By Forris Day JR
I’ll admit that I did not know or understand what a graphic novel was before reading Sarah Beach’s book “Creating Graphic Novels: Adapting and Marketing Stories for a Multimillion-Dollar Industry”.
A graphic novel is basically a comic book but a much longer format or version of one. The story is told using pictures and dialog, but dialog is used much more sparingly than a regular novel. Most of the action is described in the drawings.
I learned some comic book terminology such as “gutter”. The gutter is the space between panels in a comic book or in the newspaper comics. Who knew? I love learning new things and for some reason learning the term “gutter” kind of excited me because I had never thought about a comic actually having components and much less names for the components. There is much more terminology discussed and it is pretty cool in my opinion. It was like the time I learned that the plastic ends on shoelaces are called aglets. It’s something I may not use everyday but it can certainly be used to amaze my friends. I just throw these bits of information into random conversation and they think that I am smart, (or just weird) but let’s get back to the review.
The book is written for anyone who has a story to tell such as authors and scriptwriters. It gets you thinking about other opportunities to share your tale via the graphic novel medium. Beach will guide you and teach you what you need to do. For instance you will of course need an artist to draw the pictures but I also learned that it is usually a different person who does the lettering. Should I have known that? I didn’t and I though that was yet another cool piece of information.
The book covers general information on marketing such as conventions and what to expect at them. Even someone who has been to conventions regularly need to look at these people through different eyes and realize that all those folks you are trying to squeeze by have now become potential customers for your book. You need to treat them as such. She touches on the production of the book and goes over what can go wrong and how to avoid common pitfalls (Think misspellings etc.) The back of the book has lots of resources to help you gain more insight into this lucrative business.
A very interesting read because you’ll learned some cool information about graphic novels. The book does not teach you how to draw a graphic novel. That is not it’s intention. What it does do is give you a pretty in depth overview of the business and what steps you need to take to become a player in the it. It is loaded with drawings giving examples of the concepts. There is a little character named “Professor Exposition” throughout the book. He throws out little facts and bits of information backing up the narrative in the book. He is a weird little guy but he’s pretty smart for a pencil drawing. “If you are interested in learning more about graphic novels then “Creating Graphic Novels” by Sarah Beach is a good starting point.
Rating: 7/10 – “Turn your tale into a graphic novel”
Purchase “Creating Graphic Novels”
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