Script

What a script actually contains

There is no single industry format, but working scripts converge on the same elements:

• Page number, then panel number within it. The page is the real unit, because the page break and the page turn are structural.
• Panel description — what the reader sees. Shot size, who is in it, what they are doing, what changed since the last panel.
• Dialogue, attributed by character name, in reading order.
• Captions and SFX, marked as such so the letterer knows which is which.
• Occasionally shot notes: low angle, close on hands, establishing shot.

A description that cannot be drawn is not a description. “She realises he has been lying to her for years” is a thought; “her hand stops halfway to the cup” is a panel. The test is whether an artist who has not read the outline could draw it from the paragraph alone.

Full script versus the Marvel method

Full script specifies every panel before art begins. The writer decides how many panels are on page four and what each one shows; the artist draws to it. It is the default for most Western comics, and it is what works when writer and artist are not in the same room — which is nearly always. It also front-loads all the structural risk onto the writer, who has to count panels without drawing them.

The Marvel method hands the artist a prose summary of the issue — sometimes a page, sometimes a paragraph — and lets them break it into panels and pace it themselves. The writer then writes dialogue onto the finished pencils. It produces better-paced art, because the person who understands the page is designing the page, and it produces continuity problems, because nobody has counted whether the plot fits. Stan Lee and the 1960s Marvel office used it to ship far more pages than a full-script workflow allowed.

Most working collaborations today are somewhere in between: a script that specifies beats and dialogue but explicitly permits the artist to re-break panels. Say which one you are doing before the first page, because the two disagree about who owns pacing.

Where the script sits in the process

After the beat sheet and before the thumbnails. Writing a script without a beat sheet means discovering on page eighteen that the second act has no turn; thumbnailing without a script means drawing dialogue-shaped holes and hoping words fit them.

Two habits that pay off immediately:

1. Count your panels per page. Five or six is comfortable for a standard page; nine is a dense grid and needs short lines; three is slow and had better be earning it.
2. Write the dialogue at final length. Scripts routinely carry lines that are 40 words long and arrive at lettering as a bubble covering half the panel. Roughly 25 words per bubble for print, 8–15 for a phone.

For a vertical-scroll comic, replace “page” with “episode” and number panels straight through — the page turn does not exist, and a script organised around one will plan beats that the format cannot deliver.