Previous Post Imagine that some of the great writers of the past were alive today and wanted to work in the comic-book industry. Which work-for-hire mainstream titles would you put them on? (And no, you can’t put Robert E. Howard on Conan, for example, cool as that would be; it has to be something they’ve not done before) Here’s the talent pool to deploy. Say where you’d place them and what their first story arc might be: Dashiel Hammett (Sam Spade etc) Howard Phillip Lovecraft (Call of Cthulhhu et al) Edgar Allen Poe (Murders in the Rue Morgue et al) Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan, John Carter etc) Frank Herbert (Dune etc) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes, The Lost World etc) Sheridan Le Fanu (Carmilla (the vampire) and lots of other ghost stories) Robert E. Howard (Conan, Solomon Kane etc.) Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist et al) J.R.R. Tolkein (The Lord of the Rings etc) William Shakespeare (Macbeth, Hamlet etc) And just to make it interesting, what other writer who was born before 1920 would you pick to write: New Avengers Captain America Superman Astro City Star Wars Buffy Pet Avengers

...because in my own personal experience, there's a huge rift between writing in freeform text and writing in visual format. It's why most books converted to movie need a screenwriter, someone experienced with a visual style.

The advantages are it's easier to portray background idiosyncrasies, multiple people speaking at once with no real order to it (and leave the reader to figure out the order) and multiple events occurring at the same exact time.

It's much more difficult to convey emotion in a visual format. Text allows you to spend more time on a particular feeling or event, visual formats demand you move on because it has a different sense of timing. But at the same time, comic format has a unique advantage shared with movies - you can use color and lighting to convey those same feelings without any words at all.

That said, I actually believe Frank Herbert would be terrible in a visual format without some training. Or, for the most part, anyone who has a very technical, wordy style might have problems converting to the other style. The same with the classical Charles Dickenns, and probably Tolkien as well.

I believe the shining stars of comic/visual format out of your list would be: Edgar Allen Poe, who used words to paint visuals that I believe he would have physically painted if he had the chance (because of his repeated emphasis of certain themes about it); and not really surprisingly, William Shakespere, who originally wrote most of his works to be acted out on a stage - that format converts nicely to comic format.