Teaching an Old Writer new tricks (yes this is Art related)

Spidey

Well I've written as long as I can remember. I tried my hand at art, but really only ended up using expensive pencils to write. I've freelanced for various magazines for the past four years, but now I'm trying to make the jump to writing comics, really only for my own sanity: If I have to write just one more goddamned article about the finer points of Dungeon Delving, I'm going to cannibalize myself.

I've read just about every piece of "how to write comics" literature put out by everyone from Will Eisner to Alan Moore, but I'd really like to ask you guys, artists of all stripes, (even if you've never dealt with a script not written by yourself before, the same would pertain to commissions I imagine): what kind of details or language helps you to better work your magic? More details, less details, sparse scene descriptions, a bottle of spray on KY and a frozen fish?

Well, the last one always helps me anyway.

Godfather

First off, question thread.


That being said, your best bet might be to look at various storyboards on how they plan/write comics. It's a language both parties understand, and should at least give you some insight on how to set up a scene via writing.

However, i'm not sure how much good this is going to do you for comics, seeing as how storyboards are more of a movie/animation thing.

Peter Harris

Storyboarding is a must for my comic. I think every comic can benefit from storyboarding. Working with an artist basically comes down to how they interpret your writing. If you write sparsely and the strip that comes back is nothing like you envisioned, then you probably need to write more. If it's as good or better than you hoped, then you should probably shut the hell up and get out of your artist's way. ;-)

Then... my comic is almost as much movie as it is comic.

Blue Is Beautiful

i forget which ones but in some of the Sandman trades, Neil Gaiman shows the stages of how a comic is made. he writes a regular script with some ideas, then the artist would do some quick thumbnails for the layout of the pages, then Neil would writes notes on it, and then they would start drawing them out. after a while i guess you don't need that system, but since Gaiman had the artist change about every 10 issues, he needed a way to keep communicate with them.