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[Do] you find scripts easier to revise than chunks of narrative for, say, a novel?
Scripts are a lot more flexible. Don't know if I'd say it's easier exactly, but you've got a lot more options and can change the effect of a scene with relatively minor revisions—for instance, by changing the position of the panel breaks.
Comics are a hybrid artform: unlike a novel, which is a temporal object, unfolding purely in time, where a scene can last for as long as you take to read it, comics uses the spatial properties of visual arts to determine the pacing.
Say you've got a conversation between two people, a back-and-forth exchange:
JACK: So, whaddya doing tonight?
ROTHKOID: Dunno. Might see a movie. You got any plans?
JACK: Not really. Say, maybe I could come with?
Now, that entire exchange could take place in a single panel in three word balloons... or it could take an entire two-page spread, in six balloons (one for each sentence) with wordless panels interspersed. The first approach yields a casual exchange between friends: the second gives you Chris Ware-esque squirming discomfort —all those awkward silences!
That's the kind of control a writer gets from the full-script approach—precise control of the beats of a scene, controlling the temporal element in ways that can change the entire meaning of a scene.
On technical vocabulary: Like Rizla, I tend to use screenwriting terms in my scripts—two-shot, reverse, reference to the "camera eye" and such—in part because the language is very familiar to me (I did the screenwriting program at university), and in part because it's simply very useful: it's a full, pre-existing vocabulary, and anything comics-specific ends up just being a variation on standard screenplay jargon, so why re-invent the wheel?
On page layout: As you can see from the script sample at my blogI tend perhaps to be overspecific: if I knew the artist well and understood hir strengths as a storyteller, I might be go a little lighter on the detail, but for a spec script I would say you should be as specific as you can—because these things do make a difference: a six-panel page in a two-tier grid has a different effect than six panels in a three-tier grid. It's subtle, but you can feel it.
Somewhere—I no longer recall exactly where, but it might've been from James Hudnall—I picked up a shorthand for specific panel shapes: box for a perfect square, flapjack for a horizontal panel, i.e. one significantly wider than it is high, and silo for a vertical panel, i.e. higher than it is wide.
Last note: You will find that once you've been writing comics for a while, you start to read them differently: you notice layouts to a much greater extent, and notice how a writer or artist will solve a particular storytelling problem, or when they have failed to do so adequately. This may end up lessening your enjoyment of the reading experience: it's kind of like watching a magic show when you already know how all the tricks are done. |
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