Writing For Pictures

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Hello from out here on the frozen Thames Delta. I am once again Not Fully Awake, though possibly that is down to being repeatedly bludgeoned by the current news cycle of The Same Four Fucking Things Forever Without End. I’m setting a new rule of not looking at the phone after 5pm unless it’s an email or a message. I am working on the assumption that everything else is news about Trump telling Musk to invade Mars for sex national security reasons or AI bots trying to sell each other cheap dildos.

In this letter:

• The start of a thought on comics writing: how we write for pictures

• The News

• LTD

ORBITAL

WRITING FOR PICTURES

I spent the early part of my career sitting at a table in an all-night burger bar. People knew they could still find me there at three in the morning, scribbling in a cheap notebook, fueled by chips and cans of Coke. Sketching out rough pages and stick-figure panels. Making sure, damn sure, that I wasn’t writing anything into a script that an artist couldn’t draw. Finding the picture.

There’s a thing about comics writing that’s hard to teach, and writing for other media doesn’t necessarily teach it to you. The visual sense of the work. Finding the picture.

Part of your job as a comics writer is to help find the picture for the artist.

When you do it in screenwriting, they call it “directing on the page” and people get pissed off at you. When you don’t do it in comics, it makes your artist’s job harder than it needs to be.

You need to be able to visualise every panel yourself as you write it. Some version of it. You don’t have to be Alan Moore and describe every element of a picture down to its smallest particle. It was either Dave Gibbons or Brian Bolland who described John Wagner / Alan Grant scripts as “a series of exciting telegrams.” Mostly, comics scripts are a letter to the artists - often including the colour artists - and letterer.

(Your letterer will save your life more often than you can count. Be nice to your letterer.)

And, most often, you’ve had conversations with your artists around the work before you write the script. Screenwriters can’t really talk with the director, the DP, lighting crew and actors before writing their scripts. In film, the script most often comes before everything else. In comic, it’s often the top of the middle part - there’s conversations and tests and outline versioning and design before you get to the actual script. On a thing I’m doing with an artist right now - he wants to call it PROJECT WEPT because he’s insane - there was literally six months of talking and design and notes and random thoughts batted around before I got down to writing the first thirty pages of script. And all that informs what goes into the script -it becomes conversational, and the script references things you’ve talked about beforehand. It would be a terrible, confusing read for anyone who isn’t us.

(And, yes, you can absolutely talk to your colourist and letterer in your script. And outside it. Jordie was always part of the conversation on INJECTION, and there’s at least one sequence in there that’s only there because of Jordie: she wanted to do an autumnal scene, because she rarely got to do those colours.)

No need to write your scripts with posterity in mind. You’re writing a letter to your co-creators (and your editor if there’s one in the mix).

Mark Millar will do this thing in his scripts where he’ll tell the artist that this pic is “the greatest picture of X ever.” X being, I dunno, New York City, a mountain range, Superman taking a dump in the sun, whatever. In screenwriting, this used to be called “hyping the script.” In comics, this is a code: this is Mark Millar telling his artist to take all the space on the page, go absolutely fucking nuts and impress the shit out of everybody. This is the code for “this is your moment to shine and show everyone what you can do.”

He’s found the picture and indicated that there’s no storytelling work to do beyond the description of the the required shot, so show off a bit.

So how do you even write visually? This is why I spent years scribbling out rough pages in notebooks. Every panel has to achieve at least one of several different aspects of visual narrative. Sometimes it’s just exhorting an artist to draw the best ever picture of something. But mostly it’s finding the shape of a picture that tells a moment of the story, and suggesting that to the artist in a clear fashion.

Also, never forget: you can be a complete arseache to everyone if you want.

MOON KNIGHT, issue 1, as illustrated by the world-class Declan Shalvey:

PAGE TEN

There's a thing I want to try here.

Pic 1

Is as tall as the page, but nudged in a bit from the left. The other panels on this page are PAGE-WIDE but set BEHIND this pic. And this pic is a straight-on shot of the ladder on the wall of the silo under the manhole, and MK climbing down. Which isn't that interesting, I know, but bear with me. At the bottom of the pic, there's a RED LIGHT mounted on the wall of the silo.

(no dialogue)

Pic 2

Pagewide: a subway tunnel, train clattering down it, lights, be as abstract as you like.

(no dialogue)

Pic 3

Pagewide: scabby pale tunnel dwellers and their underground shanty. F/G one of them cooking a dead cat on a spit over an open fire. (Random thought: you could even overlay this one over Pic 1 if you felt like it.) (You can make it a dead dog if you like, but people would expect that of me. We'd never get away with a dead baby. Also, it's hard to eat a whole one of those on your own.)

(no dialogue)

Pic 4

Pagewide: dark and misty, we're in a metal corridor, weird pipes and cables and rusted, blackened Kirbyish machinery. Well spooky down here. I mean, really, down here, don't be concerned about realism too much.

(no dialogue)

Also, look how Jordie Bellaire makes the bottom third of the page pop with her colour choice of the machinery against the red light I asked for. Grey to grey, then half-red to orange, then full red to blue/green.

Not going to hold that up as an example of brilliant writing, because it’s not, but it does illustrate something. Seeing the whole page is a skill comics writers have to learn. That’s what years of scribbling out rough pages does for you.

The other thing is that, if you can’t make a panel work with stick figures on a notebook page, then there’s probably something wrong with the panel. Early on in my career, I saw someone ask for a fight-scene panel involving ten people. As one panel on a nine panel page. The artist kinda sorta made it work by going off-grid and shrinking several of the other panels down. But it didn’t really work. And if the writer had tested that page in a notebook first, I don’t think they would ever have scripted it.

I’m already way over my usual word count, so I’m going to return to this with more specifics, ways to find the picture and why. Consider this an opening half-baked thought. In the meantime, here’s Wally Wood’s Panels That Always Work (link to full size).

Now: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast, DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM. 2025: FELL: FERAL CITY new printing, THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition

This is available as a print from the lordess.io store.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

• notes on the book HOW WE GOT HERE by David Shields, which attempts to draw a philosophical line through Plato, Herman Melville, Nietzsche and Zizek to Steve Bannon and the Trump years. Eccentric and entertaining.

• morning computer happens most mornings: pictures, links and thoughts

• light25 is a container for musings around the theme of light that I’m playing with this year

• A little bit on Austin Kleon’s notebook practise

• And - my personal podcast list for January 2025. Maybe there’s something you’d like in there.

LTD is my digital notebook, and I post to it up to four times a day, most days.

This letter has been zapped to you via Beehiiv and is sponsored by:

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The world is often going to be stranger than is comfortable, but it’s not going to be stranger than you can bear. Trust me on that one. Take a breath, take some space, and take care of yourself. See you next week.

W