Script Doctoring is Needed in Indie Comics
And I'll be your surgeon.
Greetings fiends!
We’re finishing up the KITARU WITCH HUNTER campaign and tomorrow I will be shipping out the last of the orders! This was a smaller campaign I wanted to do but the results have been amazing! Thank you all who supported! I will be posting a free digital version for my paid substack subscribers soon!
Recently I did a controversial review of a comic called YAIRA from Rippaverse Studios and followed it up with a “HOW I WOULD FIX YAIRA” video you can watch here.
I want to post my fixes so people can see what I did to find Yaira’s weakness and then how you can use story structure to fix the character and give her a character arc readers can enjoy. Perhaps we can all learn a little something from Yaira!
FIXING YAIRA
Let’s look at the 3 act structure of the book and determine what went wrong. Why was Yaira such a painfully unfun read?
ACT 1
- Yaira fights off Alphacore - escapes part 1
- Yaira gets a job a projexus and everyone loves her.
- vStephanya commits crimes and gets shot and her powers shoot into the sky which rallies new bad guys.
- INCIDING INCIDENT - Stephanya GETS POWERS and it’s never explained.
- Yaira shows up to KILL Stephanya without questions. Can’t kill her so she decides to help her once the new bad guys show up.
- Yaira takes the bad guys to an oil field and blows it up to escape again. Escape part 2!
- Stephanya is captured by Alphacore
ACT 1 - END POINT - REVERSAL - Stephanya is captured by Alphacore.
ACT 2
- Bad guys release BUGs that don’t really matter to the story.
- Yaira breaks into prison and breaks everyone out for no good reason. Then kills them. She grabs Stephanya and escapes Part 3.
- Yaiura takes Stephanya home but they are attacked by bugs and then Magus who killed Yair’s old lady ancestor.
MIDPOINT - Yaira is nearly killed by Magus and Stephanya runs away hating on Yaira for no good reason again.
- Yaira puts on high heels and escapes Part 4 to go to Projexus to heal herself.
- Yaira teams up with Altona to fix her wounds. Altona doesn’t seem to notice that she’s an alien or question it.
- Yaira creates a storm to draw in Alphacore and her personal foes. They all fight.
- She grabs Stephanya and escapes again. Not shown visually. This is her 5th escape.
- Altona creates THE SCIENCE aka BLACK GIRL MAGIC and kills all the bugs which never really mattered.
- Yaira protects Stephanya again and Stephanya still ends up hating her for no good reason. Altona puts Stephanya into a cell cause she’s a ho.
- Yaira reflects to her past of being a viking with tons of babies but she’s. Big sad cause mortals die. None of them have powers at all. SAD.
ACT 2 - END POINT - REVERSAL - Yaira visits SOLARI and tells him to protect Stephanya and she makes a deal with him to give him Stephanya. She then escapes again for the 6th time.
ACT 3
- Yaira goes to confront her foes for the final battle at a volcano in Iceland. She shoots a laser into the air and they show up for the fight.
- They have their drawn out final battle on the volcano. She ignites the volcano to kill them.
- CLIMAX - ?? She finds a magic sword from her past stuck in the volcano and kills Magus or she tries to stop the volcano from hurting others.
- She tries to stop the volcano from damaging everything but gets beaten back by it and then saved by Neptune and given armor.
- Stephanya joins Alphacore as another asshole and says openly she wants to kill Yaira and Solari says “No no no” but no one takes him seriously as usual.
THE END
The problems:
NO HOOK TO THE STORY or Character. Why should we care?Clunky dialog and way too much of it.Not enough explained.No rising stakes.Flashback was nicest part, but didn’t really hit home. Yaira hurts people and doesn’t care. Why did she even run away? What even was that place? WHERE IS SHE FROM and why leave it? Yaira hurts others to fight or escape too often. Not even a little heroic.NO clear motives for Yaira either. NO real change from Yaira as a character. She still puts everyone in danger to hurt her enemies. The Themes of immortality having a cost and affecting us aren’t too clear or interesting. No real message here.Too many panels bog down the action scenes. Not enough SPLASHES for big moments or reveals.No explanation of how yairas powers awakened in Stephanya.
HOW TO FIX THIS?
FIXES:
OPEN with a HOOK - How about showing Yaira falling to earth for the opening or show her as a viking fighting but give no explanation and cut us into the present?Remove 3/4 of the dialog. No talking during most of the action.Have Alphacore not be evil but just doing their jobs. Have the main bad guys bring in MAGUS later as a last resort to up the ante.Yaira can hurt people at the start and doesn’t care but she comes back to put out the fires with ice after Altona tells her that her husband is out there fighting them.Too many escapes. Cut them down.Give Yaira clear motives of looking for her ancestors, which is also why she gets a job at projexus and explain how her powers awakened in Stephanya.Themes of immortality interwoven with family can be good. Hit that home more with a flashback of Yaira losing her family.LESS PANELS and dialog. MORE BIG ACTION PANELS and SPLASHES for reveals.- Have her and Altona form a bond where she keeps her secret.
THE NEW STRUCTURE TO FIX YAIRA:
ACT 1
- Yaira fighting as a viking in a battle. Cut to today where she has smashed ISOM on a KIA and Alphacore are pissed.
- Yaira escapes alpha core by giving them danger to deal with. So they have to save people. She has LOST her connection with humanity. She will find it later through FAMILY.
- Stephanya works for projexus and studies DNA with Altona. She tests some of her own DNA and discovers something strange inside of it. POWERS.
- INCITING INCIDENT - Through Tech at Projexus Stephanya illegally uses some of their machines and awakens her powers.
