I found myself chatting to Rhianna Pratchett yesterday about her just released comics spin-off of Mirror’s Edge. Well – the first part of six anyway (First pages here). It’s been interesting for her. As she tells to CBR, it’s her first work in the medium, and she had to do some serious thinking about its strengths and limitations before doing so. Which got me casually thinking a little more on the topic, but from the other way around – as in, what’s the specific strengths and weaknesses of bringing a game to a comic. And while there’s been a deluge of games-to-comics work in the last few years, what games would I pursue were I a comics editor interested in putting out entertaining comics. Which is, of course, a different thing from a comic that does the business.
Because that’s the key thing – the Gold Standard isn’t something you can make a quick buck off (though that’s perfectly fine). The Gold Standard is something that can run and run and have a lot of fun in the medium and make people terribly happy. From a consumer of culture, it’s easy to be dismissive about anything which crosses media – it’s derivative work, and therefore intrinsically trashy. Especially when comics (or films) to games work has been traditionally questionable in quality.
But you can’t dismiss it. Because if you do, the originally-a-comic Sam & Max goes out the window. Flipping it around, however, and we’ve yet to see something as epochal as Sam & Max was to games appear in a comics. Is it a problem with the medium? It’s a common theme in comics blogosphere reviews to note that games are wholly unsuited, due to the main thrill being in the untranslatable viscerality, yaddayaddayadda. This is just the modern version of movie critics using phrases “comicbook nonsense” to demean another medium. When a perfectly fine film has been made out of a theme park ride and veteran comics readers get all misty eyes over such unpromising subject material as toy lines Rom: The Space Knight and Micronauts you’ve got to assume it’s doable.
So what makes something work?
(And probably before going any further, I should note the self interest here. I do the comics thing when I’m not writing games. In fact, with my Starcraft story coming out in the next Tokyopop Starcraft: Frontline anthology, I’ve got one foot in this particular ring already. So you may read all this as just me touting for work, if you wish.)
Generally speaking, two things are required for optimum comics. Which isn’t to say that entertaining work can be done without them, but for the best chances of allowing such stuff…
1) An enormous, detailed and fascinating world with key characters being secondary.
2) A strong character with or without a world of note. Perhaps even better “without”.
And a third thing which will allow you to make even the least suitable for translation material sing…
3) The owners of the licence being entirely fine with you doing whatever the hell you want.
The third is kinda obvious, but worth stressing. The biggest problem with making a licensed work is the licensor. If they keep too tight strings on the material, the creatives who are doing the comic won’t be able to do anything – in fact, even if either of the first two points are totally true, trying to do good work in bondage will over-rule it. You can’t do good work if the licensor doesn’t let you. Most will want to have some control. But if you’re basically able to do whatever you want, the sky’s the limit – get a creator who’s willing to commit to the material, and memorable work can appear that eventually owes only a little to the original source.
(That’s the Rom and Micronauts story right there. British readers may have similar feelings over early Grant Morrison in Zoids or Simon Furman’s Transformer stories, where the only worry seemed to be that they had to introduce some of the new ranges upon occasion.)
I suspect that’s going to happen relatively few times, as developers and publishers are far more aware the concept of maintaining their brand than they were in the eighties. Which is a shame, but also obviously understandable. There’s one exception to this trend which comes to mind is where the developer does the comics themselves, or its visionary figure is directly involved. For the latter, Jordan Mechner’s involvement with 1st Second’s Prince of Persia game. For the former… well, if the Dreamfall sequels never emerge and Ragnar decides to follow up his suggestion on doing them in comics form may be the first (”I’ve said that if we don’t get to finish the story in games, then we’ll do it in books or a comic book. I’d love to do a comic book actually. I’ve been talking to a friend of mine about a comic taking place in the ten years between the first two games.”).
(Rhianna’s writing of the Mirror’s Edge comic doesn’t count, because while she’s the writer of the game and knows the world as well as anyone, she doesn’t have carte blance. It’s still DICE’s game.)
Moving past those issues of licensing – (and you never will) – those first two points…
The first one means that the world’s capable of being explored in depth. If it’s a story-driven game, you can be sure the main events will be pushed in the games. As such, you won’t be able to change anything significantly in the world – which means you’re left doodling in the margins. You need a lot of margins to doodle in to create something satisfactory. The more interesting the world is and the less connected it is to the main characters, the better. The problem with strong leads is that… i) the stronger they are, the more your readers will expect to see them and ii) since they’re key to the property, you won’t be able to do anything to alter them significantly.
