Graphic Novelists Make Good Writers

I have discovered something quite interesting. Actually, I discovered it a long time ago, just haven’t written about it.

Graphic novelists make really good writers. I mean really good. All of my favorite authors, the ones with books I could read over and over again, started off as comic book writers.

Those authors are Richard Kadrey, Peter David, Neil Gaiman, and Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash was originally going to be a graphic novel, and it sure reads like one). There may be others that I don’t know of.

I don’t know what it is about the comic style that makes good novelists. Maybe you learn a lot about pacing and keeping the reader interested when you write comics. For some reason, the lack of needing to write imagery and description doesn’t hurt the text. Maybe that’s on purpose — bogging the reader down with infodump images slows down the story.

Do you know of any other comic writers turned novel writers that I’m missing?