This post is part of my efforts to write and draw a graphic novel called The Walk. Paid subscribers to Random Orbit can follow along as I plan, write, and draw this story. Free subscribers get a taste of it with these posts, and are encouraged to upgrade to support this work.
(If you’d like a temporary trial run, just ask.)
I don’t think it’s ideal, but stories, whether novels or movies or comics or picture books, can be simple, told in a linear fashion, and be perfectly fine. We start here, then this happens, then that happens, it gets climactic, and it wraps up nicely. To be honest, I think a lot of graphic novels go like this. They’re carried by the lovely drawings, the writing itself is secondary, and we get a nice story. As I wrote in my last post, I have had enough material for this story that I probably could have gone ahead and started drawing it months ago, and it would have been okay. I had my astronaut in his space ship, harangued by Ground Control, performing his astronaut tasks day after day, until one day he decides he wants to get outside and go for a space walk. This request is, at first, denied. Eventually, Ground Control sets some conditions. Astronaut meets the conditions. And then Astronaut gets outside his ship where exciting stuff happens before Astronaut safely returns to his ship. The End.
It would be a missed opportunity, though. The stories I like are the ones where the ending is both surprising and inevitable.1 It’s an old trope, but it’s a good one to lean on. In order to make it happen, I knew I needed a few things that break out of the linearity of this, that, up and down.
