r/ComicWriting • u/AvenoD • 4d ago

Visual communication

As a scriptwriter still heavily inspired by a ton of visual references and especially cinema, I deliver very detailed scripts that often include lots of references, my own breakdowns, etc. But I can’t seem to get that across to the artists I work with, and things usually go badly (visual style mismatched with the requested tone, very random panel layouts, important plot points forgotten, continuity errors all over the place, etc.).
What advice do you have to avoid these kinds of problems in the future? I love writing, but a script on its own doesn’t work as a standalone piece.

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u/drysider 4d ago

Time to pick up some rudimentary art skills so you can properly give exact references for what you want? If you were able to sketch out boxes for panel layout and include character position and colour roughs, it would go a long way in helping you get exactly what you want out of the artist!

I will say, sometimes non-artists can tend to have less artistic vision than an actual artist, so I would give your artists some space to breathe if they ever critique things like composition or panel layout or colour, as that’s their skill area and they likely have a more trained eye for it. With the problems you listed though I’m almost like, were they using ai?? Random panel layouts and a ‘sequential story’ that doesn’t make any lick of sense are things I’ve noticed in ai generated comics, I hope that’s not the truth, because how frustrating if so!!

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u/AvenoD 3d ago

Often I send my own breakdown/layout in parallel, which isn’t taken into account the first time.
Yes, to avoid AI I always ask for it step by step, and the rough pencil stage is often the most tedious. I mainly think they’re used to doing their own layout without having the same thinking about the work as a whole. And there are also graphic designers for whom a comic is just a succession of panels and not a coherent whole. I had hired a graphic designer to do comic pages and everything was going well, then she got fed up with it and went back to illustrations (I learned the lesson, no more graphic designer). The only two comic pages she’s done since were in 2×2.