Comic Book Writer’s Guide – Chapter 2: Let the Pictures Do the Talking

Have you ever read a comic where the words and the images seem to be telling two different stories? How about a comic where the words do little more than describe the action on the page in redundant fashion? Or what about a book where the words crowd out the action and make it impossible to see what’s going on?

These situations are all the result of one of the fundamental difficulties in comic book creation: writers and artists think and communicate so differently at times that it is difficult for both to find the middle ground to tell a story together. Writers tend to be descriptive thinkers, focusing on what can be told and illustrating their ideas with words. Artists tend to be visual thinkers, focusing on what can be shown and describing their ideas with pictures. And unfortunately, since it is the writer’s job to create the story and instruct the artist on how to tell it, a good comic book writer must learn to create scenes in visual sequence and focus on the appearance as much as the content.

Things haven’t always been this way, however; traditionally, it was the writer’s job to simply create the story and the dialogue and let the artist worry about what went inside the panels. But as comic books have evolved from simple strips to complex visual stories, scriptwriting has evolved to offer the writer more control over the pacing and plotting of a story. In the Golden and Silver Age days, a writer could simply hand an artist a treatment and add balloons to the finished drawings. Modern comic book writers, however, are required to lay out a panel-by-panel plan for the artist to follow.

But how can someone who has spent his or her life honing the craft of words give visual direction to someone who has spent his or her life learning to communicate through pictures?

As an editor, I’ve often instructed writers to think back to the books they read when they were children. A picture book offers its reader a blending of two stories; that of the writer and that of the artist. The writer focuses on the events that create a beginning, middle and end, while the illustrator focuses on drawing out a snapshot from each block of writing to enhance the reader’s understanding of what is going on. But the artist adds details that the writer omits from the text, such as the appearance of the characters, the look of the setting, the items in the background, and so forth, while the writer describes things that the illustrations cannot depict, like the way something might feel, smell, taste, or sound. The two creators work together to tell a more complete story.

The process of creating a comic book is a similar process, but since the action is much more frequent, the writer is given the extra task of breaking down the action into panels so that each page shows not one snapshot of a scene, but rather a sequence. So for a page in a picture book that contained the following text:

Super Heroguy leaped into the air, bounding over several buildings as he surveyed the city for the dastardly purse snatcher.

A single picture of the hero high in the air above a city, looking down at a purse snatcher running away, would suffice. But a comic book writer would break the scene down into panels, perhaps having the hero prepare to leap in the first panel, showing him bounding over a building in the second panel, stopping the hero at the height of his jump in the third panel as he looks for the villain, and showing the purse snatcher running away on the city streets in the fourth.

The writer does not need to go into excessive detail to instruct the artist on how to depict this scene, nor does the writer need to think about things such as the angle of the pictures or the amount of detail in the background unless they are important to the story. From the breakdown, the artist is quite capable of making decisions about the composition of the panel, leaving the writer free to worry about more important things, like the dialogue that need to go along with the scene or the hero’s internal monologue.

As the director of the action, however, the writer does need to put some thought into the flow of the page. One of the biggest weaknesses many beginning writers face is in understanding the difference between a page, a spread, and a pause.

In American comics, we read from left to right, top to bottom. But we don’t read across the entire spread unless an image stretches across both pages; we start with the EVEN page and continue on to the ODD page (with the exception of the front or back cover or when advertisements or other “story-breakers” are present). Thus it is a writer’s job to think first about the flow of action across the page and, ideally, across the spread of both pages where possible.

A page should never begin with the end of the action from the page before it. Consider the following scene:

PAGE 7

1. SUPER HEROGUY moves towards the purse thief, who is backing up into a dark alleyway uncertainly.

SHG: Your days are numbered, miscreant!

THIEF: I don’t think so¦

2. The THIEF pulls out a handgun, smiling smugly.

THIEF: Last time I checked, you bleed like everyone else.

3. SUPER HEROGUY stands smugly, hands on his hips.

SHG: Guns don’t scare me.
SHG: I can move faster than any bullet.

4. The thief looks at SUPER HEROGUY doubtfully, holding the gun slightly to the side, as if he’s not going to fire it.

THIEF: Oh yeah? How about three?

