An interview with Devin Grayson

A Shameless web exclusive

By Shane Dingman

Continued from page 7

Another example of an outline is what DC calls the “six month outline” — this is for a regular series, and is just a kind of beat sheet demarcating the general direction of the book:

ISSUE #87: SNOWBALL
JAN, 2004
Artist: Zircher

A PLOT: Dick is on a date with Barbara trying to woo her back when she comes under attack by Blockbuster hirelings — including Tarantula! If Tarantula’s baffled as to why she was sent after a chick in a wheelchair, Dick is even more so — why are they after Babs!? — but of course rushes in to save her without a second thought.

B PLOT: ...which pisses off Barbara, whose ability to defend herself is negatively impacted by Dick’s inability to stand down. She’s tired of having to tell him she can take care of herself, tired of his ceaseless energy, and tired, too, of his ex-and/or-potential-psycho-love-interests-in-costume. Later, when Tarantula reports back to Blockbuster he asks for confirmation that Dick Grayson’s girlfriend is dead. “No,” Tarantula tells him, “it’s better than that — she broke up with him.” Final image in book is Nightwing sitting on a Blüdhaven rooftop somewhere looking lonely and forlorn.

PUT INTO PLAY: Hint that Blockbuster (or Tarantula) seems to know Nightwing’s secret ID.

ACTION QUOTIENT: Kicking-ass and taking names Oracle-style — that is, until Dick Grayson jumps in to defend his girlfriend.

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT: Dick and Babs officially break up here (although real-life style they aren’t completely done with each other yet — read on). Blockbuster shifts into high gear, foregoing the caution and subtly of a behind-the-scenes kingpin to embrace the high-level-personal-vengeance-psychosis of a full-fledged nemesis super-villain.

ISSUE #88: FLURRY
FEB, 2004
Artist: Zircher

A PLOT: Dick receives a frantic call from Irving Carberry, current accountant for Haly’s Circus — they’ve been picked up for a televised holiday special, but their star flyer was just found dead of an overdose. Sensing something awry, Dick agrees to help out, hoping to solve the mystery of the flyer’s death. By the time the filming of the special performance is commencing, he’s certain it was, indeed, a homicide...a hunch confirmed when, in the middle of his performance, a huge fire breaks out in the big tent. Though he’s able to heroically save many lives, Dick looses his circus, many of his performers, several animals, and even patrons and film crew. Dick is so distraught by this larger-than-life repeat of his worst memory and so determined to get everyone safely out that it’s one the animals — Zitka, an elephant he cared for in his youth (B:TAS cont) — who finally drags him, unconscious from smoke inhalation, out of the conflagration.

B PLOT: Feeling that he failed to protect the circus, Nightwing shows up at Babs’ place forlorn and radiating need. Against her better judgment, she lets him in. She still loves the guy.

PUT INTO PLAY: Another Blockbuster strike against Nightwing, not that Nightwing (or the reader) necessarily know that’s what’s going on yet.

ACTION QUOTIENT: Fire, explosions, animal stampedes...man, this could almost be an episode of E.R.!

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT: Dick takes another devastating — and personal — blow. We gotta be in high gear by now.

Etc....

Both those examples cover multiple issues, but you don’t sit down to write multiple issues, you sit down to write one. Here’s an example of an outline I wrote years ago for a Gotham Knights script:

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