Unspeakable Horror!

What does writing poetry have to do with writing comics?

Long before I wrote my first comic book script (long before I even started reading comics, in fact), I studied to be a poet.  I loved studying poetry and being an English Major so much, I got two Literature degrees (now I teach Literature at the local college, and I recently published my first book of poetry, The Pop-Up Book of Death).  When I started writing scripts for Bluewater and really started to get into the world of comics, much to my surprise, I discovered that reading and writing poetry and reading and writing comics share a lot of the same pleasures. 

You might be thinking: poetry and comics couldn't be more different!

Of course, in a lot of ways they are different, but they share one primary, all-defining characteristic: The Visual Image!

A great comic book depends on exciting visual images for storytelling, and really great poetry depends on exciting visual images in the form of metaphors.  In a comic book, the artist draws the images on the page; in a poem, the poet creates mind-pictures in the form of metaphors, combining two different things together to create one fantastical mental image.

A lot of poetry contains stories just like comic books (even if those stories are difficult to interpret sometimes).  Most of my poems contain stories, and many of the oldest storytelling in the world is written in poetic forms.  Take for example, The Odyssey and Beowulf.  Those are two poems that couldn't be more like comics books: both depict great heroes facing monsters and insurmountable odds to complete trials and quests.