Okay so you've got some great drawings/illustrations/paintings and a 'great idea' for a comic book or graphic novel... now how do you write the story?

Good question! As always it's a 'Bad News - Good News - Bad News' scenario on how to write a script for a comic or graphic novel. The initial 'bad news' is; there is no set way to write comic/gn scripts and everyone writes them in their own way. Good news is; that's not necessarily a bad thing as it allows you a great deal of latitude for you to develop a writing method. The bad news about that is; without set parameters to guide you, that gives you numerous opportunities to develop hideous writing habits and screw up entire projects beyond all recognition!

One method I've found very useful is using Cinematic Style scriptwriting adapted for purely static visual media (i.e. comics and gn's.) The cinematic style of script is designed for adaptation to moving media like film, video and animation but..., before then it is applied to 'storyboarding'. Though storyboards are intended to give film directors cues for camera direction and framing, they are nothing more than 'glorified' comic panels. So with some small tweaks, the cinematic style will work quite well for comic artist and particularly for graphic novelists.

The main thing to remember when using a cinematic script is to think visually when writing dialogue and direction. If you don't believe it will work take the film '300' and use individual frames with speech balloons, it looks just like a graphic novel. Only movement is the difference.

In part 2 we'll look at the process of getting started and adapting cinematic scriptwriting to your project. Prepare yourself!