Editor’s Note: Comic-Con is well behind us, but its how-to rooms left advice for anyone trying to build a creative world, bring people inside it, and keep ownership of what they made.
By Shor M. Masori in San Diego
Comic-Con has been over for a while, but some of its most useful panels have gone mostly unreported. Room 3 is the convention’s primary classroom, where working professionals teach the crafts behind their work.
I filled pages of notes with advice on building and protecting original intellectual property, holding an audience’s attention, and writing dialogue that carries a story. I thought the advice was really valuable and still worth sharing.
“Build Your Own World and Intellectual Property,” moderated by Lorran Garrison, brought together creators John Jennings, Quinn McGowan, Mark Nazal and Tara Madison Avery with entertainment attorney Britton Payne.
Creative work attracts collaborators, publishers and studios, so put agreements in writing before money or attention changes everyone’s memory of the deal. One panelist compared a corporate offer to a door in a huge wall: it can bring money and reach while costing some control. If there is an idea you cannot imagine surrendering, save it until you have the leverage to protect it.
Nazal called the urge to create “the next Marvel” or Star Trek “franchitis.” Start with what genuinely excites you, he said, and protect the kid who wanted to create before worrying about a cinematic universe. Superman himself accumulated much of his familiar mythology over decades. Kryptonite first appeared on his radio in 1943, partly as a practical way to sideline the hero when voice actor Bud Collyer needed time away.
Jennings starts with questions he wants to explore. Research into the Great Migration and Black history fed his speculative work, a process he called “critical making.” Stories grounded in lived experience can help readers recognize themselves and build a community around the work. Even a modest audience gives creators leverage when publishers or studios become interested. Payne has also used income from his legal and entertainment career to fund creative and autism-related projects.
Of course, owning a world does not mean anyone will willingly enter it.
Hypnotherapist Grant Offenberger moderated for sketch comedian Colin Stanley, industrial musician Alexis Mincolla, former WWE wrestler Katarina Severen and voice actor Jon Allen to explain a universal storytelling mechanism, the “pace and lead.” First establish something the audience accepts. Once they are moving with you, lead them somewhere they did not expect.
In comedy, the setup stores tension until the punchline changes the interpretation of what came before. Severen compared it to stretching a rubber band: too little gives no release, too much and it snaps. Wrestling can create that pull through body language alone. Stanley said his Little Victorian Boy sketches usually establish something recognizable for seven to 20 seconds before turning absurd.
Offenberger learned the pattern while managing restaurants and calming customers stuck in what he called their “I’m in a restaurant and mad” script. I recognized it from mediation training. People become easier to redirect once they feel heard, know the other person has heard them, and are in on their script.
The panel offered a useful test: When do you stop noticing the border around the television and start worrying about Batman, even though you know he will probably be fine?
Leading the audience to your universe is just the first step. Once the audience is in, the writer has to keep earning that attention.
During “Writing Dialogue that Drives Your Scenes,” writer Maxwell Alexander Drake estimated that dialogue can make up one-third to one-half of prose fiction, so it has to work well. Characters speak because they want something, not because the writer needs information delivered.
Drake said dialogue should reveal character and relationships, advance the plot, build the world, all while controlling mood, tone, and pacing. Every character wants something. Each line tries to change what another character thinks, feels, knows, believes, or does. Resistance forces a change in tactics, which creates momentum to drive the scene.
Drake demonstrated all of that through a scene from his Farmers & Mercenaries series. Minara, a blind woman, repairs a fishing net while her brother Cale cooks dinner. Her blindness is only revealed through subtext. Drake points out that almost nothing happens in the scene, but it still changes what we understand about both characters.
Their teasing immediately establishes an affectionate sibling rivalry. Then Minara smells juniper on Cale’s clothes and knows he has been with Kessa, the woman he is courting. She wants him to admit the relationship; he wants to avoid the subject. Minara keeps pressing until she jokes that she would like nieces and nephews.
That lands differently. Cale has cared for her since their parents died, and beneath Minara’s happiness for him is the fear that his building a life with someone else could leave her alone. Her joke also exposes her belief that no one will want a future with her.
The conversation also builds the fantasy world entirely through their interaction. Minara eventually tells Cale, “Let me see her.” She places her hands against his head and enters a memory he chooses. The siblings treat the ability as ordinary and need no explanation, so the reader learns its rules by watching it happen.
Even Minara’s net does work: “Slip, pull, tie” repeats beneath their banter, slows when the conversation becomes painful, and disappears when the memory opens. The characters have barely moved, yet their relationship, the emotional stakes, and our understanding of their world have deepened.
All of us contain universes within ourselves waiting to be explored. Getting a universe out of your head and into somebody else’s is hard. Heck, getting a single thought to land the way you intended can be difficult. These rooms gave me a practical route from private idea to shared world. I hope some of what I learned helps you build yours.
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Shor M. Masori is a San Diego-based freelance writer.