3 Easy Steps to Writing a Comic Book Script

In a few months my short story Headless White Horse which was published in my short story anthologywill be published as a comic book short in Okie Comics, a local comic book magazine.

I couldn’t just send in my short story to Okie Comics’s editor Jeff Provine because I had to convert my short story to what is called a comic book script. Think of it like a screenplay for a film or television show. The artist has to read the comic book script in order to understand how the comic book will be arranged on the page, what to draw in the panels, and what dialogue will be expressed.

I decided to offer a quick step-by-step guide to converting a short story or any prose story to a comic book script.

1. Get yourself a good comic book script writing program- I use Scrivener which has a template ready to go with formatting guides that are easy to use. However, Comics Beat lists links to several different templates for many types of word processors. Below is a screen shot of page one of my comic book script using Scrivener.

The first page of my comic book script as seen in Scrivener.

As you can see, Scrivener lists each page of the script in what is called the “Binder” so that each page stands alone and…