Proper Critique: Gay-Coding

One thing that’s really starting to get annoying is the need to find context that supports your group. Now, I can respect fully analyzing something, adding subtext that simply does not exist is something that should be avoided. For some reason, there seems to be a lot of this with gay critiques, especially when it comes to so-called “gay coding”.

“Gay coding” refers to situations where the characters appear straight, but where closer examination shows that they are actually gay. Consider the standard sitcom set up where you have two boys that may have girlfriends or are otherwise girl-crazy, but tend to spend far too much with each other. Obviously the two boys must be gay, and the girls are just for the benefit of homophobes in the audience, as well as to inspire hope in the girls watching; “They have girlfriends, so they can’t be gay, right? Winkwinknudgenudge.”

The problem is that this commonly adds far too much subtext where it simply does not belong. Consider Tom and Huck; you have two boys that tend to swim together, play together, and basically spend most of the book making fun of the girls. Obviously the two boys are gay, and Becky Thatcher was added just to make it look like it was a heterosexual romance. It gets more interesting in Huck’s book, as Huck floats down the river with a black male and has encounters with other males, such as the Dauphin and a few local boys throughout the book. The problem is that the “encounters” are hardly sexual by any stretch, and the gay subtext is being added simply to make Huck more of a gay hero.

Now, I appreciate the need for heroes; part and parcel of being a writer and all that. However, this does not mean that every person needs to be gay; adding a gay subtext is sometimes adding too much, especially when it is something that the author did not intend; sometimes the critique even notes that sometimes the author’s intent should be ignored as the author may have had reason to disguise his “real” intent. This means that perfectly straight boys and girls are all of a sudden gay because it suits someone’s sexual-political aims, and there is something wrong with that.

For the drinking game: I’m in a weird position here. There are sometimes when the author intended for there to be some homosexual subtext, especially if he is subverting a genre. Usually, however, there isn’t any such subtext. Just as in real life, two guys, or girls, should be able to have a perfectly fine bond as two people without their being any expectations of sex; sex should not be a part of every relationship, and in all honesty should be a part of very few relationships. Life is not a CW show, and that’s a good thing; there does not need to be sex in every relationship. As a writer you should be free to explore all sorts of relationships, and requiring them to be sexual actually limits you.

Keep this in mind when you are analyzing a comic. Make sure that there really is the subtext that you see there, and that it’s not something you are adding to it. Yeah, sometimes it may be there, placed as a way to subvert the genre, but this should not be seen as a bad thing; just be aware that it may not always be what it looks like. Not everyone is having sex, and sometimes it’s not who you would expect…

How I Outline

I have a pretty basic way on how I outline my stories. An outline helps keep you organized; even if you are constantly updating it, it acts as something you can refer to, and works to help keep you motivated. After all, it acts like a checklist; once you complete a scene or a page you can check it off the list and go on to the next scene. It’s not that hard, and it may even help with your stories.

First thing I do is figure out the characters you are going to need. This can vary depending on the story, so I’m not going to worry about the specific characters. However, it can help to list the characters, create a chart of their physical characters (height, weight, eyes, hair, skin, et cetera) to better visualize the characters in question. I also set up a relationship chart; this helps me figure out what how characters react to one another and also helps to suggest scenes later on. Also, by defining what they look like and how they react to one another, it helps to cement them in your mind. I also usually assign letters to each character to make outlining this monster easier. If I notice that there are teams, I’ll use a number to differentiate between teams and/or sub-teams.

I next figure out how many scenes I need. I usually go for 40-60 scenes, which is how many scenes there are in a movie. This also works out to about to about two pages a scene, so I know I’m looking at about 80-120 pages of script. It may sound like a lot, but that’s how long a graphic novel is or about four to six regular comics. For webcomics, that can also be almost forty weeks, or nine months, of updates, assuming two to three updates a week. As such it is not a bad target number.

I break it down to the main plot, two subplots, and a running gag or three. The main plot usually consists of about thirty scenes, each subplot about ten each, and running gags only need three or four scenes each. Breaking it down further, the main plot is going to last about five scenes for the first and third acts, and about twenty for the second act. The subplots should be about three scenes to set them up, five scenes to build them up, and then two scenes to finish them. The gags should take a scene to set up, one or two to build up, and one punchline scene.

I usually write very short summaries; a typically scene looks like “A meets B, C, D” or “1 fights 3”. I’ll also debate the emotional weight of the scene, usually positive or negative, which helps with setting up rhythms. I will go through and do this for the main plot and each subplot or running gag. Once I do that, I can then start mixing things together. I know that the best rhythm is for a positive scene to follow a negative one, and so I’ll try to set that pattern up. I also know that I can string together two scenes of like weight, as long as the emotion is similar; if two scenes are negative because of the anger, putting them together not only works, but intensifies the emotion.

