There's a purity to comics scriptwriting, and I love it. Everything goes to serve the visuals. It's so different from prose writing, and yet prose writing, especially the writing of scenes, contains plenty of crossover techniques. Here are three aspects of comics scriptwriting that I'm finding pleasurable:
- Transference. Everything is aimed, ultimately, at serving the viewer. The final image relies on the artist, of course, but the more that I can project myself into both the artist's mind and the viewer's mind, the more connected the final art will be. It's this amalgam of three minds, this network of empathy between writer-illustrator-viewer--a web of connection, a triangulation of sensibilities--that are held in the mind, ever shifting with each choice.
- Functionality. The script is a step along the way, not the finished product, and as such its highest function is to correctly describe how the final product should appear. In this it doesn't require lyricism or poetry but a precise technical language. The script itself won't be published, and in one sense this takes off some pressure to "perform" with the language. It strips the use of the words down to their functional specificity.
- Minimalism. There are lots of little things, like starting a scene with "P1 - Int. Police Cruiser," that, in its shorthand minimalism, does a ton of heavy lifting. There's no room for all the things that I ordinarily rely so much on in prose writing--psychological reflection, description, language play. In this way, I find that comics scriptwriting is a great challenge. It requires only descriptions that immediately forward the story. The form itself is so focused on present action that the script will only tolerate language that actually does something--describes an image or a character that will translate to the visual, or presents dialogue or captioned words that will appear in the scene itself. Every word in a script has skin in the game.
Here's a page from the script that I'm currently adapting, "Another Cop Story."
