Comic Tutorial #2: Creating a tangible comic world

How to write a setting for your comic that gets readers gripped.

Hello and welcome to my second comic tutorial - an ongoing series where I share my expertise and experience of how write, produce, print, market, fund and sell your comics.

Paid subscribers get early access to these tutorials for a month, then free subscribers can then read them in full at no cost. You can get early access by upgrading your subscription for just £3.50 a month, which really helps to support my writing projects.

In this tutorial, I’m going to cover:

• How to start building a setting for your comic at the earliest stage

• How to nail down all the characteristics of your world before you even write your script (and why it can help keep your plot arc on track)

• How to make your world feel like a ‘character’ in your story (so the reader really cares what happens to it, and they can really feel its atmosphere)

• How to reinforce your world through realistic dialogue (and not exposition!)

Killtopia #1 art by Craig Paton

Before we dive in, following last week’s user poll, my free newsletter is now going out every two weeks instead of weekly. Theres a poll at the bottom of this tutorial for paid subscribers to vote on how often you’d like these paid posts. I want to make sure I’m always giving you value for money, so please let me know what you’d like.

Ready? Let’s talk about world-building!

1. Starting from nothing

So, let’s say you have a great ‘hook’ for a new comic story - like an elevator pitch you have in your head that you just know would make a great first issue of an arc; how do you actually start to work out where that story should be set?

I’ve come at this two different ways over the years:

• I have a story hook and I already know the genre I want to use: for example, fantasy, post-apocalypse, cyberpunk - so the foundation of that setting is already semi-established (i.e. fantasy settings probably don’t have advanced technology, while cyberpunk settings usually do)

• I have a story hook but no setting in mind: this also happens, and in the example of my beat ‘em up comic BPM: Beatdowns Per Minute, I knew I

• wanted to do a tribute to my favourite genre of video games, but I worked out the story setting after.