TPG Week 183: A Clinic In Wrong

**Steven Forbes** · 06-27-2014, 08:12 PM

Hello, and welcome back to another installment of The Proving Grounds! This week, we have a new Brave One in Ben Goldsmith. We also have the return of Steve Colle! We also have the return of the rant! So, we have Steve in the soothing blue, I'm in the hyped-up red, and we'll all see how Ben handles

Widow's Peak

I’ll tell you right now, before I even begin, that the formatting is a real turn-off. (You should have seen it beforehand. I was kind and told Ben that he had a choice: to either beef up the panel descriptions to something an artist can work with and an editor can see, or leave it. Leaving it...wouldn't have gone well. It would have gone a lot worse than it's going to go today.) I’m already seeing a lack of page breaks, a point form look to your panel set up (with P.1 and onward having the indented descriptions), and a few other gripes that make this look extremely unprofessional. (I don't know about unprofessional. Format is format—I just care if it's consistent.) I know Steven is going to comment on the fact that this is 11 pitch instead of 12 (insert rant about pitch here!), so add that to your list of things against you right out of the starting gate. As an editor, if I were to receive this from any writer, I wouldn’t give it the time of day (Which is deep. Steve is much, much kinder than I am. There was a time when he would have gone out of his way to help a writer with format. All of you have changed him.). If you want to be a serious comic book writer, you have to know how to present your work. There are tons of examples of script formats online. DARK HORSE COMICS even provided aspiring writers with a sample of what they look for in a format at http://images.darkhorse.com/darkhors...rmatGuides.pdf. Do the research, do the work, and you’ll better your chances of getting your script past that editor’s impulsive trash dump. (Not so impulsive. A good editor has a practiced eye, so the trash dump shouldn't be impulsive at all. Just because the consideration wasn't long and deliberate doesn't mean it's impulsive.)

Pg 1(5 Panels) (Right off the bat, you haven’t spelled out the word “Page” and you’ve missed a space between the 1 and the opening bracket. This shows me that you didn’t proofread and didn’t care to go beyond simple abbreviations. It’s showing laziness and a lack of respect for your own work. Take yourself seriously and others will, too.)(Commenting because the word “page” wasn't spelled out? Know what this means? It means this script really, really got under Steve's skin. Me? I don't care, as long as you're consistent.)

P.1 Establishing shot of a lonely grey pier jutting out 30 feet from a stone filled base where it touches down at the beach. The pier resides above cold black New England waters foaming where the waves hit the wooden stands that support the structure. The angle is from the beach to the water with the pier on the right. It is Autumn. Grey hues. (I’m having trouble getting a visual sense of the setting based on what you’ve written here. In some ways, you’re being specific with things like “30 feet” [Is the artist supposed to measure?] and “cold black New England waters” [How do they differ from any other waters hitting the shoreline and pier supports of any other place in the world?] (In the northeastern US, the water gets damned COLD!). Then, you don’t give enough clear information on where your camera is placed. You say it’s a “lonely grey pier”, but that would tell me that it’s empty of people and props, which means it’s a shot from the top of the pier in order to see these things. However, you also give the impression that the shot is from underneath, which makes the opening information moot. Choose a specific location for your camera and work with that.) (Also, we read from left to right. If the pier is jutting out from the right, that means it's going to be leading the eye to the left, and back out of the book. Which might be a good thing.)

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Alyssa · 06-27-2014, 10:52 PM

And now, my dear friends, we all know how Steven Forbes became the man he is today.

I have to admit I somewhat skimmed the panel descriptions, but only because they kinda made my head hurt. They were both incredibly specific AND bafflingly (Stephen King would crucify me for using that word) vague.
I'm sure there's some kind of superpower involved there, being simultaneously specific and vague.

I am going to defend Ben on something, though.

In another life, I went to film school. I saw a lot of scripts that looked a lot like this one. The semi-random montage of locale images, all silent? You see that in some films, usually indie/low-budget films. The kind you see in art house theatres. It's been yonks since I saw 28 Days Later, but I *think* they did something similar there.
The problem is, this is missing context. If you're going to have it completely silent, you need to introduce your audience to context first. If not, you need dialogue and/or captions. As it stands, this is just confusing.

Also remember that what works for screen won't always work for comics. I get the distinct impression that this was written as a film script (if not deliberately, then subconsciously).

Quote:

If, by some miracle, you were telling an interesting story, and decided that your first words were going to come after a couple of pages of silence, what you’d want to do is to put that dialogue on an odd-numbered page. Why? Someone who isn’t Sam Read or Yannick Morin tell us why you’d want it on an odd-numbered page.

Okay, wait, I might have this. Ummmmm....
Because then you're in effect using the dialogue as incentive to turn the page?

Just as a sidenote- STEVE COLLE BACK DOIN' TPG! BOOYAH!

**Steven Forbes** · 06-27-2014, 11:23 PM

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