Read One Of MY Comic Book Scripts!

10/10/2024

I think everyone knows by now that I love comics. I try to read and engage myself with all kinds, but it's like trying to watch every great, artistic, or interesting movie ever made. It's a never ending journey!

I still have a dream to be involved with comics on some level. What that looks like for me, I have no idea. It's one of those things I fantasize about, and it makes me smile. Anyway, in 2023, I started taking notes of my own ideas and seeing if I could flesh them out into something presentable for production. Whether or not I succeeded will have to be up to you, but I thought that it would be fun to walk you through one of them, what I was thinking, and what you could maybe do better, or differently!

Let's start with some good advice from an industry veteran. This is a bit about scripts from famed letterer Nate Piekos, who correctly points out that your script is the backbone for everything else that happens in a comic's production. The letterer and artist need to be able to read it smoothly so they can do their job! You wouldn't want to hold anyone up, right? Mr. Piekos also offers a link to writer Fred Van Lente, who offers their praised script style as a template for various word processors. There's lots of other resources there too!

With that in mind, Van Lente notes: There's really not an industry standard way of doing these. This is pretty different from television and film, where there are pretty serious formatting rules. My silly ass will add in that a lot of Japanese manga, to my knowledge, basically jump right into a storyboarding/lettering process called Name. This makes a lot of sense when you consider how many popular manga are weekly publications, versus a monthly schedule for your typical English speaking periodical. Of course, different comics are made in all kinds of ways and formats now, so who really knows what's going on!

Another resource I found early on was Comic Experience's scripts archive. This one is really nice because it's fairly easy to go hunt down a particular finished comic, since a lot of the authors here are pretty big names! On this site, you can see a Batman script by Adam Beechen. This one I found educational for being a standalone issue that's narration driven. You can see how Mr. Beechen instructs whoever else may be working on the comic. For that issue, Steve Scott was the penciller and Phil Balsman served as letterer.

Does the script I'm sharing today follow these lessons and advice? Not really! But, I was doing this and trying it out for the first time. Animator Chuck Jones once said "Every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them, and the only way to get rid of them is to draw them out."

I assume writing is much the same thing. There are probably a thousand terrible ideas, or good ideas poorly written, inside me. In the spirit of that, let us have no shame in sharing. It's tough to look at your own stuff, but I'm gonna grit my teeth...!

I have not edited or revised these since that time, I'll mention edits and lessons as we go.

Darkside Dragon!

Here's a PDF download in case the browser preview doesn't work.

This is a little series idea I had that was one of those mashups of "everything I like goes in here!", at least when it comes to RPG-like fantasy. To me, it all evokes World of Warcraft memories. We've seen the MMORPG manga/LN/whatever be a staple genre in Japanese stuff for a long time now, so I also see a lot of inspiration and those. I love classes and monsters, magic and treasure, all that stuff. So that's what I was channeling into this.

I wanted this to have all those elements, but I wanted the core theme to be "The real treasure is the bonds you make with others". That's why Ryuuza is a nice person, but she really likes treasure and loot. I found out later that Frieren was kind of like that, but Frieren has a lot more depth, to be honest. But that was going to be the main idea. There would be adventure and heroism, but people and life need to come first.

Following up on that, my plan for this first story arc was to have the Church (and/or the pirates, I hadn't finalized, but the pirates were going to return in SOME capacity) chase down Ryuuza and Lola, and it would end with Ryuuza losing her treasure horde (as dragons have) in order to save Lola/friends.

Ryuuza has a darker side though (that's the title!), because she's a dragon-human hybrid. I think everyone loves stuff like the animal people and dinosaurs in Dragon Ball, so that's what I was thinking of. I was also enamored with the design of the Dragon Knight character that appears in the Dungeon Fighter series (pictured!). So that's what I imagine she looked like, a bit.

I don't think I was prepared for the reality of trying to write about a character's more bestial/primal urges. Of course, it would make a kind of cool transformation in action scenes, but the nature of that kind of topic is pretty complex. If we think about Frieren again, there's been a bit of a mixed response to the whole "Demons are talking monsters that look like humans, they're not people" thing, which retroactively gives me some pause in my work. An anime I really love, Brand New Animal soooort of ended on a note of "Maybe the animal people will turn out alright if they control their animalness", or something to that effect. That did not feel super good, for anyone who identified closely with its heroine, Michiru, like I did. If I ever bring this back or into some production, there's gotta be some serious conversations about buckling this theme down and making it palatable.

I'm really bad at naming characters. "Ryuu" is, of course, means dragon, but I wasn't sure what else to call her. I was never super happy with how "Ryuuza" sounded on the tongue, but I left it alone. You can see there's a 'name tbd' in the document. Very professional of me.

In the introduction, there's a character named Akira mentioned. I never nailed down who the third person would be in the main group, but I wanted them to be a male. I thought a stern, serious, Kenshiro type character would make or a funny straight-man contrasts with the more bodacious Ryuuza. But there were other ideas I had for this.

I liked Lola lot. Any time you have a younger, kid-aged character who has the potential to grow up and learn stuff, I think that opens up a ton of great opportunities for storytelling. So she becomes the focus for the middle of the chapter. If I ever got to give this series an ending, it would definitely have had an adult Lola. She was named after someone, but I can't quite recall who...sorry!

Okay, we can look at more of the actual writing now...

