Today in our making manga series we are going to talk about writing dialogue.

Dialogue is essential to convey conversations in your manga. For graphic noise I am in the process of writing the novel that will contain the story. When you write dialogue for a novel you have more space and time to convey your thoughts. This is not always the case in manga, you need to distill the dialogue down to its essential parts to ensure there is space enough for what you want to convey.

Narration which you can have in a novel also may need to be left out of a manga or graphic novel length story. Not so much because it is not necessary but the images in the story that will be in the manga can convey some of the feeling of the narration. In the novel if it says “by a tree on the hill in the countryside” you can actually draw a tree on a hill in the country to convey what would have been stated in the narration.

graphic noise will take place in New York City so there will be many opportunities to show cityscapes. This will heighten the feeling of the story and make it more urban if there are scenes of taxis, subway trains, buses, high rise buildings and coffee shops. Some of these will be difficult I know but I want to get the right feel across.

But back to dialogue. Because I am writing the novel first I will have all the dialogue down. When I did the manga A Storm’s Coming which was based on a short story, all the dialogue was written and it was just a matter of taking the actual speech and distilling it down to its most essential pieces. Some of the dialogue was exactly the same as the book. I wanted to keep it true to the story. Other scenes which took 3-4 pages in the short story had to take a single page or even a single frame in the manga.

Now in the manga A Storm’s Coming because the main character in the story was a 16 year old speaking with a Zone Police officer I had to make the dialogue believable for both parties. The Zone Police officer would speak with more authority and the kid since he could get rounded up off the street while he was hanging out on the sidewalk and panhandling might be curt with the officer.

For example:

From the Novel grydscaen: tribute (Xander Storm): “Here is a bottle of 190 pills, don’t ration. Come find me immediately when you need. Understand? And check out this Packrat thing, they might be good for you.”

From the manga (Xander Storm): “Take this. I have been carrying around a prescription for 190 iodine pills for a while. I told you not to ration.”

As you can see the dialogue for the manga is shorter.

Another example:

From the novel grydscaen: tribute (Shopkeeper): “These are both Mizuaoi, the white one is water the green one is tea. They are both free of radiation. That will be 500 credits.”

From the manga (Shopkeeper): “Mizuaoi is free of radiation. That will be 500 credits.”

As you can see the essential parts of the dialogue are still there but it has been shortened to better fit the format. Since pictures play such a pivotal role lets talk about these two scenes and the images that go with them. In the Mizuaoi example, the shop keeper is in front of the cooler pulling out a bottle of Mizuaoi and then there is a close up of the bottle which says it is water. In the novel this description has to be baked into the context around the dialogue but in the manga you can show the images to help convey the meaning making it easier for readers to understand the context of the dialogue.

Now when I was working on the graphic novel for grydscaen  beginnings I took the novel and actually wrote a script with location blocking and camera moves. This was helpful since I used the original dialogue from the novel and distilled it down to bite size pieces that could be consumed. I think there were more liberties taken with the graphic novel than with the manga because the words had to fit the scene.

Some people find writing dialogue challenging. Not so much for me. For me getting the characters consistent across panels and getting the backgrounds in are more of a challenge. For graphic noise because the characters are very distinct I know that I will have to change my drawing style a little to suit the medium. We will go into backgrounds in another post.

But as you can see dialogue is important to your story. If you write it out ahead of time it will be easier to distil it down to its essential elements to fit into your manga.