Anything can happen in a fantasy story. So how can writers prevent theirs from spiralling out of control?

Fantasy (along with the more fantastical strains of sci-fi) is hazardous terrain for storytellers. Fantasy deals in magic, which can manifest itself in countless forms, from the secondary worlds of Oz, Wonderland and Middle-Earth, to levitating nannies, goblin kings and gold-hoarding dragons. Magic is about miracles, mysterious forces or inexplicable events that cannot be ascribed to the laws of reason, nature or science.

Magic in fantasy isn’t always about escapism; it’s often about redefining the real world to better understand and overcome its challenges. Judy Garland’s Dorothy had to venture into Oz and defeat the Wicked Witch of the West so she could understand how to live happily in the real world of Kansas.

​Like language, like story itself, magic is protean. It can articulate anything the writer has in mind. Magic is kind of a big deal. The problem is magic is anathema to drama...

The 'correct' way to lay out a script for your comic book depends on what you're writing and who you're writing for. Find out what you need to bear in mind for the sake of you and your creative team.

This piece on how I format a comic script (and – most importantly – why I format it the way I do) was one of the most popular posts on this blog. But since writing it back in 2013, my comics scripting has evolved quite a bit. So it seemed only right that I update it.

For reference, I’ll be using the script for a Black Beth story published in Rebellion’s Scream & Misty 2020 Special with brooding black-and-white art by the incredible Greek artist Dani. I’d worked with Dani several times before, so do bear in mind that I could allow myself to be a bit less formal here than if I were sending this to an editor cold.

We good? Okay, let’s go…

Some General Thoughts

A comic script is ultimately a very hands-off way of writing a story – certainly when you’re writing ‘full script’ as I do for 2000 AD, and, well, pretty much every comic I’ve worked on over the last fifteen years. (The other general method of scripting a comic is ‘Marvel Style.’)

Getting to tinker with dialogue or sound effects further down the line is a luxury rarely afforded when writing full script. Once I’ve written the script, rewritten it and had it signed-off by the editor, I invoice the thing and start writing something else. By the time that script sees print as the finished comic, I’m usually so immersed in another story that I’ll have forgotten pretty much everything about the last one!

I might get to see designs, panel layouts or finished pages as they come in. I might not. Depends on the artist’s disposition, whether or not I’m in contact with them, and how tight the production schedule might be. I’ll often never hear from a story again until it’s been turned into a comic.
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Should that be the case, I always make sure the artist, letterer and editor have got everything they need from me in a single document. I’ll add hyperlinks to certain bits of reference, emotional directions for the characters, any notes about specific lettering, etc., just to make sure everyone’s got what they need to build the story without me...

How the tragic movie maniacs of The Black Phone and The Menu are all the more terrifying for having a hopeless method to their madness. (This piece contains mild spoilers.)

How much more frightening is the monster for whom you feel a measure of pity? This painting by the Spanish master Francisco Goya (1746-1828) will be familiar to anyone who has so much as flicked through a book on horror history in the last forty years. It was part of a series of private murals daubed on the walls of Goya’s hermitage outside Madrid, towards the end of a life that had rendered the painter deaf, embittered and traumatised by the ravenous horrors of Napoleon’s invasion.

The painting depicts the ancient Greek Titan Cronos (known as ‘Saturn’ in Roman mythology) gnawing on the remains of one of his own children, driven to cannibalism by a prophecy that said his offspring would one day usurp him. Originally untitled, the painting was later canonised by art historians as Saturn Devouring His Children. Goya painted it on the wall of his dining room.

Now, look into those eyes…

There’s no triumph in that stare, no demonic glee, no ‘Bwa-ha-ha-ha!’ Those eyes are helpless. This immortal Titan is an animal caught in Destiny’s trap.

Mexican maestro Guillermo Del Toro has cited this painting as a direct influence on the Pale Man he created for Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and I’m wondering if it had a similar influence on Scott Derrickson’s quietly brilliant horror movie The Black Phone (2021)...​

Are you a freelance writer slowly dying inside as you wait to hear back from editors about your latest story pitch? You’re not alone. Here’s how to stay sane when stuck between projects.

