Comics / Spotlight

Learn to Write About Comics – Part One

By Hervé St-Louis
September 8, 2012 - 00:00

Stan Lee

The art of writing a comic book has always been taunted as a skill newcomers to the field have to master. Similarly, the art of drawing comic book has also been presented as being important. Both skills are studied in colleges and universities throughout the world and are taken very seriously by the comic book industry. But there is one skill that has not been well taught that is writing about comic books themselves. Writing about comic books of course falls under writing for entertainment. Yet there are a few things particular to comic books that merit a revisit for budding comic book pundits. This series of articles is meant to help writers writing about comic books write better.

What’s my claim to fame. Well, I’ve written about comic book for over ten years now, having founded ComicBookBin in 2002. I was also trained in journalism a decade ago when I learned public relations. Writing was an important part of the work we did. I go through periods where I “lapse” in my applied writing, but the core skills have always remained. Instead of complaining about the poor quality of writing about comic books and the comics industry, I decided to share an adapted version of the ComicBookBin’s infamous and often mentioned writing guide to the community at large. Just because many comic book pundits use blogs to express themselves, it doesn’t mean that we should cheat our readers of a good reading experience when they visit us. ComicBookBin has never won any writing or journalistic awards but hundreds of visitors have told us over the years that our writing tens to be better and stronger than most other comic book-related Websites. I’m sure our writing guide and our core values has something to do with this.

This is a great opportunity for us to raise the bar about what readers can expect from their favourite neighbourhood comic book Website. There are a lot of budding writers out there who could use the help too. There have been other guides about reviewing comic books and reporting news that have been published over the years, but ours is different. We take the best from entertainment news writing but adapt it to comic book with a standard focused on excellence and clarity. Our values are about informing readers, be they hard core comic book readers or casual readers. We start with the principle that you, our reader, know nothing about comic books. And then, we take you for a ride.

Let’s start. There is one point in our attitude that we know is not shared by other comic book news sites. At ComicBookBin, we see ourselves as professional reporters and columnists. We are not bloggers. That simple change of attitude means that we take what we write seriously and we leave no room to hearsay, gossip, guesses and unjustified opinions. But being a professional does not mean we have to write elaborate sentences. In fact, we follow Ernest Hemingway’s lead. We prefer to write short sentences and avoid using industry jargon. We believe that simple words can convey complicated matter and inform readers not familiar with the topic at hand. We always assume that we write for someone who knows nothing about comic books. It helps us remember to put emphasis on contextual information that makes the article easier to grasp. If we’ve done our job, by the end of our articles, our casual readers are as informed about our topics as hardcore fans who know everything we discussed thoroughly but were looking for our perspective.

English Variations
ComicBookBin writers are mostly Americans, although the site is Canadian. That’s already a problem in terms of English variations. And then, we welcome writers from the United Kingdom, Asia and other countries and territories where English is not the first language. That’s one of the challenges we have for our readership which is also composed of many international readers where English is often not even the second language of the reader, but its third or fourth one!

American, Canadian and British English all have a few variations. For example, Americans spell “neighbor,” Canadians and British writers spell the same word “neighbour.” Other words are much more differentiated. Both Americans and Canadians use the word “fall” while British writers use “autumn.” Many Americans spell the colour “grey” as “gray.” ComicBookBin does not impose one set of spelling on writers. However, we ask that writers know which English variant they want to use and that they remain consistent.

The next article in the series will look at slang and comic book industry-specific slang.

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12