It’s a jam-packed show this week! Brad and Dave argue over the better delivery for story exposition — dialogue or narration. Dave is discontinuing international shipping; Brad gets his Wikipedia updates; and the guys agree that Dee Fish does autobio comics right. Then Dave does another behind-the-scenes analysis of his recent Kickstarter, talking about his pricing strategy for stretch goals and how they processed hundreds of images for the campaign. Finally, with the SFWA opening their membership to comic creators, they discuss whether they should join.

Today’s show

• Narration or Dialogue?
• Susan McTaggart’s personal affirmation
• UPDATE: International shipping
• UPDATE: Brad’s Wikipedia page
• UPDATE: Autobio comics done right: Finding Dee
• Dave’s Kickstarter Stretch Goals
• Dave’s Kickstarter images
• SFWA membership

Kishōtenketsu (起承転結, pronounced “kee-show-ten-ketsu”) is a traditional plot structure in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean literature and poetry, derived from the classical Chinese four-line poems. But there’s a twist. Instead of relying on conflict — which lies at the heart of several Western story archetypes (like the Three-Act Structure) — the four acts of Kishōtenketsu rely on a reinterpretation of the plot’s initial set-up. If this sounds exotic and outlandish — it’s not. You’re more familiar with this technique than you might be aware.

Kishōtenketsu, syllable by syllable

Each syllable of the word Kishōtenketsu stands for a part of the process. The four acts of Kishōtenketsu are:

• Introduction (ki) establishes the main characters and their setting.
• Development (sho) deepens the reader’s understanding / emotional attachment to characters.
• Twist (ten) introduces an unexpected and significant change to the setting and to the characters’ lives.
• Conclusion (ketsu) brings together and reconciles the first two acts with the changes of the third.

Misdirection

If you’re familiar with humor writing, this is not unlike the concept of Misdirection. Using misdirection, writing can point the reader in one direction and then pull the rug out from under them — to achieve a comedic effect. It works like this:

I’ve been writing longform comics on the Web for ten years. Building and maintaining my audience requires a consistent posting schedule. But how can I take the necessary time to craft a compelling storyline and continue posting every week? It’s a bit of a juggling act, but I’ve developed a system that makes it manageable. I’m going to open up my sketchbook and show you how can plan your story ahead of time and continue writing while you’re producing pages.

It’s part of the comics lexicon familiar to manga and manhwa readers: an inverted word-balloon tail indicating that the speaker is off-panel. Should you use it in your comics?

On a recent episode of ComicLab, Dave Kellett shared the real numbers from the Kickstarter campaign for his latest book, “Anatomy of Dinosaurs.” Some of those analytics reinforce long-held truths — for example, Kickstarter continues to dominate in using internal mechanisms to maximize backers through its platform. However, there was one big surprise: Bluesky outperformed Twitter, Instagram and Facebook in delivering pledges — by a jaw-dropping margin.