I just discovered your great podcast series. I was inspired to write about your podcast– and draw a rough cartoon of your show– in my blog, word whacking, http://wordwhacking.wordpress.com/.

Keep up the great work.

thanks
Jessica

Thanks for the podcast on comics. I love to see how all the different entertainment arts tie into each other.

@Howard: You put it far better than I could with fewer words. I guess that’s why I only communicate well with pictures!

Keep writing everyone; without you, all we comic artists have are pin-ups.

But whether we’re looking over the left shoulder or the right shoulder of the character in question, and which direction the action moves from panel to panel — that stuff is usually best left to the guy doing the pencils.

And I would argue that the person doing the pencils is the director. She looks at the writer’s script and the “storyboard” that his panel suggestions provides. Then she makes the decisions about what to actually include in each of those panels, and where to put them.

The inker and the letterer have much less creative input. The colorist might have some, but often the most important color decisions are things like lighting that will already have been dictated by what was penciled.

So: Writer=writer. Penciler=director. Inker, Colorist, and Letterer=Post-production and Computer Effects crew.

As you can tell, I’m not a comic writer or artist — more of a software engineer — so my apologies if I am envisioning the process incorrectly. But over in software land, we do similar things, and have used various arrangements. I like the rough outline (aka design) as a common effort, then individual approach, but I have seen others work well too. Depends on the team more than anything.

I was just speaking from my experience and training. And as I’ve worked as a comics writer for the last six years, I’ve settled on a script format that works best for me. Is it perfect for everyone? Probably not. But, also as I said in the podcast, every writer has their own unique format for scripting, just as artists have their own preferred style of scripts to read.

Good advice for comic book writers would be to talk to your artist. Ask what format they’d prefer to have. Some will want the panel to panel layout, but most will not. Remember, your name is on the book for ‘writing’, not ‘penciller’ or ‘colorist’. If you make a wrong call on layout, it’s not you who will be hurt by it, but the artist that’s been forced to do it your way. If you have a clear visual image that you want to express, that you feel is integral to the story (like a close-up of one character’s hands clutching a bottle of Glenmorangie) then by all means specify that. For the most part though leave the art to the artists.

As a comic book writer, you should be more concerned with telling the story than with panel count. Develop your story on a page by page basis and simply tell the artist what you want to happen on that page. Don’t just write what is visually happening (Spidey clinging to a wall, etc.) but also include things that the reader may not directly know. What’s he thinking about? Is he brooding? Even through a mask, an artist can portray these things with pose and camera angle.

@Mike Barker: Near the beginning, and he mentions that he does a panel by panel layout, even specifying the number of panels per page. It’s this attitude that I felt the need to reply to.