The Two Main Comic Book Scripting Methods
Posted on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at 1:14 pm
The Adventures of Hitlerbot
This is a one page short that me and my twin brother, Chris, did for “Exploded View”, the latest Cloudscape anthology. Basically this story came out of a drunken conversation at a bar that me, Chris and my buddy Colin had one night while trying to come up with ideas for a Sci-Fi short. If memory serves me correctly, Colin commented that he discovered that a girl he knew painted like Hitler. The conversation continued and Chris brought up the idea that it would be funny if, unlike the usual exploitation convention, (*SPOILERS*) Hitler was brought back to life and all he wanted to do was paint.
From there, we used the 1960’s Marvel method to create the short, which means that I drew the page based off of our discussion and without a script and then Chris attached dialogue to it.
The reason that way of producing a comic was developed back in the 60’s was to save Stan Lee time because he was writing almost ten books a month. This, however, meant that all of the story pacing and a lot of the story direction was in the hands of the artist. And the reason why that worked so well was because back then comic artists were more widely known as cartoonists, and carried all the skills associated with that title. I think a cartoonist by the more traditional definition compared to comic artists today is someone who controls the pacing and story direction of the comic they’re drawing. Pretty much all of the comic artist today, though, just take a completed script and follow the directions that are layed out in it, which puts all of the pacing and story direction in hands of the scripter.
It’s interesting to note that in movie screenwriting, it’s a faux pas for the writer to dictate camera moves, overly detailed character descriptions and emotions, music choices and any other things that should be handled by specific production experts / artists during the development. The general idea is to let those departments do their jobs and be artists. When it comes to comic scripting, though, there is no universal template. Each writer has their own way of scripting and therefor there’s no real faux pas. Alan Moore is famous for writing scripts for 22 page comics that are phone book sized due to his highly discriptive nature. That’s an extreme example, though. Most writer’s keep their scripts fairly reasonable despite the lack of restrictions. My buddy Tim Simmons’ site, the Comic Book Script Archives, is interesting to look at to get an understanding of all the various styles of comic book scripting.
I have no problem with getting full scripts from writers. In fact, I prefer it. Every now and then, though, it’s fun to try the Marvel Method because it feels like your jumping without a parachute and it truley tests your storytelling skills.
What do most artists prefer? Full scripts or complete storytelling freedom?
