Two months to the day later, he bursts back onto the scene! I haven’t done much of anything writing-related that I felt was blog-worthy until I remembered that I still have two more sets of notes from my Comic-Con experience this last May!

This second session, which took place on the second day of the Con (May 30), featured comic book writer Brian Winkeler, who contributed material to Popgun, self-described as a “graphic mixtape” featuring work by contemporary comics creators, and wrote the graphic novel Knuckleheads: First Contact. As you can probably gather from the name of his book, Winkeler’s writing has a comedic bent, which he shared in “Humor in Comics” at the Con.

Here are some key points that Winkeler discussed (paraphrased rather than verbatim, because I can’t take notes as fast as most people can talk):

In comedy writing, the situations are just as important as the characters.
However, characters are more important than the jokes. A writer needs to understand the characters before they can be used to tell a story.
Be willing to create characters that stretch you out of your comfort zone (e.g. a middle-aged white man writing about an eighteen-year-old black female pop star).

These points resounded with me. Any reader of Stephen King knows his horror fiction is just as much about situations (vampires invading Maine or a rabid St. Bernard trapping a mother and child inside a broken-down Pinto) as it is about characters, but the characters are more important than the scares because we, the readers, won’t care what horrible things might happen if we don’t dig the characters. The same principle applies in comedy.

 

I know this post is a bit light, but don’t worry; I’ll have another, fuller post up later in the week (fingers crossed for Thursday, schoolwork permitting). Thanks for reading.