Whether you are a novelist making the jump to visual media or a screenwriter exploring a new medium, understanding the specific language of comic script formatting is essential. While both comics and screenplays utilize a three-act structure and rely heavily on dialogue and pacing, the way they are presented on the page is fundamentally different.
The Anatomy of a Comic Script
Writing for comics is a collaborative effort involving a writer, artist, editor, colorist, and letterer. The writer’s job is to imagine the entire story—the flow, the action, and every point of dialogue—and notate it for the rest of the team.
Unlike a screenplay, which is built on scenes and shots, a comic script is organized by Pages and Panels.
Page Headings: Each new page of the comic begins with a clear heading (e.g., PAGE ONE).
- Panels: These make up the majority of the comic. A panel is a small section of a page surrounded by borders, carrying a specific action and speech bubbles.
- Gutter: This is the blank space between panels used to change pacing or dictate how a page is read.
- Captions: These are used for a narrator or to provide specific scene information, and unlike speech bubbles, they do not have tails leading to a character.
- Splash Pages and Spreads: A splash page is a single panel that takes up an entire page, while a spread (often a “center spread”) covers two connecting pages.
Comparing Formats: Comics vs. Screenplays
The most striking difference lies in how “motion” is handled, and is one of the most complex changes that new writers struggle with. In a screenplay, a “shot” is typically one continuous take with no cuts. You can write physical motion in this regard.
Example:
INT. KITCHEN – DAY
Sam is wearing a concert hoodie, with dried make-up running down her face. She was crying earlier. Sam picks up a cup, fills it with hot coffee, it slightly spills over on her hand causing her to nearly drop it.
She switches hands and shakes off the coffee on the other before sucking off any potential burn. She then turns and walks up to Joe, steadily balancing the coffee in her hands, trying not to spill anymore on herself.
SAM
Hope you and that witch have a good life Joe.
Sam throws the coffee all over Joe’s pants. He jumps up out of his chair and SCREAMS.
JOE
What the F—
Joe can’t finish his sentence before Sam cuts him off.
SAM
Goodbye Joe.
Joe runs to the counter and grabs the roll of paper towels, ripping off more than he needs and starts patting down his jeans, trying to soak up the coffee in desperation to make it stop burning.
Sam grins at him before turning away and finding her way out of the kitchen, she walks towards the door on the close side of the kitchen. She pulls the sleeve of her hoodie over the palm of her hand to wipe the incoming tears off her face. It smears the make up even more.
We get a CLOSE UP as she pauses, just before she leaves the kitchen.
Sam (Whispering to herself)
Fucking bitch.
–
This entire scene would need to be rewritten to be conveyed properly in a comic book. In comics, an artist cannot draw continuous motion in a single panel; instead, the writer must break the action down into key static points. Trying to write motion in a panel will lead to a very frustrated artist trying to convey the motion on their own since they can only draw one frame at a time. Oftentimes new writers will do this and it will lead to a comic being lengthier than expected because key actions need to be broken down into several panels.
Breaking down the above scene would write something like this:
PAGE ONE
PANEL 1 (INT. KITCHEN – DAY):
CLOSE UP on a coffee cup as Sam fills it. A splash of hot coffee overflowed, over the rim onto her hand holding the cup.
PANEL 2:
Sam mid wave of her hand in the air, grinning in pain, with splashes of coffee flying off her hand. She has makeup falling down her face from crying. She’s wearing a long sleeve concert hoodie, and ripped up jeans.
Sam
Ow, ow, ow!
PANEL 3:
MID CLOSE UP She balances the cup with both hands. She has a determined, slightly angry look.You can see the makeup on her eyes is slightly dried. Joe is in the background, seated at a small kitchen table, oblivious.
PANEL 4:
Sam stands over Joe, who is seated. She is holding the cup of coffee, looking down at him.
SAM
Hope you and that witch have a good life Joe.
PANEL 5:
The coffee is being violently thrown, splashing across Joe’s pants. Joe is mid-scream, mid-jump out of his chair, with coffee flying in every direction.
SFX: SPLASH!
JOE
What the F—
PANEL 6:
Sam is walking away, smirking towards us, she is mid-wipe of her makeup with the sleeve of her tshirt, while Joe is grabbing the counter.
PANEL 7:
Joe has a wad of paper towels in his hands, soaking up the coffee on his pants which look like he pee’d himself. The paper towels are still connected to the role.
SAM (Off panel)
Goodbye Joe.
PAGE 2: SPLASH PAGE
Sam is standing against her car, middle of lighting her cigarette with her hands cuffed around the flame. In the background is a car burning, with Joe’s new girlfriend screaming on the phone.
—
As you can see that one scene took up an entire page to tell the story, while in film it would have been maybe 2-5 minutes of total screen time at most. You would have a lot more room to continue the story with an additional 30-90 minutes of story to tell in film and TV, while you’d only have 10-12 pages left to tell the story in comic book form. An editor would also go back in and potentially delete certain panels to make it fit better on a page too. Maybe we don’t need to see Sam leave the room smiling, or we don’t need 2 panels of Joe cleaning his pants.
