Panel 1: Formatting

Welcome to How NOT to Write Comics! Our first post is going to cover script formatting. This ought to be a pretty short one, but this is so vital. 

I've seen so many scripts that are just an utter nightmare to read, even as a comics writer I look at them and just can't parse out what's supposed to go where. It's one thing to write a mess of script for yourself, but when you're writing for another artist, you need to keep it clean and concise. And, honestly, it's just good to keep solid legible scripts on hand. You never know when an artist is going to want to see a writing sample before agreeing to work with you. Here's an example of what NOT to do.

PAGE

Panel: Chuck walks down the street. The date is January 7, 2012.

Panel: He bumps into a woman walking the opposite direction and says, "Hey watch it!" The woman says, "What's wrong with you?"

Panel: Chuck spins around hearing a loud crash sound. There has been an accident. He think, "What was that?!"

PAGE

Panel: Blah blah blah...

Now, I just made that up and honestly, it's not even that bad compared to some of the crap that I've seen. (Okay, the script itself is really bad, but we're talking formatting here.) Below I've written out an example of a great way to format your pages that fixes everything wrong with the nonsense above.

CHUCK'S BAD DAY
WRITTEN BY KYLE J. KACZMARCZYK
DRAWN BY GOD HELP YOU

PAGE 1 (3 Panels)

Panel 1: Chuck is walking down the street.

CAPTION:
January 7, 2012

Panel 2: He bumps into a woman walking in the opposite direction.

CHUCK:
Hey, watch it!

WOMAN:
What's wrong with you?

Panel 3: Chuck spins around, there has been an accident.

SFX:
CRASH

CHUCK (CAP):
What was that?!

[Page Break]

PAGE 2 (4 Panels)

Panel 1: Blah blah blah... (you get the point)

Descriptions, dialogue, and captions ought to be written out regularly unless the character is yelling in which case you can get away with all caps. Sound effects on the other hand ought to be in caps unless they're supposed to be very quiet sounds. But usually it's going to be stuff like BOOM or WHAM. You can also use FOOTNOTE as well, which I'm fond of when referencing something kind of obscure. Just make sure you put an * in your caption or dialogue to con-notate that a footnote will appear.

Also, it's important to put your captions, dialogue, etc. in the order you wish them to appear on the panel. I know that sounds pretty obvious, but you'd be surprised how often I've lettered a panel only to find out a caption was supposed to go somewhere else. Also it gives the artist a good idea where to leave room for these things on a panel. 

Another important point is that one comic page should equal one script page. If your page runs over that's okay, but make sure you still start the next comic page on the next script page. So even if comic page one runs on to script page two make sure comic page two starts on script page three. Since you've put a panel count at the top of your page, it will avoid any confusion. This essentially just keeps the script from appearing too cluttered and avoids any confusions as to where one page ends and another begins.

Well, that about covers it. If you'd like a more in depth breakdown and essentially know where I got this from you can download this template from Dark Horse comics in either Microsoft Word or PDF format. This was a massive help for me.

Thanks for reading and see you next week!