To choose an example, Starcraft is almost perfect. The world’s plenty big. There’s a lot of world detail you can hone in on. As such, my story goes right for a faction which was barely mentioned in the main thrust of the game, playing around with a Kel-Morian salvage mission. The problem is that while big, Starcraft’s still defined by the game’s leads. There’s a desire to see – say – Kerrigan. You can perhaps get by with a cameo, but for a longer scale work in the world, people would want to see more of these icons. And since you can’t really do anything to ‘em icons, you’re going to eventually get relatively unsatisfying works.
The other Blizzard major world – Warcraft – is better in that regard. Yeah, there’s these big hefty characters from the game, but the effect of World of Warcraft has been to democratise herosim in Azeroth. As the name may suggest, it’s created a greater natural interest in the state of the World. Abstractly, even better potential subject matter for comics would be the Warhammer worlds, where scale is so enormous that even the biggest characters in other fictions would be a footnote. You can destroy whole worlds in Warhammer 40K and no-one will even blink. There’s millions more where that came from. The margins for you to doodle in are the size of most other universes.
And what about option 2?
Well, this is where you do have an iconic character and that’s all anyone wants to see. You literally can’t do a story set in this universe without this character, as there’s nothing to the place except them. These are characters in the James Bond mold. Everything else around him changes, bar the series tropes: As long as we’ve a guy looking brutish and British in a suit, we’re happy. The world is generated anew – the character remains.
While I’ve never read the comics so couldn’t speak for their quality, it’s noteworthy that in amount of time there was an ongoing Tomb Raider comic for supports this rule. There were Tomb Raider comics for a clear five years. Why? Because Lara Croft is Indiana Jones with a posh accent and tits. You can throw her through as many action/investigation/mystery plots as you wish. The world is a constantly replenishing place of archeological strangeness.
The reason why a more defined world actually can hurt this sort of character is that you simply can’t change it significantly, for reasons stated previously. So if it’s characteristic and not that big a place, you’re in risk of running out of stories you can tell with that one character in that one world.
Which leads me to two games to comics concepts people have asked me about upon occasion. Both are games I love, neither which I’m convinced would work and only one which I’d have a crack at if the job was offered to me.
Unless the money was really good.
Like, obv.
Okay. I’m going to say the games, and I want you to guess which one I think is just about feasible and which is a really bad idea.
THIEF and DEUS EX.
And now I’ll pause while you have a little think.
Little thunked?
Well, my take is that Deus Ex is a phenomenally bad idea for a comic. It’s not that it’s undoable. It’s just undoable in a way which stays true to the subject material – and the bits you can stay true to will actively be actively uninteresting in another medium.
Deus Ex features a defined lead character, whose main characteristic is that he’s not very interesting. He’s a blank slate for the player to imprint their own decisions on – being ever-so-slightly laconic is about as good as it gets. Worse, he’s got a defined world with a set story arc. It starts with him as a newly created character. We end with him closing the world.
(You could get away with a retelling of the Deus Ex story in comics… but why would you?)
Not only does he close the world, but he does it in multiple ways. Choose any one to continue from, and you’ve alienated one third of your readership. Choose all three, and you have Invisible War, which pleased pretty much no-one. This is the larger philosophic problem – it’s a game that’s defined my the multiple choices of character. Without formalist experimentation and/or gimmickry (and choose your own adventure comics have been done before) you can’t really capture what made Deus Ex work.
And if you don’t, you’re left with a character who hasn’t one, a cast who isn’t that interesting either and a world that’s just a car crash of nineties conspiracy theories. Oh – and you can’t do anything with it because it’s been neatly tied off.
But Thief? Totally do-able.
It’s an option 2. We have a strong character – I couldn’t parse JC Denton’s voice without research, but I could have a shot at Garrett’s without even trying – who has a set job which leads to adventures. Garrett goes and steal stuff: hi-jinks ensue. You can spin caper stories off that pretty much indefinitely. The first problem is its initial strength. Thief’s got an interesting, novel world which you’d have to keep. As argued earlier, this will eventually become a barrier when you can’t change it. But that’s only eventually. Without being given full access to option 3, there’s a dead end – but there’s a good chunk of comics to write before then. Equally, while Thief 3 closed Garrett’s arc, you’ve still got an entire life of misadventure to draw on. There’s places to put the stories in his chronology, depending on whether you want to concentrate on the master training novices after Deadly Shadows or an earlier lone wolf.
Biggest problem is entirely one of the medium, but it’s what I view as an interesting technical challenge rather than an impossibility. It’s a game about hiding, not direct confrontation. Can you do that in a comic? Make it solely about tension? Hmm. Dunno. It’d be interesting to find out. I suspect trying to directly mirror it would fall flat, and you’d have to play up the other aspects of the world to compensate. Human interactions and metaphorical backstabbing would work better in comics than the game. I think pushing the atmosphere thing as hard as it could would be the other possibility – I’d like to see what someone like Ashley Wood would do with the City.
