Think Editing Is Hard? Try Doing It With Pictures (On Editing Graphic Novels)
Award-winning art director, illustrator, and cartoonist Emil Wilson dives into the challenges of editing pictures in graphic novels.
Creating a graphic novel—or any novel, for that matter—is a lot of work. When I began The Nightingales, I expected plenty of challenges: whether the drawings would be any good, whether I could get the narrative voice right, whether the characters' motivations made sense, accidentally smearing ink, and about a thousand other things. Some were specific to graphic novels; others were concerns for any writer.
By the time I finished the book and found a publisher, I figured the hard part was behind me. I thought I understood what the editing phase would be like. I was very wrong.
Remove three paragraphs from a novel and the remaining paragraphs slide upward. Easy. The reader has no idea those paragraphs ever existed. Remove three comic panels from the middle of a page, however, and the page develops a glaring hole. Shift the panels up, and that hole moves to the next page. When you start adjusting art, bad things happen.
The chapter break lands in the wrong place. Maybe two facing pages, designed to work together, no longer do. One small change can throw an entire sequence out of alignment. Every element in a graphic novel—the art, the lettering, the sound effects, the backgrounds—occupies physical space. Remove or enlarge any one of them, and the consequences reverberate across the book.
Most cartoonists avoid this problem by finalizing the script first. Only after the writing is locked down do they begin to sketch or design the page layouts. That order exists for a reason: Once the drawing begins, changing the writing usually throws everything off.
My process is even more problematic. I begin with a script, too. But even after I start drawing, I continue learning about my characters. I imagine scenes that weren't in the original text. A conversation with a spouse grows. A childhood memory suddenly feels necessary. The drawing comes to a standstill while I write the new material—which, of course, requires new art. A prose novelist usually doesn't have to worry about any of that. Page 73 generally looks much like page 340: words and paragraphs. In a graphic novel, every page has its own architecture.
Dialogue creates another headache. In most comics, conversations unfold inside word balloons. Change the dialogue after it has been lettered—even by a few words—and you're left with a balloon that's either too large or so cramped the words can barely breathe. In full disclosure, I hate resizing balloons. In fact, I hate balloons, period.
So a graphic novelist has to become strategic. You stop thinking only about story, language, and art. You begin designing systems that make the book easier to build—and eventually easier to revise.
The Nightingales is presented as the pages of a sketchbook. It does not look like a comic book. Every spread resembles an open sketchbook filled with drawings scattered across the page. The story is based on a memory from my family's history about a dying stranger who moved into our home. Artists' sketchbooks are expressive and experimental: illustrations layered over one another, scraps of paper, masking tape, stray handwriting, half-finished ideas. That's also what memory looks like to me.
Eventually I realized the sketchbook wasn't merely an aesthetic choice. It had become an editing strategy. Because I wasn't using comic panels, it was easy to move artwork around. I could shrink an image, overlap it with another, or shift it elsewhere on the page. It was a sketchbook! The more chaotic it looked, the more authentic it felt. I grouped the text in one corner, without boxing it in, so it could expand or contract during revisions.
When my publisher acquired The Nightingales, the manuscript clocked in at a whopping 460 pages. It was simply too long. But editing is like playing an accordion. You compress one section, turning 10 pages into two, then realize a character needs a backstory. Suddenly you're drawing a flashback from her childhood, which needs space to breathe. Two pages become 10 again.
That may be what surprised me most about editing a graphic novel. You aren't simply revising the story. You're constantly renegotiating the relationship between the story and everything that occupies the page. Every sentence affects a picture. Every picture affects a page. Every page affects the pace of the book.
Any writer knows that one small revision can ripple through an entire manuscript. That's true in comics, too. The difference is that every ripple must not only be written, but also sketched, designed, drawn, inked, colored, lettered, and reassembled.
Check out Emil Wilson's The Nightingales here:
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