But what we do need are the key points. We need to signal that Sam is pouring HOT coffee on Joe, so she needs to burn herself initially. We need Joe to be upset, so we need the screaming moment, and we need Sam to leave confidently as it’s setting up her character progression for later in the story.
Writing out action sequences becomes even more complex as jumping from point A to point B can sometimes be confusing without direct motion connecting the two. A simple punch could take upwards of 3-6 panels depending on the importance of the scene. Or take this scene for example. If you went from her pouring coffee, to him wiping his pants, you’d be confused on how we got to that point. We also needed to show her movement through the kitchen so the reader could picture it themselves, going from the machine, to Joe, to leaving towards the viewer.
Formatting Comparison Table
Why the Difference Matters
In a screenplay, the focus is on the “surface” (dialogue and description) and the “under-the-surface” (plot and structure) for a moving image. In comics, the writer must be even more descriptive for the artist. If a character “swings out left,” the writer must explicitly state that action alongside the dialogue and sound effects like “SWOOSH”.
A film/TV show might have various stages of different groups of people putting together ideas. A script is just stage one, it’s then handed to a team that will put together potential shots to film, then a stage director will plan out where characters will enter and exit the scene, etc… If something doesn’t work, a team at some point will find a way to change things to make it work. Oftentimes the product that is handed over in script form is nothing like the outcome of the film or TV show at all. Which sometimes leads to writers wanting their name entirely removed from the production as it’s no longer “their” work.
In comics the writer has the important job of planning out all of this. You are not only planning out the lore, story, and character progression, but what characters say, how they act, how they enter and exit scenes, every little detail. They can, of course, work with an artist and if something isn’t working they can change it, but an artist going off tangent could be destructive to the narrative and very rarely is what is handed over not part of the final piece.
The biggest example of this is writing character bio’s. You have to go beyond the “power set” in every arc you take. Every detail of a character needs to be hammered home in the writing so that the artist has the right idea on how to bring them to life. Take Sam, how did you picture her by the end of the scene? Well as a writer I pictured her as
Sam – Younger, early 30’s, blonde hair that she keeps in a bun, with green eyes. She wears concert T-shirts and has a tattoo on her left inner arm. Ripped up jeans, appears very confident on the outside.
Does this align with what you pictured?
One of the biggest complexities with heroes is that every artist can convey them in their own unique style, which is fine, but each hero needs to be defined on who they are. If the artist of this segment had Sam blast off from the kitchen like Supergirl, we get an entirely new book, right? So we have to go in and write literally everything we know about our characters the moment we create them. Who they are, what they do, and how they do it.
You could look at various characters from Tribe Comics for examples too. Cypress, for example, relatively remains the same character and age through her adventures, so you can define who she is, what she does, and how she does it. An artist could then take this description and work with it. They could put their own twist on her visually, but as a writer I have key characteristics that I don’t want changed, like her short red hair.
Or you could look at other work from other studios, for example Spider-Man. In his various different iterations, several key components were changed, but they were all explained through story. In one instance he has organic webs, in another he needs web shooters, for example. However if the series introduces web shooters, then he needs web shooters, and a new artist can’t come in and remove them just because it’s their style.
Dialogue
One thing I want to mention, but not entirely dive deep into here, is dialogue. This is very important in a sense because comic book readers….well….don’t like reading. If they did, they’d pick up the novel, right? They want to see action sequences rather it be Spider-Man beating up Doc Ock in New York, or Sam dumping coffee on Joe.
In a novel we could dive into Sam’s emotional state, what she’s thinking, why this scene is so important. In film we can add subtle clues that the camera picks up. In a comic we simply convey a lot of this emotion through visuals.
Filling panels with dialogue is not only bad for the reader, but it becomes a nuisance for the artist. You don’t want to cover beautifully crafted scenes with bubbles, and word placement is an artform in itself. One reason I kept the dialogue short in the above scene is because the actions do all the speaking. I don’t need to cover the splash of coffee on Joe to have him shout “IT’S HOT!,” we already know it’s hot at this point.
Just remember
If you’re looking to get going with comic book writing, it’s a good thing. If you’re transitioning from another medium, the hardest aspect of this transition is simply motion. You need to learn how to tell stories via still shots. An artist can not draw motion, they can draw one frame from that motion.
But more importantly you have less time to tell a story than almost any other medium. You can’t go in-depth like a film/TV show, and you very rarely can dive deep into the underlying story like a novel because you don’t have as many words or pages to work with.
You have a very confined space, but the most important space of the whole production. Literally everything rests on you to plan out. You take ideas from the artists, editors, and you plan it out. How characters look, feel, react to situations. How scenes are displayed, how dialogue is said, how action scenes take place. You plan all of it.
