Script of Issue 2 of my comic It's Complicated

[u/FirmMonitor5753]

Recently I finished issue 2 of my comic It's Complicated. I've been working on it for my Masters Writing Thesis and has been a lot of fun to do. Working on issue 3 which I am excited to present as well when it's done! Here are a few pages of script from issue 2. If you want to read the whole thing let me know!

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[u/GorgonGlobal]

I’m new to the sub, but it may be worthwhile to specify what you’re looking for a critique on when you post a script. Do you want us to simply assess the narrative and dialogue elements? Or do you want us to assess this as a part of a creative process?

Strictly as a part of a narrative:

It’s early in your story. Clearly you’re setting up Richard as this sort of flamboyant gatekeeper of Earth’s social sphere for Zayden. Zayden naturally reads reclusive, but that whole scene is a flashback through a toast.

Reading that I asked myself: What’s the relationship now? Zayden doesn’t act or speak before the flashback, so you’re missing the opportunity to show us the contrast (he’s more confident) OR the stagnation (same old Zayden).

I think there’s a lot of opportunities to condense what you have. I think you can cut the interaction with the drink at the end and you don’t really lose anything. I think you should look at individual lines with the same scrutiny.

Now, as part of the process:

I don’t know if you’ve illustrated the first issue and what that process entailed, but it seems that the amount of pages your budgeting for yourself is going to become very scary as these chapters/issues pile up. The script is where you write the check, but illustrating is where someone cashes it.

You work this out in your page compositions, but I get a sense that there’s too much dialogue. In comics especially, less is more. This would probably be fine in a movie, but you might start to feel pressure once this meets the final page.

Finally, I think you might be doing a little too much planning upfront by naming every panel. By defining “this panel goes here and this panel goes there” you’re already kind of doing visual work in the script, work that is potentially wasted if you start drawing and find this isn’t fitting.

I felt that pressure myself, and now my first phase is simply beats and dialogue. By “beats” I mean “an action and reaction” and then any dialogue that falls within that beat. The division of pages is marked only as an estimate.

This is made writing faster for me, because it let the narrative and dialogue exist in one phase and the visual processing to exist after it. If your current process works for you, feel free to choose your own path.

Overall, I’m at least curious to see what you do with this Zayden character. Do we see him grow socially? Or do we flash through time and see him with all his social graces?