As I have said several times on the blog, there are many different ways to write a comic book…and here I'm talking about page format and the way a writer conveys what he or she wants the artist to draw. Let me repeat that and put it in boldface for emphasis: THERE ARE MANY DIFFERENT WAYS TO WRITE A COMIC BOOK. It has been my experience in 50+ years of working in this industry that most writers and editors know a grand total of two, if that many.
In this article, I'm going to tell you about one method but first, an anecdote: One day in the eighties, I was at a comic book convention and I happened to have a copy of a script that Carl Barks (i.e., The Great Carl Barks) had written for Gold Key's Junior Woodchucks comic book. I showed it to Julius Schwartz, who most of you know was a longtime editor of comic books for DC. It was in the format that I'm about to describe.
Mr. Schwartz looked at it and said, "Hey, that's an unusual way to write a comic book!" I said, "No, it isn't. Thousands of published comic book stories have been written this way, especially funny comics, especially of the 'funny animal' variety." Julie looked at me like I'd just told him I was from the planet Twylo and was here to enslave mankind with walnuts. He said, in an incredulous tone, "Really?"
This is Julius Schwartz, who then had been editing comic books since the original lungfish crawled onto dry land. And he had no idea a lot of comic books were ever written that way.
Most everyone in or around the field knows of The Full Script Method in which the writer types out a script which specifies how many panels go on each page and then describes what is to be drawn in each panel and he or she supplies the captions, word balloons and sound effects. Within this format, there are many variations of how this information is arranged on a page but it's basically one method. Zillions of great comics have been done this way along, of course, with some not-so-great.
There's also The Marvel Method, which most of you know about. In this method, the comic starts with a plot which may be very detailed or fairly loose or it could even be one sentence like "[Name of Hero] fights [Name of Villain]." It may even be verbal.
This "plot" may have come from the writer, it may have come from the artist or in some cases, it may have come from a third, perhaps uncredited person or a committee meeting. The penciler draws the comic before dialogue and captions are written and may, depending on how detailed the plot is, make up a little or some or most or even all of the story. The writer composes the words later to fit what the penciler has drawn. Again, this system has yielded countless great comics along with the not-great.
But in all my years of writing about comic books or discussing them with others, I've seen precious little mention of what I am calling here The Sketch Method. That's the name I've given it because, like I said, very few people ever discuss this method and so I've never heard of a commonly-used name for it. It is most easily explained by showing you an example. Here is the script for a page from a Bugs Bunny comic book. It's on the left and next to it is the printed page that was drawn from that script. If you click on the image below, it will get much larger on your computer screen…
Let me get some credits out of the way here. The finished page was penciled by Tom McKimson, who I wrote about in this message. I'm not sure who inked it but there's a good chance it was a gent named Joe Prince. The editor markings on the script were done by Chase Craig, who was the Senior Editor for many years at Western's Los Angeles office and most of the time I wrote for them, he was my boss. The lettering was by Bill Spicer, who was the main letterer for that office for a long time.
The script on the left was by John Brady…and I'm afraid I don't know much about Mr. Brady other than that he was a cartoonist, he sometimes drew comics instead of just writing them and he was amazingly productive. I can't back this up with any hard numbers but it wouldn't surprise me if he belongs in a list of The Ten Most Prolific Comic Book Writers of All Time.
He sketched his scripts out like you see…on 8-and-a-half by 11" typing paper and he often partially colored them with colored pencils. This puzzled me when I first saw his scripts in the Western Publishing office since those scripts were never seen by the mysterious people who colored Gold Key Comics. (I'll tell you about them one of these days. Wanna know their names? So did I but even Chase didn't know.)
I asked Chase why Brady's scripts were colored like that and he said, "John enjoys doing them that way." That, he assured me, was the only reason.
Anyway, as you've no doubt figured out by now: In what I call The Sketch Method, the writer just draws out the comic page in rough form. An awful lot of the writers who wrote Dell and Gold Key comics for Western Publishing worked this way. It was more common on the "funny animal" comics but it was done on adventure titles, too. There were issues of Magnus, Robot Fighter done this way. It was used a lot at Archie and Harvey…and even sometimes at DC, though apparently not often enough for Julius Schwartz to notice.
With The Sketch Method, the artist who pencils the page for publication is free to follow the writer's staging or ignore it. My observation, seeing pages go through the Western office, is that most artists would use some of the writer's staging but not all.
McKimson, for example, decided to draw Bugs in a walking pose in the first panel, which I think was a good change. It suggests the idea that Bugs and Porky have just arrived and that we are not coming in on the middle of a conversation. On other pages, he may have deviated a little or a lot.
