Daniel posted this yesterday: a rough study of a panel from page 7 of CARRIER.
And, in case you’re interested, here’s my script for that panel:
You’ll notice that, while still rather detailed, this panel description is much briefer than those from the first page. There’s a couple reasons for this. One, my scripts are always much wordier at the beginning, because I’m first describing characters and establishing tone and setting in addition to just describing what’s happening. And two, this is an action scene. I try to pay attention to the fact that varying the number of panels per page and amount of words per panel can change the “speed” of a page, and I try to make action scenes move faster than the rest of a story. And to a lesser degree, even though it’s really only for an audience of one (my artist), I try to be conscious of this in the script itself: making the action scenes read faster. Basically I try any way I can communicate to an artist, not just what’s happening on the page, but how it feels. That’s the theory at least. Which is why I swing closer to the John Wagner school of scripting when writing action (Dave Gibbons once memorably described his scripts as “being like a series of exciting telegrams”). This particular panel’s not the best example, but some of my descriptions do venture into telegram territory. (I’ve also discovered that the longer I work together with an artist and the more of a gestalt sensibility we develop, the shorter my descriptions usually become as the artist better understands what I’m envisioning and I know when to trust them and cut them loose to draw the sort of visual I’m looking for without being hampered by over-direction)
Some more trivia for those of you who like looking behind the scenes: Daniel describes this panel as being from page 7 of the story, but it actually appears on page 5 of my 8-page script. After reading it and starting to work on the visuals, Daniel told me the final pages would probably come out to more than the 8 I intended. Which is just fine by me, because we’re targeting this for a publication where page count is not a concern, and because Daniel is a good visual storyteller in his own right and I trust his instincts.
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Oh man, you didn’t tell me you would be putting me on the spot like this Caleb, haha!
Heh, I’ll warn you next time, Daniel. But, you know, a future Comic Book Idol has to get used to being in the limelight.
haha, so you know about that, well we’ll know soon enought if more stress is going to be added to my life!
[...] CARRIER Takes Shape Yesterday Daniel sent me the completed rough layouts for the entire CARRIER story. The 8-page script shook out into an 11-page story and I’m very pleased with the result. Here’s the full page 7, the last panel of which I posted earlier. [...]