Revving Up for the Run

There were a few writer’s tricks up my sleeve which I applied to Devil Car and earned me some pretty gratifying results. It had always been my contention that for a comics novel to click, it just had to grab the readers by their throats at the earliest possible time, perhaps not any more later than its 20th issue. The writer achieved this by immediately pouring everything he’s got, every initial power-ideas he has thought of for his novel, into those first, second and third chapters and not get worried about not having anything juicy left for later (some colleagues I knew were so short of ideas that they tended to stingily hold on as long as they could to their miserably few bright ones for fear of being unable to produce any more for later). My reasoning is that once you’ve caught the reader’s attention early on, he will still continue following your novel even if it waned a bit in intensity later on, as long as your writing didn’t turn lousy, and provided too that you could still surprise the reader with even just sporadic flashes of brilliance. But if your weekly story installments continually failed to show any signs of life after having already wasted the reader’s time and money for five whole months, then forget it-—no amount of flooding your remaining chapters with even the faintest of your concerved ideas would entice the reader to still take a belated look.

Another wily trick I did which I became happy about was deciding beforehand never to show the readers the interior of Devil Car, thus keeping them greatly intrigued and perpetually guessing as to what the devil must really be the contents of the damned auto. (Although in the sequel, Devil Car, the Return, which I was requested to do in 1988 again in Holiday Komiks, I could no longer avoid exposing completely the innards of the murderous machine in the closing chapters.

But let me share with you the greatest trick of all in making serialized comics novelas (and this can also well apply to the “telenovelas” that now seem to have taken over as the “masa’s” most favorite form of inexpensive entertainment since the comics serials became extinct). If you ask me, the real secret in being able to continually sell a serialized story lies in its most crucial point: in the “To be Continued” last frame of every chapter. The writer shold always keep in mind to try and end each episode with a scene wherein the reader will be asking himself: “What will happen next?” In Devil Car, I always tried to squeeze in a cliff-hanger of an ending whenever possible, in every issue. You always had to keep the readers guessing as to what is in store for them in the next chapter.