Philip Pullman authors a Comic Book!

The comics form has all the vivid immediacy of the cinema, and all the private advantages of the book. Comics can do anything, it seems to me, and for all that their history is rich, it is also very short: 100 years covers most of it. Comics have hardly begun.

I'd long toyed with the idea of writing a story in comics form, but I didn't begin seriously until my publisher created The DFC, a new weekly comic, and found an artist for me to work with. I can draw only things that keep still, and comics are full of movement, so my story would have to be a collaboration. A good thing, too: I couldn't possibly draw the scenes I've asked John Aggs to draw, and the story is all the better for his part in it.

The Adventures Of John Blake is the story of a boy on a sailing ship somewhere in the Pacific. It's an adventure story, plain and simple, but it's not an ordinary ship, and he's not an ordinary boy. To tell it, I've drawn on all my memories of Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad, and books with such irresistible titles as Unsolved Mysteries Of The Deep. I wish I could say that I've also drawn on my long experience before the mast, such as the time when I clung to the topsail futtocks in a hurricane, trying desperately to reef the bowsprit while the other hands manned the pump to empty the fo'c'sle halyards. But that wouldn't be strictly true, and I always tell the truth.

As for the technique of getting the story down on paper, I've found that the best way to think of it is as a screenplay. I describe what we have to see, and write down what the characters say, and let John do the rest. The real fun comes when you realise that you can do something in a comic that ordinary prose finds very hard: you can write in counterpoint. A character can say one thing and think another, simultaneously; we can see a picture of one scene while a caption continues to speak of another.

But the principles of storytelling don't change. For all the brilliant versatility of the form, a comic will work only if it tells a good story, and tells it clearly. That's the most important thing of all.

© Philip Pullman, 2008