UNICEF 4

A Writer Comments

UNICEF 1 - UNICEF home
UNICEF 2 - Front Covers
UNICEF 3 - Production Process
UNICEF 5 - Comic Pages

David Belbin writes about working on Dear Amy for Comic 4 and Cry Me A River for Comic 5

Some novelists long to write movies. I've always wanted to write comics. However, like most comic readers, I look at the words first and take in the images second, sometimes almost subliminally. When John Clark asked me to try writing a comic for UNICEF, I had to learn to write visually.

My brief was to write a story covering several rights from a list of twenty. I had five pages to do it in. Slowly, I came up with a piece about siblings separated from their father and running away from foster homes. A boy writes to his baby sister about what has happened since they were taken into care.

John made ‘Dear Amy’ fit on the page. To my mind, it had way too many words crammed in, but the feedback was gratifying and at least I'd written one comic story. Ambition achieved.

Only then I got asked to do another. John knows my Young Adult (YA) work. He insisted I had a strong ability to convey complex issues while still telling an involving story. He wanted me to take the skills I'd developed on ‘Dear Amy’ and write a full length comic, a mini graphic novel. The topic: globalisation.

I'm concerned about poverty, about the environment. My first novel, ‘The Foggiest’ made links on think global, act local lines. But globalisation wasn't a theme I'd consider for my YA fiction. It was too complex and required too much knowledge I didn't have. John offered to steer my research and double check all the details. I said I'd think about it. And I started reading.

Globalisation means different things to different people. It's about how the world gets smaller while the divisions between peoples get bigger. It's a process that helps rich people to exploit poor people all over the world. Or, for people, read countries. At some level, we're all involved. Everything connects. I needed a multi-cast story to exemplify this process and push various children's rights. In 12pages.

Britain has signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child. However, most people aren't aware that there's a separate Human Rights Charter for children. I needed to be aware of the six children's rights I had to cover, but, once in storytelling mode, I needed to forget them, too. I tried to get a central focus for my story and characters who would engage our 12-15 target readership.

I read New Internationalist, checked out websites, watched documentaries, an African movie. UNICEF wanted me to feature child trafficking, and this was the starting point for the story. The other subject which leapt out at me was water and inappropriate development. I kept reading about the Narmada dam and other projects that made no environmental sense, displacing people and benefiting only the country's rich elite and multinationals. I had an idea about a political kidnapping. Once I’d got that, I started to see a way I could tell a story spanning three continents.

UNICEF were delighted with the synopsis. The story was nearly at the stage where I would start the detailed script. But I needed to know which artist I was writing for. To me, it was inevitable that John would draw the whole thing. It was a huge, challenging job and  he wasn't keen. Eventually, he conceded that giving detailed instructions to another artist would take so long that he might as well do it himself. Now we only needed to get the script right. I had three months.

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We needed a title. I suggested first 'Running Dry', then 'You Don't Miss Your Water' from the great Otis Redding song (the next line goes: 'until your well has run dry'). John came up with another classic song title, 'Cry Me A River', that made complete sense. I find it very hard to write a story without a title.

I did three pages, sent them to John. He was happy for me to get on with it. He was less happy when I refused to use thought bubbles (the comic equivalent of the clunky ‘voice overs' in movies) but went along with it. Space was tight. I wanted to leave space for big drawings, some of the creative flourishes we had envisioned at the start. Inevitably, though, some of this got squeezed out. The creative flourishes are the techniques (split panels, frames that almost fall off the page and other miracles of layout) John used to fit such a complex story into 12 pages. We had around the same amount of plot as a docudrama like the film 'Traffik' but with a lot less dialogue to convey it.

Inevitably, when looking back at any piece of writing, you tend to forget the erased mistakes, the false turnings and fake emotions which you, or your editor, wisely excised. Which is my way of saying that there was a lot more to John's contribution than saying 'are we covering all the different rights we agreed here?' or 'don't worry, I can convey that in the picture.' We had a lot of discussions of ways to include maps and a complicated history in the shortest space.

I wrote six major drafts of ‘Cry Me A River’ between February and June. When the script came back, UNICEF had added one change - an additional line explaining why huge dams in poor countries were such bad news, pointing out that maintaining them can bankrupt a nation. We'd become so involved in our story that we'd taken that point for granted.

Now John had the really difficult job, making our story work on the page. He had tricky decisions like how to distinguish between different heads of state and identify characters at a distance. The big difficulty was fitting what, in standard comic pages, might take sixty pages into a mere twelve, including credits and a list of rights. And, on top of that, he had to do the biggest drawing job of his life, staying up until 3AM night after night and still ending up a month behind. Just getting the right visual reference material (from guns to dams to a dyeing works) was a huge undertaking but essential for verisimilitude.

Now and then we'd bash our heads together, trying to decide what images to include in the purely visual sections, stuff I'd only vaguely described. When the drawings were nearly done, John started inking the pages over a light box, handwriting the dialogue (most comics use typed fonts). I went on holiday for a fortnight and when I got back, he was still at it, e-mailing me each page as he finished it. We gave them final tweaks and continuity corrections.

Scripting a comic teaches you a lot about being economical with words and the power of pictures. So can studying them. There's a lot of prejudice against comics in this country, which is odd because we love movies so much and comics are very like storyboards with dialogue. It's not for me to say how successful 'Cry Me A River' is. But I hope that many teachers reading this will use it with their students and help bring home what a small, interconnected planet we are all responsible for.

David Belbin
Sept 2002

www.davidbelbin.com