So that’s how I outline. It gets really weird quickly, but at least it keeps me sane…

Making a meal out of snacks

Okay, so I just finished watching the “Misfits” and so I got thinking: How could it have been done better? “Misfits” is a show where some kids doing community service get powers by being out in a storm. They get some pretty powerful abilities, but by the end of the second season those powers have been downgraded. It ends up being one of those gritty teen dramas where they explore powers and their various uses and abuses. It being gritty means that there is plenty of sex and swearing.

And then it hit me: The sex and swearing. One of those things that’s sort of amusing is how much people think that sex and swearing are getting a bit out of hand. At one point they actually five character refer to male genitalia as another word for “rooster” a few dozen times in a few minutes in a story arc about one man’s quest to find a missing appendage. What got interesting was how many times sex featured in a story arc during the four seasons; they have some fun with it, don’t get me wrong, but it gets sort of boring after a bit.

This is not to make me sound like a prude or anything, but it’s really amazing when you realize that just how much writers depend on shock value to sell their product. More to the point, it’s weird when you realize just how much it takes to shock people any more. The problem is that too many shows, movies, or especially comics rely on straight shock value in order to sell it rather than the story or the artwork. It’s almost as if they didn’t listen to the people who actually have a successful product and just went, “What can we get the characters to do?”

The catch here is that you need to really debate just how dependent on sex, swearing, and even violence your comic. You don’t need to make an all ages comic; you can still have plenty R-rated elements in your comic. The only question is are you putting too many of them in? Are they slowing your comic down? When I’m watching “Misfits” it’s sort of great how many of those elements they had, but they had to skimp on some story and it showed. They decided on the sex and all that, but that limited them in terms of story. Because of that dependence on sex and, um…sex-based powers it’s going to be a well-remembered series, but hardly a classic.

It’s going to be forgotten within months of its last show at this rate. If it had been a comic, it would have been forgotten a lot sooner. It would have to get more shocking in order to survive, and it’s lease on life wouldn’t last much longer; there’s only so shocking it can get before people get bored with it. More successful comics may start with some shocks, but they quickly get over it, and throwing more story, more characterizing, and generally more world-building. They may still have a measure of the shocking elements, but they learn to leaven them with denser stuff. By doing so they become a better read, more filling as it were, and so people gravitate towards that. As people prefer meals to snacks, they’ll prefer the more filling comics.

Well, it’s time to listen to the successful people. Have all the sex, nudity, swearing, and violence you want, just make sure that they serve the story not some perverse desire. If you want you strip to get beyond its niche, you’re going to need to make some basic decisions. Note that I’m not asking you to sell out; what I’m asking is to what degree do you really need the shock value? If you’re doing the comic for yourself, then do whatever you want. But if you want to the comic to really take off, you may have to discard some of the garbage in order to make a decent run of it.

Should you include characters just for the sake of including them?

Consider the Planeteers for a moment. It’s a multi-racial group of kids serving the greater good; each has a power ring giving them control over an elemental force that when combined creates a guardian of the planet. There were three boys, two girls, with an Asian, a native South American, a black African, and two Caucasians; a more heterogeneous group you are unlikely to find. However, they do raise an interesting question: Is there a reason to include every gender and race in your story just for the sake of inclusiveness?



The problem is that too many people worry about political correctness. There is a fear among far too many writers that by excluding a particular group the writer seems to be racist, sexist, homophobic, whatever. The obvious reaction to this is to create a character that has the appropriate qualities and is likely to relieve the fear of being exclusive. The problem, however, is that having a character just for the sake of providing a character with the given qualities is likely to ensure that you will not really care for the character and it's likely to show in your writing.



This means that you have a character that is there for no real purpose beyond making someone else happy, and that is something you should never has as a writer. Every character should fulfill a purpose in the story, be it to drive the story, to serve a symbolic purpose, or even as the expository focus. A character that is there just for color may as well be little more than the background, and eventually you will be treating that character precisely as that. Worse, he will drag the story downand the fans will notice. Worse, those that were drawn to the comic because of that character will get tired of the comic, and will soon start spreading a negative word about the comic, nailing you for precisely the reason that they should.



Now, if you use the character so that the character serves a purpose, go for it. Do not feel as if you need to use the character a particular way, such as having the black person inject some level of urban cred into the comic. Kwame, the black kid of the Planeteers, was pretty much a waste because he served no real purpose in the group; it's almost as if they tried him in every position and it just didn't fit. Compare to Wheeler being the leader of the group, Linka being the voice of reason, Gi was the brains, and Ma-Ti was the passionate one. Kwame tried to be the leader but he was virtually ignored in that role and Wheeler ended up taking over the role. As such he came off as a token character in a multi-cultural group; he should have focused more on being the equipment guy as that niche needed filling.



The bottom line is that only include a character is you have an internal reason to have that character around; otherwise cut the waste off before it becomes waste. At the same time, if you do include a character for the purposes of multi-cultural consideration, do not feel obligated to use that character in a stereotypical fashion; feel free to have a black character who is a doctor rather than an ex-street thug. They are your characters; feel free to have some fun with them and use them as they best serve the story, not some idiotic sense of racial guilt that almost always ends up messing things up. Your characters should be guilt free for maximum effect, not minimized to serve some stupid token use.