Analysis of a Comic Script (GHOST published by Dark Horse Comics)

Ghost is the fictional superhero of a comic book published by an American company called Dark Horse Comics. The character appeared in specials and monthly titles detailing the afterlife of Elisa Cameron and her search for the truth surrounding her (apparent) death. I have. Dark Horse Comics have released a sample script of Ghost online. 

Fig. 1.

One my first observations about this script is the extensive descriptions for each different scene. For example, the description of the first panel (see Fig. 1.) is very long, this could be because it is an establishing shot. The artists who have to visually recreate these scenes would obviously find it extremely helpful for the script to be as descriptive as possible so it can satisfy the writers and producers who have approved of the script and they would receive a product that they are expecting but this gives the artists very little creative freedom. This extensive establishing shot would also be useful for the backgrounds in other panels in the scene.

Fig. 2.

Character descriptions in comic scripts are very blunt and basic (see Fig. 2). In the second panel a character is described as "The man is wearing threadbare jeans, wrinkled and sagging on his thin form and notched with a belt obviously too large for him, and battered work boots". This description is essentially a list of all the traits the writer imagines for this character and putting them in list form is a basic way for the artist to recreate it allowing minimal variation from the writer imagination.

Fig. 3.

The format to comic scripts is quite different to scripts in the audio visual medium. Each page of the script describes the page in that actual comic it self, it is then divided in to descriptions of each panel. As shown in Fig. 3, the speech and caption is separate from the description of the panel. I am writing my script on Celtx, a free online script writing service and with Celtx you can write a script and it automatically puts your writing in to a script format. Recently, there was an update for comic scripts to be written on Celtx. When printing a comic script it pits in to the format of a table but it types in a similar format to a regular comic script.




Sources:

http://images.darkhorse.com/darkhorse08/company/submissions/ghost_sample_comic_script.pdf - The online pdf document from Dark Horse Comics, Ghost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_(Dark_Horse_Comics) - This source was used to gain information about the comic Ghost as I have not read it myself.