Drafting

The first draft of this had like, a bazillion panels, because I was just writing stream-of-consciousness and wasn't thinking about how it would look on the page. This is obviously an enormous sin for a COMIC BOOK. I actually read something recently, a brand new manga, and the first three pages had eight panels each, and I thought that was nauseating! So remember, if you have a lot of panels, that is more information on a page, but the drawings are going to start getting tinier, and that's not fun, right? Comics are a visual medium too. And remember, you can't write too much because your dialogue, captions and sound effects are all sharing real-estate in a panel. This is really hard!

It's so hard in fact, that I've heard of the writer doing some preliminary page layouts (or outright doing it!) just to make sure it's not complete gobbledegook.

The average panel count for a manga is five, so I hear. Go try it with some manga you like, seriously! A lot of pages are exactly five, with very varied layouts! So, when I revised this at the time, I found that a lot of pages could get split in two, so that actually ended up giving me a decent page count. Your average count for pages in a traditional western comic is somewhere hovering 22, so that's where I was able to land. You see all kinds of page counts on stuff like Shonen Jump and MangaPlus, so I guess that all depends on where and how it's published.

If we look at Page 3, the first thing I think of is that there could certainly be more sound effects. And just a general description of how these things should appear on the page. If this was going off to an artist, I have to imagine there's not enough detail. Todd McFarlane once said that he likes to give more freedom to the artist, and he doesn't necessarily care about some of the details. You can see an example of one of his scripts in that video, too. Being generous to myself and considering this method, my script could probably still use more direction. I think not every page has this issue, but I'm sure there's a zillion "need to knows" I haven't thought of!

Page 6, I think, needs to have a panel or two cut. I want that last one, her "corpse" sinking into the ocean, to have some impact. It's not impossible with seven panels, but that specific objective would easier if there was some trimming, right?

On page seven, we shift gears. There's some more specific direction here with the camera. I'm not super sure I have the skill to pull off this kind of transition, but I really like the idea of opening with a battle scene, at least for this. So, the rhythm turned out like that. This is unimportant, but in my head, Lola looks kind of like Poppy from Pokemon Scarlet and Violet.I think it's a miracle anyone can pull off introducing multiple characters without it seeming clunky. I also describe a flashback scene. Flashback scenes in manga and comics are almost never identical looking. I think one of the coolest is black gutters, like in Kindergarten Wars. I left it as a fairly casual suggestion though.

Are you noticing the lack of sound effects now? There should definitely be some little 'flomp's or 'oomf's or something when Lola falls over. I mention color sometimes in this script, but what if it was in black and white? I guess you'd know that before starting your script, ideally.

I think all that reveals a lot of the trends in my writing here. You can maybe spot a few more typos. On Page 12, Panel 2, it should say "Almost the same as panel 1". Does this conversation seem like it's going really slowly? They get to know each other for like, four pages. I think it's really cute, but if you were the reader, you might have that "Yeah, I get it" feeling. Let us consider that the reader can see for themselves what Ryuuza looks like. Not sure about this point, though! Maybe it's good to have a pace-breaker, because they fight a crab monster after this.

Lola is pretty tough, isn't she? ;_;

This ends with a reveal that the Head Priest guy is...evil! I named him Gabriel in chapter 2's script. You can't really go wrong naming someone Gabriel, it just goes hard. The one thing I don't like about this is Ryuuza saying "Heretic!". I never imagined her as particularly religious, but I guess I wanted to come up with something that had some bite. I mean, could you imagine someone like Goku, even as a Super Saiyan, saying "Heretic"? Not really...! So even in Ryuuza's dark side, it just sounds weird.

I wonder if this came out on a manga site, as is, if people would smell cancellation...

I think I might've tried to cram too much at the end here. Some panels seem to describe more than one action or movement, which is obviously impossible. I wouldn't submit this as my final draft. Look at Page 23, Panel 5. What should the reader see, exactly? Her eyes? The action with both characters in clearly view? Agh, my work is painful!

I'm sure you have your own observations, so, let's move on.

Will I Write More?

Of course I will! This was one of the first things I had ever put together, of course it's messy and weak!

And also be eyeballing other comic related things on the side. It would feel great to be involved with something, somehow, and learn more stuff! I've got a metric ton to learn about comics, even after all the reading and Scott McCloud books!

My big goal, one day, is to get something produced, that was written by me, and make sure that the artist, and anyone else (I've done only very basic lettering myself in the past...) are compensated fairly. Pencillers, inkers, and colorists do all the hard parts! And the story better be worth their time, too! Right now, potential production means keeping ideas small and letting my savings account build up. Which is...hard, but that's the avenue I've got. I'm really not comfortable doing something like Kickstarter yet, consider that I am a complete unknown and have never managed crowdfunding before. That's scary, and has a lot of potential for disaster!

One piece of advice that I've heard is to talk to an artist and craft a story with their talents and interests in mind. Not as a substitute for paying them, of course, but that sounds really fun to me!

I ended up writing about three more scripts at the time before I called it off for a little bit. Knowing they wouldn't be produced any time soon, the way I'd WANT them to be seen, was a bummer.

In way, that was a little blessing, because it was only a month or two later that I decided to create this very website! This has been one of the great joys of my life, of course, so it must have been the right choice at the time.

I'll always be thinking about comics, at the very least. I may lament a bit that I didn't discover and cultivate that love when I was much younger, but hey, it's never too late to do something amazing, is it!

So, I hope my passion for comics came through, and that you yourself have something similar! Something you daydream about and immerse yourself in, that can make you smile even when times are tough. If you read this, I thank you for letting me share one of mine.

See you next time! Keep reading

- James