Tom McKimson also drew Bugs Bunny stories that I wrote. When I was selling scripts to Western, most of them were typed, though in a format I've never seen used elsewhere. In some future post, I'll show you that format. I did do a few Sketch Method and sometimes, I'd type a script but also sketch out what I saw in my head for a certain panel or sequence. Looking just at the published comics, I do not think it would be possible for anyone to discern which stories were drawn from which method of script-writing.
This method, like the two described above, has its good points and bad points, and they have a lot to do with the skills of the writer and artist involved. Of course, one big consideration is whether the writer can draw or whether they can type. If the writer can do both, then you have to ask how good is that writer's staging? Can the artist improve on it? There's also the matter of time…
When I did scripts via The Sketch Method, it took me twice as long (or longer) to finish one as opposed to typing it out. Don R. Christensen, who wrote in both formats for Western Publishing, told me that sketching was usually faster for him than typing. And Roger Armstrong, who drew scripts for Western by both Don and myself said that he preferred working off typed scripts. He said that once he saw a writer's staging of a scene, it inhibited his ability to "tell" the story his way.
Roger's view reminded me of certain actors who like their scripts to not tell them how a certain line should be read, or of some directors who like minimal description from the writer. Some in both job descriptions like to know everything the writer had in mind and some like to feel free to react to the material however they react.
Another very prolific writer for Western was Vic Lockman, who certainly belongs on that imaginary list I mentioned of The Ten Most Prolific Comic Book Writers of All Time. Lockman might be in the Top Three. He wrote his scripts via The Sketch Method and often complained when the artist changed his staging. But Chase told me that sometimes, Vic would write a script and then be assigned to pencil the story also…and he'd change the staging the writer (that is to say, Vic Lockman) dictated.
Watching all of this at the various companies for which I've worked led me to a conclusion which I'd kind of like to sell to anyone who works in comics or is interested in how best to create them. It's not only that there are many ways to write a comic book — including ways unmentioned in this post — but that the method should be tailored to the strengths and weaknesses of the creative personnel.
Even if the writer can't draw or can't type, there are many variations within what they can do. John Brady and Vic Lockman and all the other folks who worked via The Sketch Method did it the same way, no matter what the assignment was or who was going to draw it. In those cases, they had absolutely no contact with the artist (unless they were the artist) and I think that may not have been the ideal way to make good comics.
I've worked for 40+ years with a brilliant artist named Sergio Aragonés who possesses a flair for visual humor that, to put it bluntly, most other comic book artists do not have. It would be such a waste of that talent to handcuff him into working via a method that did not take advantage of that or his great facility with plots and storylines.
For a few years of my life, I was simultaneously working on Groo with Sergio, a book called The DNAgents with Will Meugniot (and later, other artists) and also on Blackhawk — and later, Crossfire — with Dan Spiegle. Sergio, Will and Dan had a few things in common. They were all excellent artists. They were all friends of mine so we talked a lot and had lunch together when we could. Day or night, they could get me on the phone and ask, "What the hell is this thing I'm supposed to draw on page 8?"
They were all guys who turned in work that never disappointed me in any way…but they were all different people with different skills.
Sergio came up with (and still comes up with) almost all the storylines for Groo. Will contributed lots of storylines and ideas for characters in the comics we did together and would sometimes take a sequence I'd figured out and then figure it out a different, better way to handle it.
Dan would have told you he contributed absolutely nothing to the plots of the comics on which we collaborated. He kind of took the "it's not my job, man" attitude about that and put all his attention into drawing what I wrote as well as he could. When Marvel called and tried to get him to draw for them, they usually wanted him to pencil (only) from a loose plot and that was not the way to use him best. He had to have a full, complete script and he had to ink the comic himself. That's if you wanted to get the best work out of him.
The method I worked with each of these three artists — and also many more including Scott Shaw!, Gene Colan, Erik Larsen, Jack Manning, Roman Arambula, Pete Alvarado, Doug Wildey and dozens of others — varied to suit the artist and, of course, the material. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that great or even good comics were always the result because I don't think that way and I also don't want to sound like one of those YouTube Chefs who insists that everything they cook is The Most Delicious Thing Ever. But I will tell you that I think better comics resulted from custom-fitting the way I worked with each of those creative partners.
In some future piece here, I'll talk about still other ways writers and artists have collaborated and how I think it impacted the end product. Mostly, I'd like to encourage other writers and artists to come forth with ways they discovered to work as a team…or even ways they wished they'd been able to work as a team. It has always bugged me that when people write books or essays about how to write comics, they so often talk about the only way they've done it, the only way they know. That might be fine if every story had the same creative elements and every artist had the exact same skill set.
There's a saying that when all you have is a hammer, every job you have to do looks like a nail. I think better comics might result if some people had a larger toolbox. It doesn't have to be huge but it should have more in it than just one hammer.