Freelancers have to master the art of living in a state of quantum uncertainty, of existing simultaneously within several different realities. I spent most of June and July this year waiting for editors and publishers to get back to me on pitches or to discuss future projects. I was peering beyond the gulf of summer (when it’s tough to get hold of anybody and even I have to take a little time off), and was chewing my fingernails at the sight of several months crammed with so many projects I may have been unable to complete them all. Yet those very same months were also completely, terrifyingly empty.

How so?

You’ve heard of ‘Schrödinger’s Cat’, right?

Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, one of the founding fathers of quantum theory, came up with a thought experiment in 1935. He was trying to explain how new scientific theories can be considered both correct and incorrect until the point in time where they can actually be proved or disproved.

He stated that if you sealed a cat inside a box containing a substance that could potentially kill the animal at any time, then you wouldn’t know whether the cat was alive or dead until you opened the box. Until then, the cat can be considered simultaneously alive and dead.
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While waiting for confirmation on their next project, the freelance author’s schedule exists in a similar state of quantum uncertainty...

The Tabletop Lair: When did you realize that you wanted to be a writer? Were there any pieces of media that were particularly influential?

Alec Worley: I always had comics and books as a kid, but it was Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s Fighting Fantasy gamebooks that really snagged me as a reader. As a writer too! I think maybe it was that sense of telling a story that plays out as a result of choices made by the main character. That main character being me, the reader! I started writing my own gamebooks soon after, full of Hammer horror and illustrations copied out of comic books.

I got into RPGs soon after and got my hands on West End Games’ Ghostbusters at one point. I only played it once, I think. I had no idea how to run a comedy adventure without things going completely off the rails. Plus, all my players wanted to do was blast civilians in the face with an unlicensed nuclear accelerator!

Getting under your reader’s skin is about more than just showering them with blood and showing off your favourite monsters. Let me teach you the black arts of creating a truly disturbing horror comic

Why are so few horror comics genuinely scary?

The genre of horror and the medium of comics have had a fruitful marriage since the 1940s, when Prize Comics’ The New Adventures of Frankenstein thought to cash in on the success of Universal’s monster movies. Eighty years on and breakout series like The Walking Dead, Basketful of Heads, and Something is Killing the Children continue to spawn spin-offs and can’t seem to stop winning awards.

Horror comics are as popular as ever. Maybe this has something to do with the genre’s mass-media marketability, as creators look to hawk their horror comic’s IP as a low-budget movie or a TV show somewhere down the line. But just how many titles out there are giving readers that delicious ripple down the spine, that soul-freezing scare that haunts you long after you’ve put down the book, and leaves you jumping at every bump in the night?

​‘Scary’ is a subjective term, for sure. So before I go on, let me give a quick rundown of the comics that have creeped me out over the years...

Do characters really have a life of their own? Or is it all just marketing bunk and cultural mythmaking? Do writers really commune with the unseen?

According to his creator Robert E. Howard, Conan the barbarian – that primordial figment of masculine imagination – entered our world like he’d been real all along. In a letter to fellow pulp author Clark Ashton Smith in 1935, Howard wrote, “I did not create [Conan] by any conscious process. He simply stalked full grown out of oblivion and set me to work recording the saga of his adventures.”

In truth, the character’s evolution took several months, and had less to do with his author being ordered about by imaginary barbarians and more to do with what pulp editors were buying that year1. Howard may have been guilty of indulging in the kind of self-mythologising that we writers love, the sort of needy postering that confirms our popular status as visionaries, shamans, psychics, Moses receiving instruction from God.

That shit does wonders for building a writer’s brand.

​Over six decades later, those lines from Howard’s letter had been colourfully embroidered by a succession of editors, fans and adaptors, all of whom wisely chose to print the marketable legend.

“[Howard’s] alone one night and he feels this shadow overtake him from behind and he knows that CONAN is standing behind him with a large axe, and Conan tells him, ‘Just stay there and write, and if you don’t do EXACTLY what I tell you I’m gonna cleave you down the middle!” John Milius, director of Conan the Barbarian, 1982, quoted from Conan Unchained: The Making of Conan(2000)

It’s a tall tale of which Howard himself might have been proud, but there’s a definite truth to the phenomenon of fictional characters telling their writers what to do...

