excerpted from today's AKOTAS newspost

[scarfman]

theferrett blogs a lot about writing Home on the Strange. He's written a coupla times recently about putting an effort into making individual strips which share a plot continuity standalone in case of new reader: the mechanical things, like having to spend the first panel recapping The Story So Far, and having the characters call each other by name. The first time I saw him write about this I noticed that my characters don't call each other by name very much. (This is probably a function of my not being very good at, or anyway not being very mindful of, giving characters voices different from mine; I generally contrive not to address people by their names very much.)

I wrote about a year ago that I'd checked my most recent strips and was satisfied with their accessibility. But more recently I've been thinking that when I link to AKOTAS in casual conversation I ought to link to the first strip instead of the main page. After all, it really is a pretty wacky premise. A reader who otherwise would enjoy it but comes to the main page on a given day, and finds unnamed characters not rescuing maidens or slaying dragons but griping about sketch comedy, might be confused enough not to stick around.

I happened to think of this while I was importing today's dialog into the graphic file from the text file where it had been composed.

I ended up revising every line of dialog in the first panel. I changed Guenevere's single word from, "What?" to, "Leave?!"; I added Lancelot's name to Arthur's line; and I added the word Roman to Lancelot's line.

Comments

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm. I see what you mean about "voice", but, on the other claw, you do instill each character with a distinctive personality. In many AKOTAS strips, a lot of "TEH FUNNY" comes from my thinking, "that line is SO [insert name here]".

That said, Joss Whedon has the same "problem": you can always recognize a bit of dialogue as Obviously Whedon, even when it perfectly fits the character's personality.*

I can think of worse company to be in.

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* Best example (and one you probably know): Whedon was called in to play script doctor on the first X-Men movie. He's said that only one short dialogue exchange made it from his edits onto the screen. Watching the movie, it's not hard to immediately pick out the Whedon Moment, even though it's perfectly in-character.

[dave-iii.livejournal.com]

It's a difficult line to walk, by my observations... One the one hand, you want the speech to be flowing and natural-- on the other hand, exposition is many things, but rarely flowing and natural. This is why characters like Hermionie Granger are handy; by being the bookworm/info nerd, they can tell and repeat certain facts to the audience without having most of the other characters have to stop and review what's going on every five minutes.

"Meanwhile, Aunt Martha, having taken the trap to the woods, is lying in a ditch on the edge of town."

For this strip, I don't think you have a lot to worry about. All the character identities are pretty strong, and picking up the thread isn't that hard. A lot of script writers seem afraid of pronouns, which is a great annoyance to people who actually HAVE been following the story all along, which is where the balancing act comes back in.