Like many of my coworkers in the world of comics, I’m also involved in making films these days. This is seen, I realize from talking to acquaintances and journalists, as a step up, signaling that I’ve finally left the gutter. (Still, filmic legitimacy only goes so far. Opera seems to be the cultural front-runner, while books, with or without pictures, trail some way behind.) I like film. I am not very good at writing for film yet, which is what keeps me interested in it. Most of all I like the astonishing process—it’s hard to get near a film set without remembering Orson Welles’s description of a film studio as “the biggest electric train set any boy could ever have.” When I first went to Hollywood, the only people who read comics were the most junior assistants, the kind who weren’t allowed to speak, who just went and fetched the bottled water. But that was a while ago. Now those people are running studios.

There was a time when those of us who made comics would try and explain what advantages comics had over film. “Comics have an infinite special-effects budget,” we’d say. But we missed the point, now that movies have, for all intents, an infinite special-effects budget. (I was writing a script for Beowulf last year, and, worried that a climactic airborne dragon battle was going a little over the top, I called the director, Robert Zemeckis, to warn him. “Don’t worry,” he said. “There is nothing you could write that will cost me more than a million dollars a minute to film.”)

Still, the “unlimited special effects” nonsense hides a truth or two. Ink is cheaper than film. Film, especially big-budget film, often needs to compromise in order to be liked by the biggest possible number of people around the world. A comic tends to be a small enough, personal enough, medium that a creator can just make art, tell stories, and see if anyone wants to read them. Not having to be liked is enormously liberating. The comic is, joyfully, a bastard medium that has borrowed its vocabulary and ideas from literature, science fiction, poetry, fine art, diaries, film and illustration. It would be nice to think that comics, and those of us who come from a comics background, bring something special to film. An insouciance, perhaps, or a willingness to do our learning and experimenting in public.

That was certainly how it was making MirrorMask, a film I wrote and which artist and director Dave McKean designed and directed recently for the Jim Henson Company. As long as we gave Sony something “in the tradition of Labyrinth,” Dave could make his film (it’s my script, but in service of Dave’s story and vision). It didn’t have an unlimited special effects budget, or any kind of unlimited budget at all, but Dave still managed to put things on-screen that hadn’t been seen before—huge stone giants floating in the sky, a librarian made of books and voiced by Stephen Fry, a horde of Monkeybirds all called Bob (except for one, called Malcolm). We made MirrorMask on location in Brighton, and in a blue screen studio in London, then Dave took fifteen animators to an office in North London and worked for eighteen months telling the story of Helena and her peculiar dream.