Comic script and screenplay, side by side
Both describe a story for the people who’ll make it. The difference is who those people are and what they need to know.
I work in both, and switching between them took me a while. Here’s the same moment written twice, and what changes between them.
The same moment, written twice
Two people on a bus. One of them is carrying something she won’t talk about.
As a screenplay
As a comic script
Same moment, same lines, but the comic script decides three things the screenplay leaves open: where the bundle is seen, that the movement gets a panel of its own, and that the last line falls on a panel of somebody not reacting. A screenplay describes the action as it happens over time, and the director picks the shots. A comic script breaks the scene into still panels, and the writer decides what each panel shows.
That was the first thing I had to get used to.
What actually changes
- The unit of time
- A screenplay is measured in minutes, one page to one minute, and a scene runs as long as it runs. A comic is measured in panels and pages, and the page is a fixed limit: the reader sees all of it at once and turns at a set point. You’re writing to a page count, and that’s tighter than it sounds.
- Who reads it
- A screenplay goes to a lot of people, most of them deciding something. A comic script gets read closely by one artist and one letterer. It’s a working document, so it can be blunter than a script you’d send out to be judged.
- Description
- Screenplay action describes what an audience sees over time. A panel description is a single still image, written in the present, holding one moment. The habit I had to lose was putting a small sequence of events in one panel. If your description has an “and then” in it, you’ve written two panels.
- Dialogue
- Dialogue on screen can run long, because actors perform it. Dialogue in a comic takes up space in the drawing, so it stays short: around 25 words in a balloon before it starts covering the art. A speech that plays fine on screen usually gets cut or broken across balloons.
- Sound
- A screenplay barely mentions it. In a comic it’s lettered, so you write the noise as a word and it gets drawn:
SFX:and then the sound. - Camera
- Screenplays leave camera direction alone by custom. Comic scripts go the other way, because the framing is part of the storytelling and it’s yours to choose.
WIDE,INSETandDETAILare normal to write down, and no artist reads them as overstepping.
The symbols each format uses
The two formats are laid out differently. One is a sequence of scenes, the other a hierarchy of pages and panels.
- Screenplay
- Almost nothing needs a symbol.
INT.orEXT.starts a scene, an all-caps line with text under it is somebody speaking, everything else is action. Full syntax in the Fountain guide. - Comic script
- Three symbols do most of the work.
#is a page,##is a panel, a caps name with a colon is a balloon. Everything under a panel belongs to it. Full syntax in the comic format guide.
Both are plain text, so a draft in either one stays a file you can open anywhere. Why that’s useful is in writing a script in plain text.
Adapting one into the other
Going from screenplay to comic means deciding which moments of a scene get a panel. That choice is the real work, so no converter can do it for you. Going the other way means letting go of framing you’d already chosen.
Two things don’t carry over well:
- Screenplay to comic: the page count shrinks. A three-minute scene is three screenplay pages and often one comic page. Adapting is mostly cutting.
- Comic to screenplay: silent moments get lost. A wordless page is a moment the reader spends time on. On screen a silent moment has to be held by an actor’s performance or it’s over in a second.
Dialogue carries over, which is why writers working in both tend to draft the talking first and decide the frames after.