The Making of City of Lies
Behind-the-scenes of the NORMIE prequel comic
Publishing NORMIE, my dystopian novel, through this digital newsletter allows me to experiment.
Free subscribers get the full novel for free.
Paid subscribers get access to additional story-related content:
An official soundtrack
A prequel comic called “City of Lies”
In this post, I want to focus on the development of the NORMIE prequel comic:
Let’s take a look at how the comic was developed:
Why a comic?
Comics are interesting to me because they’re an exercise in long-form storytelling.
Readers could follow a particular character for hundreds of issues across different titles.
In 2023, I randomly bought an entire trade paperback collection of Brian Michael Bendis’ original run of “Ultimate Spider-Man” on Ebay. I’d had a couple issues as a kid and remembered enjoying them, so I jumped at the opportunity when I saw the low price the collection was going for online. I ended up binging the series. It was fascinating to see how Bendis was able to develop the characters over 130+ issues.
In particular, the Clone Saga was one of the craziest and most entertaining things I’ve ever read:
I hope to be writing my own stories for many more years and would be interested in developing certain characters across different titles and storytelling mediums. Comics would be an interesting way to continue telling stories, maybe continuing to offer them as additional content for paid subscribers? They’re not exactly cheap to produce. Especially when you can’t draw.
Finding a collaborator:
I can’t draw. At all. And that’s a big roadblock if you want to create a comic.
Though never having created a comic in the past (besides scribbles in a notebook as a kid), I thought I’d attempt to write and draw one myself. And then have someone come in to redo it with suitable artwork.
I went to Fiverr.com to look for a freelancer to work with.
The work of a freelancer named @mike71994 instantly jumped out at me.
Here is one of the examples featured on his page:
The talent speaks for itself.
The script:
I did some research into how comics are produced and found a script format.
It ended up taking days to put everything together. I thought it would be easy, but it turns out a lot of thought goes into creating a comic. You need to strip a story down to its basic actions.
I’ll link my full script here:
A comic script requires detailing each page with its separate panels and providing descriptions of the scene, as well as dialogue/narration.
Most comic writers don’t feature any of their own artwork in a script, but I went about actually drawing a version of the comic myself to make things as clear as possible for Mike.
You’re going to laugh at my work 😂
But it’s all good in the end because @mike71994 was able to translate my scribbles and create something of actual artistic quality.
I’ll show you each page: first my version and then Mike’s.
Cover:
The cover was inspired by the Batman and Daredevil covers below:
Page 1:
Page 2:
Page 3:
Page 4:
Page 5:
Aren’t you happy that Mike did the final artwork? 😂
I think the finished comic turned out great.
I’d love to keep doing creative experiments like this in the future.
For NORMIE there was the soundtrack and comic, do you have any other ideas about what else could be done for future novels? 🤔
I also wrote up a BTS for the NORMIE soundtrack that you can read write here:
All the best,
- C.S.M.
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Your art looks a lot like mine! I wanted to write a comic, and have a few ideas for them, but like you, I wasn't sure how to go about it. I might pursue it once I'm done with my current project.