Everything Everywhere All at Once PART 2: The Opening Sequence

Comic Book Writing: An Interview with Ron Marz Jacob Krueger: I’m Jacob Krueger and this is The Write Your Screenplay Podcast, and today we have a special guest Ron Marz. Ron Marz is a legendary comic book writer, he is also the newest faculty member at Jacob Krueger Studio and we’re so happy to have him.And so, today we’re going to be talking about comics; we’re going to be talking about comic book writing and we’re going to be talking about the links between comic book writing and screenwriting.And so Ron, I’d love to start off. I come from a character driven indie film and television background, so for me, comics are a territory that’s relatively new. And at the same time, I see in our industry there is this incredible overlap that’s happening now where comics are feeding movies and movies are feeding comics and those two industries are kind of dovetailing together.So if I am a new screenwriter and I am just coming to comic book writing for the first time, what are the things that I want to be thinking about?Ron Marz: Screenwriting and comics are really kind of half-first cousins. They tell the same kind of stories but they don’t tell them the same way. So the most obvious difference is movies move, comics don’t. Comics are single images that tell the story and really the action of comics takes place between the panels. The story actually takes place in between the panels and the gutters, then the old chestnut of your mind fills in everything else in a comic. You’re given everything in a movie.But ultimately, it is all storytelling, there are different aspects to the craft that you have to master, but ultimately it is really character driven, character based storytelling. Whether it is a guy dressed up as a bat jumping off of buildings in Gotham City or a detective in Los Angeles in the early part of the century figuring out a water scam, they’re all the same kind of thing. And you can tell any kind of story in comic, you can tell any kind of story in film.  Really you have to decide which is the best medium to deliver your story.Jake: I think one of the interesting things is when you think of movies you think of movies moving. When I think of movies, because I am a screenwriter, I think about the same thing you are thinking about, which is, I think that the stories are told in the cuts between my images that I am going to show you this image and I am going to show you that image and that in the cut in between, you are going to tell yourself a story. So, I can show you Ron Marz slams his laptop down and then I can show you Jake’s dead body and you know Ron did it, right? Or I can show you Ron slams his laptop down and then I can show Jake and Ron at a socially distanced pool party hanging out and I know, “Oh it looks like they made up.” And so, in those gaps we invite the audience in to tell themselves the story. But I think one of the things that is interesting to me in comics is how compressed those images are, right? In a movie, I get thousands of images to tell my story.Ron: Sure, yeah in a comic you know you have 5/6/7 panels on a page and that is it. In comics, a lot of it is about the real estate that you have. You have a finite number of pages; you have a finite number of panels on those pages.So in that sense, there is a lot more structure in a comic than there is in a screenplay. Because in a screenplay, unless you’re writing a teleplay where you know you have a certain number of minutes that you have to hit, there is a little bit more wiggle room.In a comic, you know you’re generally working 20 pages, 22 pages for a single issue, 100 pages for a graphic novel, whatever your page count is, you have to make sure everything fits.