That the activity works in comics is something you have to consider – and also whether the activity is all there is to the world. It’s one reason why I don’t envy Rhianna with Mirror’s Edge. Its Le Parkour-running is about motion. In the same way that car-chases are difficult to pull off, a plain chase sequence creates problems of motion. You’d pull it off easier in a manga-digest format with many more pages than a traditional 22-page thing, using artful decompression to capture the sense of pace.
(Randomly: most game’s basic interaction is a fine fodder for comics – kicks and ’splodes works in pretty much any medium)
That went on longer than I thought I would. You may guess that I annoy my editors and artists immensely with over-written e-mails. But if you’re worked your way through the lot… what’s your thoughts? What games would you like to see in comics? What do you think wouldn’t work? Hell, for the creative sorts, what would you like to write personally?
Speak. I’m interested.
Related Stories:
Hitman comic would be great!
@Dorian, well said. I would add Appleseed myself, I think the efforts of Shirow to add lot of dynamism and complex movements to the combat scenes gives that manga a lot of rhythm (his capacity to create extremely rich and detailed scenarios helps too).
Rhianna Pratchett is daughter to Terry. Maybe there is a writing gene after all.
Speedball 2! Defined world (Blade Runner by way of City of God)! Myriad character personality/design possibilities! FIGHTING. Humour! Ice Cream!
Natural Born Linekers!
(seriously: would write this tomorrow)
(would mix blood and mint choc chip into the inks, as well, Squadron Supreme-style-e)
//\Oo/\\
“Soren: No-one lives forever is a brilliant example of something that could work. I’d read that even if I wasn’t a fan of the game. Sadly, it’s not a game that has a fanbase that would support a licenced comic.”
It’s possible that it could work in the broader scope of the Austin Powers universe, which has more public awareness. It’s basically the same idea, so merging the two wouldn’t be incongruous.
That said, if we’re going to do James Bond spoofs then I want to see a 18th Century, early-steampunk Bond-style story, a sort of Sharpe-meets-Moorcock.
Half-Life 2! Only it focuses on one of the citizens… a concerned citizen…
“hat the activity works in comics is something you have to consider – and also whether the activity is all there is to the world. It’s one reason why I don’t envy Rhianna with Mirror’s Edge. Its Le Parkour-running is about motion. In the same way that car-chases are difficult to pull off, a plain chase sequence creates problems of motion. You’d pull it off easier in a manga-digest format with many more pages than a traditional 22-page thing, using artful decompression to capture the sense of pace.”
I think a We3-Quitely style could capture that pretty well.
“The biggest problem with making a licensed work is the licensor. If they keep too tight strings on the material, the creatives who are doing the comic won’t be able to do anything – in fact, even if either of the first two points are totally true, trying to do good work in bondage will over-rule it.”
This works both ways – look at MK vs DC.
@Ginger Yellow: I’d rather not look at MK vs DC :(
Good article, Kieron.
I think Fallout has the most potential, as it’s a textbook category 1). I also think a Thief comic might work well, but as you mention, it might be difficult. Maybe keeping Garret as scenery for panels while other characters are the foreground? Maybe multiple characters as several short arcs covering the same story (at the same time)? Take the mansion from Thief 3- go for a story about the Captain and the manor, one about the Factions and one Garret story. Captain as a prelude and lead-in, Factions as side-by-side with Garret. The Factions storylines could run concurrently with Garret’s misdemeanours (rather like the do in the game).
Maybe Quake II/IV/Wars as a 1). Too obvious. The abominable BloodRayne as a 2)? It would sell, cynically. Overlord as a 1)? Make it a one-shot, perhaps. Freedom Force et al are discounted, I guess. Maybe The Ship? Again, a one-shot seems best. Metal Gear Solid has been done. I guess Uncharted too? Jagged Alliance?
Ahh, perfect. OddWorld. It’s got 1), it’s got 2), but the games have looked at multiple characters. More 2) than 1), but I think OddWorld could make a good comic book. Any of them.
I won’t lie: I would really, really like to see a lot of tie-in fiction for Half-Life. There is a good ten years between Half-Lives One and Two, and so much crap happened in the intermediary. You know how it starts (basically an unremarkable near-future Earth), and you know how it ends (Combine running everything, oceans drained, monsters infesting the countryside, etc) . . . but it take ten years to get from one place to the other, and there’s so much room for things to happen in the meantime.
