and filmographies of Charlie Chaplin, Hedy Lamarr and Errol Flynn, reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, reading about writing, reading about art, rereading all of my favorite comics and dissecting them, and even more reading on top of that. All of that research before seeing a single page from Dexter.

And all of that research aided me in unearthing the very thing that helped me finish it. While reverse engineering the works of Alan Moore, pouring over Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics so many times that I wore out the glue holding the pages together, working though the formulas of three act structures and storytelling guides of Syd Field’s Screenplay, Aristotle’s Poetics for Screenwriters, and Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat, I made a miraculous discovery.

I found a treasure map.

It was the map that unlocked the story that was already within my psyche. And it made all the difference. My problem in finishing was never that I became distracted, or that I was lazy, or that I didn’t know how the story was going to end. On the contrary, it is usually the eureka spark of the beginning and ending that compels me to tell the story in the first place.

My problem was I always got lost in the dense jungle of act two. I’ve scripted nearly a dozen comics, or more accurately, I’ve written nearly a dozen issue number ones of comic series that petered out a few issues in. That’s a nearly a dozen stories I’ve started and abandoned. Very nearly a hundred characters I’ve written extensive backgrounds on and abandoned. Six of them actually got off the ground with a completely penciled, inked and colored issue one. In comics, it is even easier to get lost, as I would Quantum Leap like Sam Beckett from issue to issue, hoping each time that my next issue would be the issue that led to the big finale I conceived. Instead I would get lost in the weeds.

What I needed was a map to guide me through the undergrowth. And here, presented to you, is that map.

AS ABOVE, SO BELOW

In deconstructing the the greatest deconstructor of the 20th century, Alan Moore, I saw him reference Hermeticism several times, so I picked up The Kybalion – one of the myriad of esoteric books that purportedly contain the ancient knowledge of Hermes Trismegistus. It primarily focuses on seven axioms, one of them being the Principle of Correspondence, stating “As above, so below; as below, so above”.

The significance of this quote is that it that “macrocosmos are the same as microcosmos. The universe is the same as God, God is the same as man, man is the same as the cell, the cell is the same as the atom, the atom is the same as…and so on, ad infinitum.”

So beyond being the essence to all the mysteries of magik, astrology, and dynamic interconnectedness, I found this idea to be an important key in writing and in storytelling. The big macro story being told is the micro scene. Here is how I utilize the concept to structure a story arc and issue arc in a comic book.

In Poetics, Aristotle first described the dramatic structure that we have all learned since primary school; beginning, middle and end, or as it is termed in play and screenwriting, first act, second act and third act. Now typically, a three act structure isn’t precise, equal thirds. Instead, the story is actually four parts, with the second act being twice the length of the first and third, split by the midpoint. I’ll write a primer on the basics of storytelling in a later article, synthesizing every bit of study I have done on the artform into what I personally find to be the most salient method for creating the muscles of the story.

For now, I am going to focus on the skeleton of the story. Basically, I take the classic three act structure and utilize it for each story arc, and also for each issue, and each scene within the issue.

So here is how I apply that structure to a macro story arc. First, I determine how many issues I think it will take to tell my story and divide by 4. For instance, when starting The Fuhrer and the Tramp, I initially thought it would be a breezy 4 issue mini series, 24-25 pages a piece, coming in at 100 pages. So it would break down like this:

That is the basic skeleton the macro story arc, each issue and each micro scene. If you want, you can break it down further and outline three acts in each page, but I think that most writers will find that to be overkill.

The next article will be an analysis of the purpose of each story beat, The Inciting Incident, The Promise of the Premise, Denouncement, etc, followed by a practical demonstration of the method using The Fürher and the Tramp as an example.

Continue with ACT 1 STORY ELEMENTS