What does structure mean in a graphic novel?

5 examples from Tom

My original Substack plan was to offer a structured series of posts over the next six or seven months or more, but I think I will just jump around through some of the stuff we’ve collected here at SAW as they come up. Right now, a student asked about this video so it was a good chance to revisit it.

In this video, I explain the 5 different structures and to some degree, working methods from 5 of my books. These were mostly unconscious until the last book.

Transcript below. Video here:

The funny thing is I cut off right before talking about The Emotional Arc in my memoir; that’s in a different video, keep an eye out for that.

This is from our Graphic Novel Development Intensive, a 6-month cohort-based workshop we run from June- November every year. Check it out!

Video transcript:

I'm sitting here with a stack of notebooks from the early 90s to 2013 or so and I want to talk about the differences in structuring, but also staying focused and also coming up with ideas and all that stuff!

I mentioned in one of my a couple other videos about the first book I did, Hutch Owen's Working Hard (it looks like this) … it came from tons and tons of writing and then that became sketches and that became revisions and then the final output.

And I've mentioned many times that at least for me personally that was a pretty unhappy way to work.

I did it, and I even got okay at it but I didn't realize how much I was trying to force myself into a mold. The emotion in the story was real but the act of creation, the process, was somebody else's. It was a little too much of an assembly line. It divided the parts of the process too much for me.

So the next book— I've mentioned this before so I won't go over too much — started with like, random index cards that I printed myself in photocopiers and then other index cards and then ideas of first pages, ideas about what the cover would be, because even the cover might suggest the story that might start on the a second page…

In this notebook it says “bombastic” and I knew from the beginning that I wanted to have a section that had lots of giant words. Kind of a ridiculous way to start but I realized it's as valid as any other way to start.

I had this urge to like be very, well, bombastic, so in the same way that the first book started from certain emotional urges, so did this book, except I tried to find ways to creatively engage or even enact those emotions in the process of creating a little more complicated story.

So again this big notebook became that little book. And again, I think I'm just kind of a word and verbal person when I did do some structured visual improvisation, they were dull and strange and very ineffective it's because I really didn't know what a comic was. I didn't know what kind of comic I created and I was left sort of floundering at every panel transition.

It wouldn't be the same these days because I have better impulses I think but I still don't work that way too much.

What did I do after that I did a book called The Sands.

This is that notebook from … it doesn't have a date …

I wanted to expand on those ideas and so in here we're seeing larger sketches, some little sketches some big sketches. So I'm trying to allow some visuals to inspire the work, the ideas, the story.

I haven't looked at this in ages so I might I'll try not to get too distracted… I'm getting distracted.

I had little bits of improvisation or or even structured thumbnails that I thought were good they'd get taped in and eventually this became that book which is over there on the shelf.

(If you will forgive me one second I'll grab it thanks so much.)

Real briefly about the structure of it- I realized I was happy to tell a regular story in part one but only for a little while.

This came about sort of innately. There’s section one- it's a lot of the book it's most of the book maybe a little more than half, and that's a sort of normal story from beginning to end.

But then section two is a complete uprooting of it. It's set in a different part of the story and it's also just one long scene, it's just one long dialogue, and so after sort of upsetting what you think about the story, part three emerges and part three is just a bunch of little snippets of potential other parts to that story.

It's a cute little exercise I'm a little bit proud of this, I just wish I was a better cartoonist some of these drawings are so crude but there are some things happening in there that that are fun and there's some potential.

There's even a sort of climax but it's only a possible climax it's more, almost a frustration with the form itself. The character sort of doesn't know what to believe he sort of doesn't believe his own understanding of things, so that fracturing sort of reflects his reality a little bit. So that's one way I structured that it's a little bit accidental and a little bit unconscious…

The next book I did I'm don't like talking about very much. It's okay. Anyway here's the binder- yet another binder, 1998.

First thing I noticed is that I've got -oh my goodness things are falling… is that I've got a research photos and images and other things in there, newspaper things …

So even though it's a fiction I was researching…

So this story was an attempt to change the format again. It was a two-part story. I've got a part one and roughly halfway through it is a part two.

I tried to sort of set up all the systems and all the characters in part one and then part two sort of introduced something which was a hurricane and see what happens in part two. It was actually kind of a theatrical structure but very unconscious actually.

I think when I finished that book that's when I started understanding more about story structure so I'm sad that that's the last book I did which which had an unconscious sense of structure.

I'll show you briefly the binder which I've shown before for Rosalie's book, the memoir I did. This had tons and tons of notes again, but so there are two things worth mentioning here.

One that the structure was a chronology it was a travelogue it was from when the event happened to when I felt like I had some information and wisdom and understanding to move forward with. That period was about five weeks it also had to feature a lot of the setup so that was months and months and months prior to the event.

But it didn't have much after that that, so sort of five weeks. And so the interspersing of the background information and story and the five weeks of grief- that was very unconscious. I just sort of went back and forth. And I mentioned this to one woman who's really had the amazing insight— she said that that's how grief works and it's true. I think that grief just comes in waves where you feel it very heavily and then you don't want to feel it anymore or you are allowed to not feel it as much.

And so the book itself had that wave structure that I didn't realize until much much later.

At some point the sort of present tense catches on and it's only going forward after that.

So that's one structure which is largely again the travelogue with early interspersings of the first of the history of the pre-story but more importantly is the emotional arc.

The emotional arc is in the next video.

Thanks for reading!