VOICES FROM ON HIGH #3: FORGING YOUR MANGA PROPOSAL
Written by Paul Benjamin & Steven and Megumi Cummings

To start off 2007 Steven and I thought we’d give a brief tutorial on how to pitch your incredible manga ideas to an editor. There are a million ways to do it and the best plan for one editor won’t work for another, but there are a few rules that are a must for just about any proposal. In the first part of this feature I’ll talk about writing your proposal, using our Tokyopop book PANTHEON HIGH as an example. Next Steven will give some pointers on the artist’s half of the equation.

Step One - the title:
Whether you’re pitching a manga story to an editor or producing a 200 million dollar movie, your concept won’t sell without a great title. Your title should summarize your story in some way. It can be a character’s name, a location, or even just set the tone for the book, but it’s got to grab people’s attention and give them some idea of what they’re about to experience. Think PANTHEON HIGH is a good title? I do. It totally sums up the idea of a high school for demigods. But that wasn’t the title I used in my pitch. My original title was THE BELIEVERS. When I first came up with the property it wasn’t about demigods in a high school. It was about people who had special abilities because they had a direct connection to their gods. By the time I sent the pitch to Tokyopop it was set in a high school, but I still had the old title. In fact, the school wasn’t even called Pantheon High yet. It was Hercules High. So the most important lesson here is not just to have a good title. It is that you should recognize a better title when it comes along. The title PANTHEON HIGH came out of a conversation with Paul Morrissey, my editor at Tokyopop. By the time the pitch made it to the top at Tokyopop it was called PANTHEON HIGH and the title stuck.

Step Two - the premise:
You should ALWAYS be able to sum up your idea in one sentence. This is often incredibly difficult. There’s so much interesting and cool stuff in a story it seems impossible to narrow it down into one sentence. However, you’ve got to do this. Even in writing the script you can refer back to this one sentence to make sure you’re keeping to the core concept. Look at movie packaging and you’ll see that they’ve gotten this down to a science. The original STAR WARS can be described like this: “A simple farm boy, Luke Skywalker and his newfound allies attempt to rescue a rebel leader and destroy an evil Empire.” It doesn’t hit all the nuances that make the film great, but it gives you the basic idea. Here’s the premise from the original pitch for PANTHEON HIGH:
In a world where monotheism never took hold and the ancient gods of all religions still take an active interest in our modern world, a group of high school students with little in common will become the champions of the gods.
If your editor has asked for a fairly detailed pitch (which is what Tokyopop wanted) then you can expand beyond that initial premise. At least you’ll know that you’ve already hit the high notes and that if someone is still reading it’s because they like the basic idea.

Step Three – the logline:
Some people like a simple sentence that compares the project to something familiar. For example, I describe PANTHEON HIGH as THE BREAKFAST CLUB meets CLASH OF THE TITANS. Be warned though, some editors hate this kind of thing. That said, when I was an editor at Humanoids I found it to be a useful tool. When I was pitching movies based on comics pretty much every Hollywood executive expected to hear this. As a rule, you should try to limit yourself to two reference points. If you need three then you’re getting too complicated. By the way, you should also know your audience. If I had been pitching someone much younger than myself, I might have tried to find more recent movies as reference points. Fortunately, Paul Morrissey had seen both films and that simple line gave him a good general idea of what he was about to read.

Step Four – the characters:
The characters are the heart of any property. You can have the coolest story and world ever imagined, but if you don’t have interesting, relatable characters everything else will ring hollow. That’s not to say that there aren’t successful properties in which the look of the project or the plotting is great even if the characters aren’t fully realized. However, great characters can make even the most pedestrian storyline interesting just because we can’t wait to see what they do next and why. Your proposal should include some basic information on your character. Don’t just tell who they are or what they can do, talk about why they do it. You might not even reveal everything you know about the characters in your story, but knowing that information will help you get inside their heads. You also might end up abandoning some things once you actually start writing the script. For example, in the detailed write up on Aziza el Ra, here’s what I said in the pitch:

AZIZA RA: Her mom is a high-powered attorney and her dad is the Egyptian sun god, Ra. Aziza uses her parents’ status to her advantage at every possible opportunity and she’s without a doubt the most popular girl in school. She doesn’t just think she’s better than everyone else, she knows it. After all, she is the daughter of Ra, king of the Egyptian gods. Like most queen bee girls, she has a group of wanna-be’s who worship the ground she walks on. One day she expects to become a full deity and she’s promised that anyone loyal to her now will reap great rewards in the future. Aziza will develop a love/hate relationship with Griffin. She’s totally into him, but letting anyone know that would seriously damage her Q-rating. She sees herself as the leader of the Believers and the others as her followers, so there will always be tension when Aziza is around.

: :

home | reviews | news | features | about us | advertise | privacy policy | contact us
All materials © Manga Life, 2005 - Site designed and hosted by Silver Bullet Hosting