Thursday 18 October 2012

Script Writing

If a comic book is a faithful adaptation of Alice so that the dialogue in the comic is taken directly from Carroll and if, further, some large panels are almost entirely visual in content with many pictorial details but no speech balloons and minimal or even no captions, then it is obvious that the artist has had a lot of work to do but what have the script writers, in this case, Leah Moore and John Reppion, done?

Almost everything. It is they, not the artist, who have been responsible for the transition or translation from prose narrative to sequential art story telling. They have had to read the text, visualise some of its scenes in far greater detail than the words can possibly convey, then describe their agreed visualisation to the artist in a long, detailed script. For the dialogue, they have had to select and edit since an entire text cannot be reproduced in speech balloons or captions. An enormous task, comparable to directing a film.

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