And it’s a powerful enough change that there’s so much material there to work with, even just as vignettes: stories of the last generation of children growing up, before human reproduction was suppressed. Stories of the six-hour war, and its aftermath. Stories of relocation and what has happened to the rest of the world’s cities, of the founding and organization of the resistance. Of the first waves of Overwatch soldiers to be processed. Of the history of the Public Safety cadre. Of the establishment of Nova Prospekt, and the construction of the Citadel. Of the Stalker program. Of other rebellions in other cities, and the Combine reaction. Of what the Vortegaunts have been up to in the meantime. Of how the Combine started weaponizing headcrabs.
Of the Combine conquests of the other races in their empire, specifically the assimilation of the Dropships, Striders, and Hunters. Or even some backstory on the Nihilanth and Zen. And what led to that.
The Half-Life universe does have some very strong characters, but Gordon Freeman isn’t really one of them. But the fact that most of the supporting characters are supporting characters means that they’re easier to work with, especially if you’re working with vingnettes. Stories of Alyx growing up under Combine rule, for instance. Or the construction of Dog, or campaigns by Colonel Odessa Cubbage.
There are a lot of stories to tell there, and I would really, really like to see some of them make it into print.
That ME panel looks so much worse than the game. They should have done it in-engine.
Probably the only game comic I want to read would be based on Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Zombie Ninja Pro-Am. Terrible game but I like the characters from their TV show…
Also: Monkey Island. Actually, anything where you can just add funny dialog. Which you can do almost anywhere, look at Red Vs Blue. If some guy rewriting the same panel every day can make Dinosaur Comics one of my favourite websites you could make a brilliant graphic novel out of Geometry Wars.
Can anyone else see the damn comic?
IGN’s gallery is severely broken for me.
Scratch that, found a copy on facebook of all places.
The Internet: Providing content redundancy since 1902
Bah, I’m too lazy to read through 62 comments to see if this has been said before. Also, I’ll feel severely disappointed if I discover everyone else is just more clever than me. Enlightened to the truth perhaps, but severely disappointed.
Why not build on the vibe of the initial game instead of using the established material.
For instance, Deus Ex is a “car crash” of conspiracy theories mixed in with as many nanotech sci-fi as can possible be achieved. There can be a number of such stories that invoke such a vibe without impugning on the Deus Ex franchise directly. Throw Denton under the bus (I know you want to) and re-create another world from scratch drawing on the same inspiration that Ion Storm drew on to make Deus Ex. The Japs do this all the time and they often create some really compelling and original stories. (Cowboy Bebop for instance.)
Or similarly Thief, where the world is large and interesting enough that Garrett doesn’t have to be a central character. I might be persuaded to read a bunch of comics that feature interesting characters that have been affect by Garrett’s larcenous actions. A story about a keeper, a hammerite, one of those steam engineers, another thief or a sheriff. If anything, the cradle from Thief III suggests that there are characters and stories that are compelling enough to sideline Garrett for the moment. The game itself comes chockful of atmosphere and backstory that it can be used to be build other characters, not just Garrett himself.
I suspect the main problem of most games to comics/any other medium translation is simply that the amount of material created for the game isn’t enough to support the weight of a narrative in other mediums. Most games get away with minimal amount of story in order for you to go ahead and shoot things, save princesses or what not. They end up being a hodgepodge of conventions designed to get you to interact, rather than attempt to create a manifold world which things can happen. I say this as a fan of Stalker, fallout, Thief, etc, which do. Games like God of War, Zelda, Gears of War, Deadspace, and even Half-Life create only enough to shuffle the player through and don’t really inspire much beyond that. (Apologies to fanfics writers of those though, who wouldn’t wanna see Kratos versus Link in a head to head fight?)
Also, what about Bioshock. Any chance of a redeeming comic story there?
Already beaten the No One Lives Forever suggestion, so I’ll put forth the EarthSiege/StarSiege/Tribes universe. Extremely well detailed, and in StarSiege introduced several key and well defined characters who could work equally well as supporting cast for a writer created protagonist, or could be the leads in their own stories (those would have to take place during the time between the second EarthSiege and StarSiege, since StarSiege dictates most of what happens with them). The Tribes timeline is somewhat more flexible, since Vengeance was the only game that really integrated Tribes with the *Siege universe narratively, and there is the whole ‘Chase’ period that the Starsiege: 2845 project was going to be about.
I do think lumping No On Lives Forever in with Austin Power is selling it short. Yeah, they’re both sixties spy-spoofs, but there’s a sense that the characters take themselves seriously in NOLF that’s completely missing in Austin Powers. NOLF2 bordered on being a straight spy thriller, albeit with a 60s ethos, for large stretches.