- She can’t control them though and they go haywire and create a massive beam away from the Earth.
- Yaira sees it and so do the 2 assholes hunting her from her home planet.
- Yaira approaches Steph and asks where she got her powers and sees that she works for Projexus. Steph uses the powers to get away from Yaira.
- Then Yair’s nemesis’s show up. Two fuckers from her planet that want a full on kill her for leaving her post.
- Yaira fights them only to damage oil pumps and set the place ablaze. He enemies point out that she doesn’t care about the humans yet lives amongst them? It hurts her enemies but at what cost?
ACT 1 END POINT - REVERSAL - Alphacore catches Stephanya and interrogates her about Yaira.
ACT 2
- Yaira goes in to interview for a job with projexus and gets shown around the lower level security levels. She meets Altona.
- She learns about Stephanie’s genetic research and checks her slides, including the ones where she analyzed her own DNA and discovers they are related. She is her ancestor!
- Yaira breaks into the SUPER MAX prison to get Stephanya out but Stephanya doesn’t want to go. The fight with Alphacore leads to some prisoners getting out and mass chaos ensues.
- Yaira tries to take Stephanya with her but she won’t go and choose Alphacore instead. Yaira escapes, wounded.
- Flashback to Yaira fighting as a viking again - her tribe is in peril so she unleashes the powers she has been hiding from them to defend their home. While many are happy the high priests call her an abimation of the Gods and tell her to leave. Her own husband turns on her.
- Yaira’s nemesis are back in their world, beaten up and plotting their new attack. They decide they need the dark arts on their side and of to MAGUS the bug demon to help them. We learn that Yaira was a general on their planet and led their armies to war and without her they suffered great losses. They want her to pay.
- MIDPOINT - MAGUS joins the team. A new threat.
- Yaira works to heal herself when MAGUS arrives and unleashes insects that poison her. She fights him off but the poison is working and killing her.
- Yaira goes to projexus for a cure and falls near death before Altona. Altona helps her make the cure and tells Yaira that her husband is out fighting the fires on the oil fields.
- Yaira is revealed to be a goddess and Altona is shocked but they form a pact to help each other.
- Yaira goes to the oil fields and puts out the fires with her ice magic and strong bursts of icy winds. She cleans up her mess. Alphacore sees her put it out from their spy cameras.
- The villains see this and decide she’s become soft for humans after all.
- Yaira turns herself in to Alphacore so she can tell Steph that they are related and should stick together.
- The villains start attacking the city to smoke Yaira out.
ACT 2 END POINT REVERSAL - Yaira teams up with Alphacore to take down her enemies. The enemies escape and ALphacore are saved by Stephanya using her powers, which will get her a job offer later.
ACT 3
- Yaira lures the villains to the viking territory she used to belong to. She goes to the ancient waterfall and walks through it to find her old viking sword. The only thing that will kill MAGUS is an ice sword.
- She flashes back and we discover why she gave up on humanity. She was cast out of her tribe and had her children taken away from her. After that she wanted nothing to do with connecting to humans again.
- She left the war gods realm to live a life of peace and birthing babies. But after even the humans cast her out, she became cold to them but now through Stephanya, she wants to connect with them again.
- The final battle ensues and the fight leads to them igniting the old volcano.
- CLIMAX - Yaira takes down the baddies but also turns herself into ice and sacrifices herself to stop the volcano and save everyone.
- However she is saved by NEPTUNE after stopping the eruption with her ice form. He was the original rebel.
- Yaira goes to talk to Stephanya but she has decided to join Alphacore so Yaira avoids confronting her and must reconnect with humanity again through saving people.
THE END
I hope this structure and story breakdown of Yaira helps you out! It helped me remember how important good structure is — without it the story can’t stand on its own! I even did a massive rewrite on my story DEATHSLINGER and threw out over 20 pages and the structure still worked perfectly because I had made it so strong from the start. Set your broad strokes before you put in those meaningful subtle strokes is how I look at story structure.
I’m going to have to sell myself as a script doctor for some indie comics out there because a lot of you need help and don’t realize how important getting your script right is to gaining customers who come back for more! I WILL HELP YOU! I will be your doctor.
A hopeless monster corpse clean up crew worker wants nothing more than to join the powerful defense force that kills the giant invading monsters, but there’s a catch. He gets infected by a monster, known as Kaiju, and has the ability to become a Kaiju himself. Now that the defense force has accepted him he must keep his abilities a secret even though they help humanity defend from some of the most horrific giant monsters around. He is KAIJU #8 and though powerful, if his teammates discover his secret he could be their next kill! This anime is pure fun with a relatable dorky lead who is also a bit older than his colleagues, awesome fights and an overall cool set up for a story about a part monster man who uses his horrific monster powers to take down evil. We’ve all seen the part man/monster who hunts the monsters before. It could even be balled cliche, but when done right it’s an absolute delight to behold and Kaiju #8 succeeds in this. The animation is top notch and the characters are all fun and fit together well to create all the right conflicts for our hero. The tension of him carrying a secret power of the very monsters he hunts is ever present and keeps it interesting. When he unleashes his powers he is still learning them and having trouble controlling them which adds some much needed growth for our lead. Overall while formulaic in some ways, this show hit on every level. The only bad thing I can say about it is that the more scary bad guys talk too much instead of attacking and they become less scary because of it. It’s a solid show and a story I can’t wait to enjoy further so give it a look and see if it’s your thing!
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Thank you all for supporting and reading and I’ll see you for the next one!
Your fiend in comics,
- Vonster