Super-Powered Storytelling [Benjamin Percy]
Twenty pages, five to seven scenes. Splash pages, two-page spreads, gutters. A plots and B plots and C plots. Heroes and villains and love interests and sidekicks. Emotional arcs. Panels and layouts. I am a better novelist, a better screenwriter and essayist and short story writer — all thanks to comics. Over the past five years, I’ve been writing for Marvel and DC, and this SLAM-BOOM-POW crash course in spandex and capes has opened me up to a whole other world of craft. In this three-hour class, I’ll introduce you to what I now call “story math,” so that you might appreciate comics more and carry its algorithms and techniques into other storytelling mediums.