From: Kurt Busiek
To: AD ASTRA Writers
10/25/88

I. OPENING REMARKS

This memo is designed to give you the basics of how to use the comic book format. Some of this may seem extremely obvious, but I'd rather say something you already know than forget to say something important. On the other hand, some of this may seem obscure and confusing, and you may wonder how you're expected to remember all of this stuff while writing a script The fact is, you're not expected to remember it all; don't worry about it. This will just get it all down in one place, so you have a handy (and hopefully concise) reference to check when you need it.

You're also not expected to read this, sit down and write a finished script. If you have any questions, give me a call. If you're not sure how best to handle a particular scene, how to make a plot more visually oriented or how to handle anything you have questions on, just give me a call and we'll figure it out.

II. PLOTTING

A. Visual Nature

The single most important factor in plotting comics is the fact that the comics medium is a visual one. The stories are told through pictures. Each story is made up of a certain number of pages, each page is made up of a certain number of panels and each panel holds one illustration. The captions, dialogue and so forth augment the picture in each panel, but it's the pictures that are the primary storytelling element. Therefore, the stories have to be visually interesting, and since you, as writer, are going to be telling the artists what to draw, you have to plot your stories with that in mind. Some pointers:

• long conversations don't generally have much to them that's visually interesting. For that reason, it's usually best to make sure that whatever characters you're using in whatever scene you're plotting out are doing something more than just talking. And whatever they're doing should be something that carries the story along, allows the characters to express their particular personalities, or something that uses the pictures to help tell the story.

• similarly, internal monologues are generally even less visually interesting. If you take what would ordinarily be an internal monologue and rework it so that action that complements it accompanies it (for instance, if in a short story you'd write an internal monologue in which the lead complains about how his wife left him at a time when he really didn't need the extra pressure, you could do that in comics by having the guy thinking about this stuff while he tries to get the kids ready for school, find his briefcase and assure his boss over the phone that he'll be in on time for a change all at the same time), you can get the same stuff done in a visually-oriented manner.

• if you do have to have a visually static scene, and you can keep it down to two or three panels, it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

• if the scene absolutely has to go for longer than that, there are ways to work around it. For instance, a long and essentially static scene of a cop waiting in his car for the guy he's been tailing to come out of an apartment building might be intercut with other, more active scenes, so no one page is solidly made up of essentially the same picture of the cop in the car over and over again. Or if two people are talking about events that took place earlier or people that aren't there at the moment, you could flash back to those events or cut to those people and continue the conversation in overvoice, so that artist will be able to draw something other than two people at a table chatting.

B. Breaking Down a Plot Into Pages and Panels

Asking how much story goes into one single comics page is a lot like asking how long a chapter should be. The correct answer is "However much works," and it's no help at all.

There two major factors determining what you can fit into a page. The first is that there's only so much room on the page. No matter how much story information you cram into each panel, there are physical limits to how much you can get on a single page. The second is the more aesthetically- determined matter of how to pace the story.

As a general rule of thumb, you can figure that the average comic book page has six panels on it. For whatever reason, it's generally accepted that your basic average unexceptional panel takes up about a sixth of the page. Naturally, you can fit more panels on a page if they can be smaller than average, and fewer if they have to be larger than average. Some examples:

• a tight shot of something simple can usually be smaller than normal: A shot of someone's head with no important background, a hand opening a door, etc.

• a complicated panel or a panel that needs to carry a lot of information usually has to be larger than normal: An establishing shot of a location, a panel with three or more characters that have to be shown clearly, a shot of two armies engaged in combat, etc. Those are the purely physical factors. What you can fit on a page is also affected by questions of pacing, and what kind of effect you want to have on the reader. For example, the bigger a panel is, the more important it seems. If the "hand opening the door" panel mentioned above, for example, is a dramatic and important moment in the story, making the panel bigger will increase its emotional effect on the audience. Similarly, a simple head-shot of a character talking doesn't need to be all that big, but if the character in question is shouting out some vital and telling piece of information that shifts the plot movement of the story in an entirely different direction, well, maybe it should be bigger. A full-page panel carries about as much impact as is possible, but even a 1/3 to 1/2-page panel will have a lot more impact than other, smaller panels on the page.

Along those lines, the size of the panel carries indications to the reader of how much time is passing in the story. Generally speaking, the smaller a panel is, the "faster" it happens, much the way a short, blunt paragraph "moves" faster than a long paragraph full of description and detail.