5. The THIEF fires his gun in quick burst.

SFX: BANG! BANG! BANG!

6. SUPER HEROGUY dodges all three, moving toward the THIEF as he twists in the air.

1. He smashes the THIEF in the face with his right fist.

SFX: Krak!
THIEF: Ungh!

2. The THIEF falls over as SUPER HEROGUY snatches the purse away from him.

SHG: See?

3. SUPER HEROGUY speaks into his wrist communicator.

SHG: Police? Yeah, this is Super Heroguy!

SHG: I got the purse snatcher. Yeah. He’s out cold.
SHG: See you soon.

4. Back at SUPER HEROGUY’s lair, we see our hero sitting at his computer, looking at a criminal file. His trusty butler, ALBERT, walks into the room.

SHG: I don’t get it, Albert…
SHG: I must catch what… five? seven? criminals every day.
SHG: And they still keep taking purses and firing guns in public places.
SHG: Are they really stupid enough to think they won’t get caught eventually?

ALBERT: I wish I could say, sir…

When this scene is drawn, there will be several problems with its design:

1) The gun fires on page seven, but we don’t see what happens to our hero until we turn the page. The writer didn’t take the time to build any suspense (perhaps by showing the hero’s worried face) or give the reader any reason to have concern for what happens next. The reader’s only incentive to turning the page is to see what happens. There is no emotional involvement, something that could be fixed with a quick panel giving the reader reason to worry (or, perhaps, to see the hero’s calm expression in the face of danger and flip the page to discover why he or she should not worry).

2) The resolution is brief, with too little action to make it feel satisfying. The artist is also charged with the task of having the hero snatch the purse back from the thief while the thief is falling backwards from the impact of a punch. The writer might have had some idea of how he or she wanted this to look (perhaps the thief was knocked back so hard the purse remained in midair?), but by failing to convey this to the artist, the scene may turn out looking different than the writer intended. This sequence needs more action in more panels, and most likely the rest of the page. Which leads us to the third problem…

3) The story abruptly shifts scene with no good reason. The scene in the hero’s lair has no bearing on what just happened with the thief, and would really make more sense if it formed the beginning of a different page, particularly since the exchange will probably continue following this panel anyhow.

Even with a transition between the two scenes, this shift in setting makes little visual sense. The artist could do far more with this scene if he or she had the top of page nine to play with.

4) With regards to the overall spread, it would make more sense for the exchange between Super Heroguy and the Thief to start at the top left hand corner of page seven and resolve itself at the bottom right hand corner of page eight. The artist would have many more opportunities to be creative with the scene if they all occur in the same time and place, and the following scene would be an excellent start to a the spread on pages nine and ten, where there will no doubt be plenty of dialogue as the hero plans his next move in his vendetta against crime.

Another common problem in comic book scripting (and something I did not include upon in the example above) is the redundancy that one often finds between what’s said in dialogue and captions and what’s illustrated on the page. The classic example of this (or so I’m told) comes from an old Batman comic where the panel showed a picture of Wayne Manor with a gate that actually said “Wayne Manor.” A caption above the scene helped clear up the confusion the reader might have had by stating, “Meanwhile, back at Wayne Manor…”

But redundancy is rarely so obvious. It is found most often in narratives where the protagonist offers a running commentary on events so that the reader can gain insight into the character’s perspective and psyche. In a detective story, for example, a writer might have SAM SHADE encounter FEMME FATALE and describe her appearance to the reader: “She was tall, with legs that seemed to go on into eternity and a skirt that barely covered what little she wasn’t showing. Her lips were as red as the shirt she was wearing, both of which were only made brighter by the black jacket and veil she had on.”

This is fine for a novel, but is it really necessary when the reader can see the character that’s being described? If the narrative said something along the lines of, “She reminded me of a rule I’d made for myself when I first started out: the better they look, the more trouble they’ll cause me,” that would at least offer the reader some useful information to complement the scene.

Remember that every word that appears on the page, whether in a caption or in a speech bubble, should tell the reader something important about your characters that the art cannot convey. In all other matters, let the pictures do the talking.

Writing Scraps

by Sean J. Jordan