AMA: Balancing storylines

Q.: With so many great characters and so many interesting storylines, how do you balance the A Story, B Story, C Story, etc?  Do you have specific cliffhangers in mind to leave them at before swapping, or do you try to wrap up individual threads before moving on, or is it more of a page/time thing of switching on a schedule so that everything can stay fresh?  And do you have a clear finish in mind when you start them, or is it more free-form and rotating to the next story when you need time to come up with direction on the previous one.

A.: There's a lot of my approach to storytelling that has been shaped by twelve years of doing a daily comic strip. See, when you're doing a daily strip, you're looking at about 260 strips per year, for as many years as you can possibly produce.

When you're taking on a task like that, you learn a few tricks. One of them is to always leave a loose thread that you can go back to. I had a running list in my sketchbook. If I ever got stuck, I could always go back to an old storyline, tug at that thread, and start filling weeks again!

It's a good strategy. There's only one, little problem: If you keep leaving loose threads all over the place, you're not resolving any conflicts. And conflict-resolution is at the heart of good storytelling. Readers want to see those conflicts settled — for good or for ill.

In 2012, when I switched from a comic-strip format to a graphic novel, I had to break some bad habits. Speaking honestly, it took a couple years. Now, I have some pretty definite ideas for where these stories are going. Each chapter has two storylines running concurrently that advance the plot towards the end I have in mind. And most of those storylines feature some solid resolution.

Kicking and screaming

And if I'm being brutally honest, I have to drag myself kicking and screaming to do that. Because strips are forever. And the kind of storytelling I'm doing now has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And that's frightening.

What happens when I've resolved all of the major conflicts in Evil Inc? It will be time to decide an entirely new direction. It might be a new interpretation of Evil Inc. It might be that we shift the story to a new branch with new characters (and cameos of old characters). It might mean starting an entirely new comic — Captain Scarr has serious potential. So does the world of the Real Housewives of Transylvania.

And that's terrifying. It's not that I don't have options. Rather, it's the fact that for the first time in my 20+ year career, I'll be weighing those options.