Panel to Panel - Writing for Comics 101 with Cecil Castelluci

Panel to Panel - Writing for Comics 101

with Cecil Castelluci

Got a comic in your head and no clue where to start? Looking to adapt a piece of prose into a graphic novel? Comics curious? In this workshop learn the basics of comic book writing and what strengths telling a story sequentially can do. You’ll get an overview of how panels work, gain insight in both in plotting and writing a comic book script (as well the different types of script formats), and how to be a great collaborator with the artist.

Having been in the world of comics for 20 year, writing comics like Plain Jane and global IP to opera librettos and interactive performative art, Cecil loves sequential storytelling!

Comics have come a really long way, from text heavy panels making it feel more like books, to a marrying of the text and illustration, comics is sequential art story telling, where the story is told from panel to panel. 

Cecil then dove into the elements she considers when writing for comics. We started with TIME. Comics play with TIME. They can expand or shrink time, play with how readers understands time and as a comic writer, you want to hold the readers hands as they navigate the story. The reader is filling in the information which makes it interactive, so playing with and molding time is a great tool.

A simple four comic exercise for anyone starting out: SET UP,  CONFLICT, TWIST, RESOLUTION. Working with only four panels, try to tell a story. This doesn't give you a lot of space to work with or a lot of time to tell the story but challenges you to tell the story in short form where you rely on the reader to fill in the gaps.

A great book resource, is Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. In this book, which is a big comic book itself, you will learn all the elements and principles of comics. I have read it and it is a brilliant work of art and guidebook if you are just breaking into comics. 

Cecil continued by showing us examples of time in comics. In two pages of Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns, every moment in the scene is being highlighted to emphasize the tension, a device used to make the reader feel the slow passage of time. 

Opposed to the Frank Miller example, you see the artist Claire Roe in Pheromone draw the scientist's initial writings about "the chemical" and then time jumps to the result of this newly found experiment, showing the drastic effects of its creation. 

We then moved onto SCRIPTS!

 There is no one format for comic script writing.

What is most important for you as a writer is to try to communicate with your artist/collaborator. What's important to get on the page and how should the pacing should be.

There are two types of scripts: a FULL SCRIPT which has the page number, dialogue, panel descriptions, etc and an OPEN SCRIPT which isn't as descriptive, leaving it up to the illustrator to fill in the panel breakdown.

Communicate with the artist.  You are building the scaffolding but if they see the scene in a better way, allow them to feel free to interpret it how they see it. Give as much information and what your suggestion to pacing and structure could be but leave it open to adaption as comics are truly a collaborative form of creation.  

When Cecil starts out, she opens up a doc and simply writes "page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6..." to help plot. Double check how many pages you need to fill. You might have a certain amount dictated from your publisher. Start there and then begin slipping things in to break it down in a very loose beat sheet.

From there, Cecil makes a grid to map out the page turns to play with cliffhangers, and help her pre-visualize the script. This is all prep work when writing comics, And remember, you always want more pages than you have so be sure to add a buffer.

When writing dialogue, try to avoid "two people talking at a table." Map out the drama to make it visually exciting. 

In the resource section on Airmeet, Cecil share a PDF where you can find "Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work!" This is a helpful visual for those who want to create some interesting variety in their panels.  

Be mindful of how many words are in a panel. Don't write too much. This limits the art that the illustrators can do, so write notes to illustrator. Revise the text after getting thumbnail because the artist will draw things to help establish setting, scene and other elements that is in the text. 

You can really explore, and experiment with structure, and layout when visually storytelling by using so many techniques. Cecil continued onto other elements that can help bring your writing to life like: 

- Color

- Sound

- Silence

- Style

- Animals as a convention to enter 

"Let go of the words, and lean into the pictures. It is a lot more collaborative than picture books. Trust your artist. Find a way to have a shares visual vocabulary. So go out and read, read, read comics!"

About Cecil Castellucci

Cecil Castellucci (she/her/they) is the award-winning New York Times Bestselling and Eisner nominated author of books and graphic novels including Shade, The Changing Girl, Boy Proof, The Plain Janes, The Year of the Beasts, Female Furies, Batgirl, Star Wars: Hyperspace and Odd Duck. Her newest graphic novel is the cli fi hope punk book Shifting Earth out on Dark Horse Comics. Her short stories have been published in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Tor.com, and other literary and comics anthologies. In a former life, they were known as Cecil Seaskull in the Canadian ‘90s indie bands bite and Nerdy Girl. She has written three opera librettos incorporating comics Les Aventures de Madame Merveille (w/ Andre Ristic/ 2010) Hockey Noir: The Opera (w/ Andre Ristic /2018) and Metternich! (w/ Cwww.cecilcastellucci.com