AU Student a Unique Storyteller

For Scott King, inspiration struck with a trip to the hospital and a couple of cell phone pictures.
Scott King: American University Master's student and creator of "Dad!"
Kevin King, Scott's dad, has been struggling with his health for many years. On one trip to the hospital, Scott took three pictures with his cell phone and noticed they were sequential, like a stop-motion movie. Being a film student, as well as a fan of comic books, he came up with the idea of writing "Dad!," a documentary graphic novel about his relationship with his father and his father's illness.

King began taking pictures of his father and recording their conversations, "filming" the novel over two-and-a-half weeks. He took more than 8,000 pictures and 16 hours of audio.

"I had to look over the 8,000 photos and decide, 'How am I going to write this down and tell it in a story that actually makes sense,'" said King. "It was just really emotional to be, like, 'Well, I'll focus on this scene, this scene and this scene and so forth.'"

After finishing the editing and finding a publisher, King then had to figure out how best to tell the story visually.

"At first they [the publisher] wanted us to hire an artist to basically trace the photos, and we did that, and it just didn't look right. The actual photographs were too raw, whereas the traced artwork was not raw enough, too cartoony. So that's where we developed the system that we used to make it almost look like line art."

King said each page has three to eleven pictures, and each took about 30 minutes to two hours to render into the final art, plus time to lay out the pages and letter the comic, all of which King did himself.

"It was a pain in the ass! That's hours and hours and hours at the damn computer, just clicking files and tweaking them," said King. "It was tedious and a lot of hard work."

Luckily, King used that hard work on the novel for independent study and got academic credit for it. He also recognizes that American University played a part in his success.

"I couldn't have gotten it done if the school hadn't given me both the support and the time to get it done," he said.

King's next project is another, more traditional, graphic novel entitled "Nice Guys Finish Last," which he describes as a romantic comedy. He found that working as a writer, and with artists, is a lot different than he thought it would be. A writer, at least a comic book writer, has to worry about marketing himself and his book, and artists don't necessarily produce what's in the script.

King said it has been a learning experience to find out what really goes into writing for a living.

"I'm very interested in writing, definitely, that's what I want to do. But I think I've discovered there's a lot more to being a writer, it's not just doing the work, turning it in, and getting it published. There's a lot more to writing than just writing."

King's book, "Dad!" is a available through Amazon.com, directly from his publisher, Th3rd World Studios.

King said he expects it will be in major booksellers Barnes and Noble and Borders in December.
"Dad!" Front Cover