Welcome to ACES WEEKLY Volume 31, Week Three!

I'm lucky enough to get lots of great work submitted to Aces Weekly for potential publication, but amongst it I often see work that isn't fully-tailored for the medium of comics storytelling, but is squeezed into it and cut to shape. There are two main reasons for this, I think.  Firstly, it's because comics occupy the lowest rung of the entertainment ladder, and thus are naturally a first target for those who want to climb higher with a story they originally intended as a screenplay, and, secondly, in an industry where traditional tight comics storytelling has been ditched to enable overlong story arcs to dominate the market, the style of scripting that's attached to those stories - which often have the length of a screenplay! - has become a norm. There's lots of instructional material around that preaches the model of good concise comics storytelling but as creators are, and will always be, influenced by the things that they see and enjoy in art or entertainment around them, they naturally want to duplicate those in their own work.  Unconsciously, if not consciously, creators take lessons from those things rather than from better examples they should learn from.  The key study of comics creation are the key texts of the simplest comics creation. They're the foundation you can use to build anything!  Start there, work on that, and you can't go wrong.  Trust me : )

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