National Graphic Novel Writing Month, Day 12: Comic Scripts AREN’T Screenplays, by David Alan Mack

Day twelve of NaGraNoWriMo, and we’re bringing in some fresh voices to add their expertise. First up is David Alan Mack, the national bestselling author of nearly twenty books, including Wildfire, Harbinger, Reap the Whirlwind, Road of Bones, and the Star Trek Destiny trilogy (Gods of Night, Mere Mortals, and Lost Souls) as well as a writer for television and– most important for our work today– the writer of the Farscape: Scorpius comic for BOOM!

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p class=”MsoPlainText”>My first training as a scriptwriter was a screenwriting 101 course I took more than 25 years ago. In that class I learned the fundamentals of writing for motion pictures and television, and I refined my understanding of those forms a few years later during my studies at NYU’s film school. Nearly a decade later, after three sales to the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star
Trek Voyager television series, I had to unlearn most of what I knew about scriptwriting when I got a chance to write for the Star Trek comic books, then produced by the now-shuttered WildStorm.

A lot of scriptwriters make the mistake of thinking that if one knows how to write teleplays or screenplays, that comic books are just the same thing without the constraints of a limited budget or an overworked visual-effects department. After all, they both describe stories pared down to images, sounds, and dialogue. However, the two forms differ on a few very important points.

The first key difference is how the two formats break up the narrative. A screenplay or teleplay simply has scenes, which might or might not be subdivided into shots. Scenes can start or end anywhere on the page. It’s a minimalist format intended to serve as the blueprint for a story while affording the production team great latitude for interpretation.

A comic-book script needs to break up its story into pages, and those are further broken up into panels. As a general rule, a page should be treated as a discrete storytelling unit, which is a fancy way of saying don’t start or end a scene in the middle of a page. It’s also important not to clutter a page with too many panels, or to crowd a panel with too many lines of caption or dialogue text.

The second major difference between film/TV scripts and comic-book scripts is how the action is described on the page.

When describing a scene in a film/TV script, one can describe continuous actions with great economy. For instance, a line of action in a screenplay might read, “Porter gets up from the table, picks up the phone, and uses it to smash in Resnick’s skull.” The reason this direction works in a screenplay is that it’s a blueprint for a motion picture—emphasis on motion. That one sentence might end up being depicted with a half-dozen different shots edited together in a film, but in the script, one needs to describe only the continuous series of actions.

Comic-book scripts are not blueprints of moving action but instructions from which an artist will render sequences of static images that imply movement by breaking down an action into decisive images across any number of panels. For instance, the simple moment described above might be rendered thusly in a comic-book script:

PAGE FOUR

Panel One

With his left hand, Porter is pushing himself back from the table and is half-risen to a standing position; with his right hand he is reaching toward the old-fashioned rotary-dial phone in the middle of the table. Resnick sits on the other side of the table, facing away from Porter and ignoring him while smoking a cigarette.

Panel Two

Same angle as Panel One. Resnick is in the same pose, oblivious. Porter is standing and holding the phone high overhead in his right hand, poised to strike.

Panel Three

Same angle. Porter has swung the phone and clobbered Resnick. A motion trail shows us the arc of the swung phone, and a burst highlights its point of impact. Resnick is in free fall, knocked from his chair, arms limp at his side, a few bloody teeth flying free away from his slack jaw.

Panel Four

Same angle. Resnick lies in a heap on the floor, a puddle of blood beneath his face. Porter is walking away to panel right. He is not looking at Resnick. The phone lies on the floor beside Resnick’s head, the bulky cradle fractured, the dial busted and half-off the cradle, the receiver a foot or so away at the end of its tangled cord.

PORTER: It’s for you.

As you can see, a comic-book script can take a lot more space to convey the same idea that a screenplay expresses in a single sentence.
In that respect, it’s a more difficult form to master because it’s not as immediately intuitive as film writing. One can’t simply describe the series of events that constitute a scene. It is the responsibility of the scriptwriter to pre-visualize the story and decide which images best convey the moment he or she wishes to describe.

One more difference is the way the comic-book medium handles something known as “internal monologue,” which are a character’s inner thoughts. Comic books make frequent use of internal monologue in the form of narrative captions written in the first-person style—i.e., “I smell the despair rising from the line of artists waiting in vain for a chance to have their portfolios reviewed. I breathe in the schadenfreude like the perfume of a flower that blooms only at night.”

In film and television, the only way to express internal monologue is the voice-over, which falls in and out of fashion from one season/year/decade to the next. In a screenplay, the voice-over is treated as a form of dialogue; in the graphic novel format, it is treated as caption-box content.

The one bit of good news for those who have been trained in the rigid and unforgiving ways of screenplay/teleplay format is that there is no such thing as “graphic novel/comic-book format.” In my experience, no two comic-book scriptwriters ever format their scripts exactly alike. Unlike screenplay format, which makes unyielding demands regarding font, type size, margins, indents, and punctuation, a graphic-novel script simply needs to be clear enough for the editor and artist to follow and understand the writer’s intentions.

As long as you remember a few basic rules, you’ll be fine:

• Break up the story into comic-book pages;
• Divide your pages into panels;
• Keep in mind that even-numbered pages are always on the left, which means that two-page spreads should always fall across even-odd page pairs, such as 8-9, 10-11, etc.;
• CHARACTER names and DIALOGUE should be written in ALL CAPS, because comic-book lettering doesn’t usually use lowercase characters;
• When you put text in a caption box, specify for your letterer whether it is an EDITORIAL CAPTION or a CHARACTER CAPTION for internal monologue, or a CHARACTER DIALOGUE CAPTION that will contain a character’s off-panel dialogue in quotation marks.

So, as you embark upon your own graphic-novel-writing adventure, tell yourself as often as is necessary: “I’m not writing a movie, I’m writing a graphic novel.” Then write like it.

FADE OUT.

Follow David on Twitter @DavidAlanMack. And remember: you can follow all the NaGraNoWriMo posts here!