What basic lessons learned in high school English are applicable to comic writing?
DAVID: I try not to bore my students too much with, “Oh, Mr. Hopkins writes comic books, so let’s all read Ultimate Spider-Man for homework.” However, in high school, learning how to communicate clearly in your writing and how to identify and enjoy good literature — it’s essential to being a writer in any medium. Everybody has ideas, but you need to translate those ideas into something others understand — and that’s what I spend a lot of time teaching in class. Art-wise, Tom, how does your process work? What do you do first? TOM: David sends me the script and I (being obsessive-compulsive) divide it into manageable sections, which basically fall on the scene changes. If a character is introduced that we haven’t seen before, I do some sketching to get a good idea of what he or she will look like. If there’s a location that will play a crucial role, I lay out some rough blueprints. David’s great about providing reference photos, so I work from those. After all of the preliminary work, I
