How To Write Your First Comic Book
The official rules— “whatever works” — are not helpful. Here’s what I learned about doing things that scare me.
My comic book, Maw, is one of the few pieces of writing I’ve done that actively felt inspired. The whole story seemed to have been handed to me by some outside source. I had been invited to pitch Boom! Studios in spring of 2019, and I had worked up a variety of atrocious comic book premises, but I was sitting at my desk, not thinking about any of them, when it hit me: First, a mental image of a woman on her hands and knees, with some unspeakable thing trying to crawl out of her. Second, an image of what would happen once the thing got out.
Those two images are now the first page of Maw’s first issue and the last page of its last issue; they have remained constant ever since that day in 2019. Everything between the first page and the last page has changed.
Writing a comic book was something I had wanted to do ever since I was a lonely queer twelve-year-old with an X-Men fixation. Yet being inspired to do something and being able to pull it off are two very different things. Over the course of about a year, I had to teach myself an entirely new mode of writing. Instructions were surprisingly hard to come by, so here is a document of my learning process…
