Behind-The-Panels: Dark Waters (feat. in The 4th Monkey) -Writing to the Artist’s Style

As a writer, early in your making-comics-career, you can’t always write a script with an exact artist in mind. A style, yes. But it’s a lot harder to write for a particular artist if you’re new to the game.

For me, I hadn’t written this way with any of my stories. That is, until I connected with Hus Ozkan online and started seeing his work. Then, when The 4th Monkey came into fruition, I immediately knew I had to collaborate with him.

I wrote "Dark Waters" specifically with Hus in mind as the artist. This is something I've never done before, but Hus' fantastic use of darkness and heavy blacks in his art made me want to work with him for a while now, and I'm proud that this is the story we get to collaborate on.

"Dark Waters" is about the pollution of our oceans. There are thousands of ways to go about telling a story like this, but I decided to focus more specifically on illegal off-shore dumping, it's decimation of fish populations, and its destruction of fishing villages around the world.

I did this in part to be able to write scenes that incorporated a lot of black and white (things like oily sludge mixing in with crystal clear waters, the bright white moon in the dark sky and its reflection in the dark waters below) to allow Hus to do his magic.

I was even leaning towards keeping the story in black and white, but after discussing it with Hus, and after he threw his mesmerizing colors on top of the first page, I knew that he’d go ahead and add a whole other layer to the story.