A big draw for novelists

Ben East

• Last Updated: November 04. 2009 2:58PM UAE / November 4. 2009 10:58AM GMT

The author Stephen King has collaborated on five issues of the new comic series American Vampire. Courtesy DC Comics / Vertigo

A sociopathic cowboy on the run from the law arrives in a dust bowl American town. The saloon regulars barely glance at him at first – they’ve seen his type before. But there’s something strange about the murderous bank-robber Skinner Sweet, something that makes them do a double take: he has fangs.

This detail isn’t steadily revealed over the course of a suspenseful chapter. Instead, the reader can see it because the horror and fantasy author Stephen King’s new book isn’t a book at all. It’s a comic, called American Vampire.

King is joining an intriguing club of well-regarded, best-selling authors who are turning to the graphic form to tell their stories. Jodi Picoult, better known for her emotional melodramas, collaborated with the artist Dustin Weaver in 2006 to tell parts of The Tenth Circle in comic format and ended up writing five issues of Wonder Woman for DC Comics. The His Dark Materials author Philip Pullman – as traditional a storyteller as they come – serialised The Adventures of John Blake in the British comic The DFC, illustrated by John Aggs. And perhaps most interestingly, the Scottish crime novelist Ian Rankin has just published Dark Entries, a collaboration with the comic artist Werther Dell’Edera.

What Dark Entries doesn’t explore, thankfully, are the exploits of a grumpy Scottish detective. Instead, Rankin immersed himself in the comic book world and wrote a story about, er, a grumpy English detective. And if that doesn’t sound like much of a stretch, it’s because Rankin was commissioned by Vertigo (who will also publish American Vampire next year) to give new life to the occult detective John Constantine. Rankin gives the star of the Hellblazer comic series – who incidentally, has a rather hilarious likeness to Sting – a haunted house horror mystery in a reality TV show studio.

King’s relationship to the new comic series American Vampire is similar to Rankin’s. The series creator Scott Snyder – himself a writer rather than an illustrator – asked King if he wanted to be involved. After an initial agreement to work on a couple of issues, King eventually collaborated on five as he became more involved in the kind of gory tale he’s become famous for.

The cover makes it clear that the book is an “And Stephen King” affair rather than a full-blown King creation. But the fact he’s involved at all suggests a cross-pollination of prose and graphical ideas that could lead to incredible storytelling, whatever the genre. Eventually. There’s certainly a sense that we’re not quite there yet. On internet message boards, many comic fans see such big writerly names as nothing more than a marketing gimmick for publishing houses. With Rankin or King on the cover, they can sell more comics or graphic novels to readers who wouldn’t otherwise be seen dead with such material.

The sceptics have a point: writing for this medium requires a skill beyond quickly scribbling a novella packed with superhero cliches and handing it over to someone who will fill in speech bubbles. Rankin admitted, bizarrely, that he had never met the illustrator of Dark Entries. It’s rather like a band collaborating with guest stars over the internet rather than making music in the same room: it’s done often but the soul of the piece – which comes from the creative frisson of poring over material together – is missing.

For now, these forays into the pictorial format are enjoyable diversions for writers in the day-to-day slog of creating their next mainstream hit. Comics played a major part of these author’s childhoods: Batman and Spider-Man were perhaps more important to Rankin than the likes of Oliver Twist. To be asked to write in that format must be something of a treat, but is perhaps not to be taken all that seriously.

In the meantime, the classic graphic novels remain Art Spiegelman’s Maus – the Pulitzer Prize-winning account of his father’s battles to survive the Holocaust – and, of course, Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Both are serial comic strips compiled into one book, which suggests that perhaps the form doesn’t lend itself to, ahem, long, drawn-out stories. And crucially, both were written by people who already knew comics inside out.

Still, King and his peers are having a go, and slowly helping move comics away from the slightly geeky fringes of culture and art.

Next stop? Video games.