Ultimately I’d say that Bioshock is too definite a statement on the world and events of Rapture for there to be much room for new stories there. You could probably get some milieage out of viewing the rise and fall from other citizen’s point of view, but that’s about it.
Ginger Yellow: I admit, if I was going to do it, I’d go for WE3-vision rather than Dorian’s Subjective motion.
valiumaddict: Problem with buying a licence and then throwing it all away – especially if you mean the whole thing in the case of Deus Ex… well, why by the licence anyway?
KG
parse – I do not think it means what you think it means. (And yes, I do understand metaphors)
Other than that, I enjoyed the words. Please keep extruding them.
I think I probably meant “essay”, which is probably not right either. That’s what you get when you hammer out 2000 words for no good reason. But thanks!
KG
Sorry, the word “parse” always jumps out at me, I’m not sure why.
I wish I could think of a good game universe with latitude for stories now… um…. Laser Squad!? Not much of a universe to it, but there is some intriguing stuff here
Beyond Good & Evil. Strong characters, good set for detective capers, varied characters providing for multi-layered plots and spin-offs. Varied world’s and environments to be explored.
We3’s dozens-of-little-frames approach is pretty visually distinctive. It’s definitely a “do not overuse” item. At least with subjective motion the eye would be drawn in naturally enough that you wouldn’t notice if it pops up a lot. In color I imagine blur streaks or other “visual information overload artifacts” would be the equivalent because actual speed lines are more difficult to get away with outside of a stark black and white presentation. These motion indicators being as subtle or exaggerated as the situation requires. The point being that it blends in with the rest of the information on the page to create a sense of motion.
Come to think of it, Quitely did do precisely this. Not with the thumbnail-storm splashes but with blur, perspective, and even in-action objects (weather conditions providing natural “speed lines”). Which, I suspect, is why some people had been describing We3 using the phrase “Western manga,” much to the annoyance of more than a few who take that as an insult.
A means to depict motion in stillness should be like the word “said,” in the sense that it slips into the text without drawing too much attention to itself.
But We3-ism is great for visceral effect. Like the VATS system. Though that gets old with overuse, too. That said, creating a mosaic of action using a splattering of miniature images each with one piece of the action puzzle makes for a compelling mental image. Something about both incomplete information and too-much-information colliding, I think explains it.
Granted, I wouldn’t envy her or her artist either, but a bit of blur would’ve been useful. There’s blur in the game, too. Mostly in the periphery of the POV, but it’s enough to help give a real sense of speed and body to the play.
Ed: Sorry – that was meant to be a genuine thanks. I’d totally write a Laser Squad comic.
KG
A comic starring the Commandos cast (1 through 3, natch), in the style of the old ‘Daring Heroics of WW2!’ comics would be wonderful. Ah well.
Apparently Mark Millar (of unbearable tryhard comics fame) wrote a Streets of Rage comic as a backup feature in the Sonic comics once. As a slight Streets of Rage tragic, I’d be disappointed that I can’t find it, but… it’s Millar, so what would I miss, really?
“I’m a totally badass anal rapist! Isn’t that badass? I could really go for some rape right about now! Anal rape!”
“Axel, you can’t go raping right now, we just got a message from the commissioner! Mr X is threatening to ejaculate his spunk on the mayor’s face!”
“No-one ejaculates their spunk in this stinking, little town but ME! Let’s go and rape his ass! Come on, Adam!”
[Adam walks in, adorned with nipple clamps and a ball-gag] “Mff-ff-mff!”
“This is so edgy! I’m going to decapitate a transsexual prostitute!”
…Actually, the transsexual bit’s more ‘latter-day Garth Ennis’…
James T, I was just about to mention Sonic the Comic. Definitely the best non-game use of the Sonic characters (and in fact, better than most of the post-Mega Drive games, too). OK, so nostalgia probably plays a part, but at its best it was genuinely great, and even the rest of the time it was better than 95% of children’s film/TV/game tie-in comics.
Nigel Kitching writing, Richard Elson drawing, Nigel Dobbyn colouring. What a team!
Mick McMahon of Judge Dredd fame also worked on the comic, although most of its readers (including me) didn’t really appreciate his art at the time. He was great on the hilarous strip based on Decap Attack, but his style really didn’t suit Sonic at all…
That strip can be read here.
There were also a couple of series of Ecco the Dolphin, which are available here.
Eternal Champions, Shining Force and Shinobi were the other major Sega games to get their own strips.
DYNAMITE!
But yeah. Comics and movies and novels all seem totally apt for conveying rulesets.
The most important part of this is that you have not played Sam and Max!!!!