In the age of corporate epic fantasy has pulp-era sword and sorcery become more appealing than ever? Wondering where the genre stands as I discover a forgotten fantasy heroine from the Marvel vaults

Sword and Sorcery (or Heroic Fantasy) has long cast a spell over me as unbreakable as the riddle of steel. I love the absorbing worlds, powerplays and sagas of Epic Fantasy. But sometimes I just wanna see a barbarian dude shove a yard of rune-etched Cimmerian steel through a bad guy’s face.
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The pleasures of Sword and Sorcery are primal and undeniable, their tales descended from those of Gilgamesh, Māui, Anansi and Odin, violent, pioneer ‘culture heroes’ who tamed the monster-filled wilderness of newly-forged creation before fading into legend. In the same sense, it’s the bulldozer heroes of Sword and Sorcery – Conan and Red Sonja – who pave the way for the ‘civilised’ epic worlds of Tolkien and George R. R. Martin. But if you’ve read Robert E. Howard, the godfather of 20th century Sword and Sorcery, you’ll know he felt civilisation was just another – even worse – form of savagery.

My love for tales of swashbuckling and monster-bashing was rekindled in earnest with my writing Black Beth, a thoroughly obscure Sword and Sorcery heroine from British comics, whom I revived for Rebellion with the sensational Greek artist Dani. I wanted to write exactly the kind of continuity-free heroic tales I don’t see much of these days.
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I harked back to my youth devouring Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and watching Hawk the Slayer on repeat. I grabbed missing back issues of vintage White Dwarf and Warlockon eBay, losing myself in those grimdark illustrations that had so hypnotised me as a kid. But nostalgia becomes poison when one drinks too deeply, and I want to see what the genre is doing right now...

A few years ago, I took a stab at telling the truth.

I’d just been commissioned to write a novella for the good people at Games Workshop’s Black Library, part of a Sisters of Battle triptych called The Book of Martyrs. My story would feature alongside two other stories, one by the mighty Danie Ware and the other by Warhammer loremaster Phil Kelly. I considered myself an old pro when it came to comics, but still felt like a noob when it came to prose, and this was my longest word count for Black Library to date. I’d only written Warhammer audios and short stories until now and most of those had ended up way longer and taken twice as long to complete than anticipated.

I knew I had a solid story, a turbo-charged thriller about Sister Ishani – a Hospitaller of the Argent Shroud with her faithful servo-cherub Borvo – who must survive a xenos invasion long enough to warn a neighbouring agri-station before they too are slaughtered. I also knew that I could do this, though it certainly didn’t feel like it while I was writing.

The only thing stopping me getting the job done was my worrying about getting the job done.

So I decided to keep a journal. Just ten minutes at the end of each working day and I’d barf out everything with which I’d been struggling during that session. No holding back. No uplifting lesson at the end. Just a bite-sized stream of consciousness. You’d be lucky if you got punctuation! I’d worry about scenes not working, too-subtle character arcs, over-description, the persistent possibility that the whole thing might be running away from me, soaring over the word count and demanding several extra weeks I didn’t have in order to cut it all back.

Bloody Dan Abnett (my stable-mate over at 2000 AD) made this look so easy in First and Only. What was I doing wrong? Why was this so hard? What the hell was wrong with me?

Who knew? Just get it down and get it out there.

I figured I’d wait until Book of Martyrs had been out for a while, then publish a few spoiler-free journal entries on my blog every week. I’d gotten a surprisingly good bit of traction on the craft essays I’d posted, so reckoned there might be a few young writers hooked into my RSS feed who might appreciate the honesty. After all, this was exactly the sort of equalising confessional that I craved back when I was making my first steps into the business of writing. Here was my chance to maybe let a few rookies coming after me know that they probably weren’t doing things quite as ‘wrong’ as they thought.

I managed about two entries in that journal before realising I could never publish it...

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James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) shows us how it’s done

There are certain types of scene that are just naturally boring. There’s no immediate conflict, no one trying to manipulate the focal character, fill them full of lead, punch their lights out, or get to the finish line before them. In writer-speak, you might say the focal character’s line of action has no counter-action to challenge them.
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Maybe what one character wants is exactly the same thing the opposing character wants. A great example of this kind of stock scene is the ‘mission briefing’. Think Police Commissioner Lee Van Cleef offering Snake Plissken a do-or-die deal in Escape From New York, the Feds visiting Indiana Jones on campus and sending him off on a quest for the Lost Ark, Lt. Gorman explaining the bug hunt to his crew in Aliens.
 
Let’s take Aliens as an example of how to approach a scene like this…