Some writers like to construct each page so that it works as a unit, so that the structure of the individual page is as important as that page's contribution to the structure of the story as a whole. This isn't necessary, but it does carry some benefits, most notably that it gives the artist, who of necessity has to construct each page as a separate structure, some organizational hook to build the page around visually. It also allows the writer to concentrate on smaller pieces of structure at any one time, just as structuring a novel a chapter at a time allows a writer to keep from being overwhelmed by the major structure of the novel as a whole while he's working on line-by-line details. However, there's no need to feel you have to think about the structure of each individual page if that's going to make writing the script more difficult.

All the above said, there are two basic ways to break a plot down into pages and panels so it can be scripted:

• you can break down the story so that you have a full page-by-page, panel-by-panel outline before you start scripting. The advantage of this is that you know everything's going to fit from the moment you start the actual scripting. The disadvantage is that you get locked in, and if along the way you discover a way to handle a scene better that takes up more (or less) space, you're going to have to rework the balance of the script to fit it in.

• you can go ahead and start scripting without an outline, breaking down pages and panels as you go and keeping a general eye on how much space you're using (for instance, if you reach page 6 in a 12 page script, you'd better be about halfway done. If not, you'll have to speed things up or slow them down in order to finish the story on page 12). The advantage of this is that you've got the looseness to take advantage of any structure ideas you have while writing. The disadvantage is that you may run out of space before you run out of story, and have to go back and rewrite to fix it.

Naturally, there are any number of working methods that fall between these two poles--some writers do a rough page breakdown and figure out the panel structure as they write, for instance. It's the same old question of outlining vs. not outlining, with the one added element that you have an exact page length you have to meet, not a rough wordcount.

C. A Couple of Items Of Note

Splash Pages: One page in each comics story, usually but not always the first page, is the splash page. It's a full-page panel that holds the title of the story and the credits (which usually credit the writer, the artists, the letterer, the colorist and the editor). Since the splash page is the artist's opportunity to hook the reader into the story with a dynamic and compelling illustration that will make the reader want to read that story, there are two things to keep in mind about splash pages:

• the splash page should be designed to have a lot of impact. It's a whole page, after all, and you don't really want to waste it on something that could be just as effectively done in half that space or less. If you can come up with an image that will really start your story off with a bang, that's the one to use as the splash page.

• the splash page is traditionally the first page of the story. The reason for this is that it gets that impact right up front, where it's the first thing the reader will see. For that reason, most comic book stories start off in high gear on page one--and thus the plot has to be structured so that it can start off with a moment of high impact. In recent years, a lot of writers and artists have chosen to delay the splash page in order to start off with a scene that can build up to the splash page, giving it more impact than it'd otherwise have. If you choose to do that, you must make sure to make that initial scene an effective buildup to the splash page and that that buildup starts with the very first panel of the story--starting off with an unrelated scene and getting around to the splash page when you get the chance will result in a weak and disorganized opening.

Setting A Scene Visually: In any scene in a comics script, you have to give the artist a chance to show the reader where it's happening. If your script calls for a scene that runs six panels, all of them close-ups on someone's face, the reader will never be able to tell where the scene is set; unless you specifically want to keep them in the dark, that's a bad idea. The most straightforward way to establish the setting is to make the first panel of a scene a medium or long shot that shows the reader the setting as well as the players. That's not to say you have to do things straightforwardly, however. For instance, let's say you have a scene that begins with a corporate exec firing an employee. You could begin the scene with a shot of the exec's office and the exec telling the employee he's fired, then follow it up with a close-up of the employee's stunned reaction. You could start with a close-up of the exec delivering the bad news, then follow it up with a medium shot that establishes the office as the employee reacts. You could even start with a long shot of the building, then cut inside, to the office, before getting into close-ups on the characters. Each of those choices emphasizes different characters and different images and each could be the "best" choice depending on how you want the story to read. It's the same kind of thing as, in prose writing, deciding whether to lead off a scene with description, or to lead off with dialogue and get the description in later, but it's done with the art rather than text.

Go to Part 2

All text copyright 1988,1996 Kurt Busiek. Permission granted to print out one (1) copy for personal use only. All other rights reserved. Marvel Comics^® is a registered trademark of Marvel Entertainment Group Inc. HTML formatting copyright 1996 Greg Morrow.