Daniel had a suggestion that folks might be interested in seeing what it looks like, when a comic is written. So, for this post, I've scanned 2 examples of scripts that have been given to me.
Pete's is the first. In my experience, what he has always done is he has type-written 3 or 4 pages of story, and from that I'll go ahead and do my thumbnails. As you can see at this point, I know very little about what the actual dialogue will be. The scenes that I draw are more or less situational, rather than knowing what the actual exchange between characters is.
Murph is somewhat different. He will give me the actual panel count per page and often tells me what he wants shown in each panel, sometimes even with a little thumbnail of his own. Dialogue has been written to a finished, or near finished state. The book that I'm starting to pencil today is written by Berger and he writes in a form very similar to Murphy. This form of writing would be considered more industry standard, I'm figuring.
Either way, from here I'll proceed and go to breakdowns/thumbnails.
Woah, that's really neat. So it seems like the actual layout of the panels can be somewhat cooperative between the writer and the artist.
ReplyDeleteIs the approach significantly different when you are both writing and doing the art for a comic book?
It's interesting to see how different Peter Laird's and Murph's/Berger's script writing styles are. Thanks a bunch for posting this, Jim!
Wow man. Thanks for the sneak peek at the daily workings of making the comics happen. That's pretty cool. Not to mention interesting.
ReplyDeleteIs there a preference that you have? How do you plot?
ReplyDeleteIs Peter's style what I see so often referred to as "Marvel style" (which I guess now is more "old Marvel style", having learned to script myself from a lot of recent Marvel scripts)? Great post Jim!
ReplyDeleteThis is fantastic stuff! I've always wondered what comicbook scripts looked like. Thank you so much for sharing these, Jim!
ReplyDeleteIn my case, I work more like Pete- pages of story with some dialogue roughed in. Often, as I do the layouts I will write what I think the dialogue should be off to the side. Hopefully this kind of avoids the trap of having too many words on one page and very few on another. Having said this, I don't know if it's really a fair comparison as I have never written a story and then given it to someone else to do the art. If that were to be the case, I could definitely see myself desiring the control the Murphy style brings.
ReplyDeleteHey Tristan! What format do you prefer when you are writing your scripts?
ReplyDelete-->> .. would it be possible to see some of Steve's old thumbs ??
ReplyDelete>v<