  
E-MAIL THE AUTHOR |
ARCHIVES
ONE HAND CLAPPING
By Chris Ryall
January 2, 2006
The (Hopefully) Great and (Not-So) Secret Show, Part V: Script Doctoring: Wherein Chris Ryall begins the monumental task of adapting a 700-page novel into comic book form
Last Time: the character sketches were completed.
Spending time on the other aspects of this adaptation, the character descriptions and cover descriptions and issue descriptions… all of those elements are necessary components to pulling off a successful adaptation. As with any lengthy project, if you don’t have a clear direction and concise ideas of characters and story, you damn yourself as you go, since eventually, you’ll need to think about these things. So they’re all vital parts, especially for the artist. However, as you’ve seen from previous columns, Gabe already seemed to have a firm grasp on the characters’ appearance. He and I even went so far as to map out the entire imaginary town of Palomo Grove:
All of these things, though, important as they are, were also a way for me to work on this project with working on it. And by that, I mean the scripts. I knew I’d have to begin sooner or later, but the idea of actually scripting the first issue of this immense project was daunting for a few reasons:
I’d be adapting a beloved work from an author who’s got a passionate fanbase. I certainly didn’t want to let them down the way that, say, producers of the last couple HELLRAISER movies did.
I’d be adapting a 700-page novel into no more than twelve 22-page chunks. This meant not only finding logical places to break the chapters apart, but also endings in each issue that held a proper amount of suspense and reason for you (the reader) to want to read the next one. That isn’t a lot of pages, when you look at it. Clive doesn’t waste pages on needless exposition or descriptions that aren’t germane to the story. And with comics, telling a story graphically, a lot of the descriptions and moving of action from panel to panel have to be done visually. What I mean by this is, a simple sentence that describes a basic action (“he picked up the ball and threw it at the moving car”) could take an entire page to illustrate. Which means… a lot of story needs to be fit into these few pages.
Clive himself would be monitoring the progress as we go along. It’s one thing to show him character descriptions and illustrations that were inspired by his words. It’s another entirely to show him a script that, by its sheer omissions, tells him “the scripter didn’t think this part or that part of your book were essential enough to the story to include them.” Now, Clive’s no stranger to this process, and he’s stated he really enjoys seeing the way others translate his books into movies or comics. Still, there’s a bit of hubris involved in actually doing this thing, cutting sections of a book out, rather than just knowing it has to be done.
I’d done adaptations before—in fact, at IDW, that’s all I do when I take on scripting duties thus far. Movie adaptations aren’t so tough now—after the two “OF THE DEAD” movies (SHAUN and LAND), I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t in translating a project from film to comic. But with those, what I essentially have to work from is the shooting script and the movie itself, a kind of “visual, moving storyboard” for the comic. Between the two, yeah, there are still challenges, but it’s much less involved than taking an entire prose novel and making comics out of it.
THE GREAT AND SECRET SHOW will, in all likelihood, never be adapted to film. It’d never work, and so much would be lost that the final result wouldn’t be anything like the book anyway. If anything, it might work as a miniseries, but even then, visions of the truncated version of Stephen King’s IT dance in my head. But chances are, this comic version would be the only real graphic adaptation of the book. So I really wanted to make sure to get it right.
When I was re-reading TGASS last summer, I made notes throughout, and tabbed chapters that seemed like proper breaks for the comics—that was the first step. When I had the thing broken into twelve chapters (each one anywhere from 70-100 pages), I then began breaking down each chapter into its most basic “beats.” This is really just bullet-pointing the action that needs to happen in each issue, and assigning page counts to each beat. When that’s done, it leaves me with a basic, very skeletal outline of what needs to happen in the issue.
Symbols and Portents
The great thing about TGASS is that it explores worlds within worlds, and looks behind the veil of reality as we know it. In short, magic. So Gabe and I decided it’d be a really nice visual treat to work in magic symbols, runes and characters from various cultures throughout the comic; they’d all make sense within the scene they appear, too—if a character is about to enter a new realm, maybe the Gaelic or Chinese symbol for “gateway” appears in the background. There will be other little visual extras added into the issues, too—sure, in all likelihood, without us annotating these symbols, they may well only ever be seen by us. Which is also deliberate. Even as the lead character in issue one, Randolph Jaffe, starts to piece together a mystery that he never noticed before, maybe the reader will, over time, start to see recurring symbols or characters, too, and catch on to a larger picture within the issues themselves. Maybe, or maybe not. It amuses us to work these things in, anyway. And maybe I’ll try to offer annotations in subsequent issues to help point these things out (although I’d rather see if anyone can spot them themselves).
This all in mind, I began the rough scripting of the first issue. I’m doing these “full script,” since that’s the way Gabe and I have worked in the past. I prefer doing things this way, moreso to help me organize where I’m going and where I need an issue to end up than to feel like I’m doing my share of the heavy lifting, too.*
*For those not in the know, comic scripts are typically written two ways: one is full script, the way I’m doing things here, which is to describe each panel and the captions and dialogue in each panel; the other way is working in more broad strokes, describing in general terms the action that goes on in an entire issue or page by page, and then writing the actual dialogue to fit in with the art. Of course, even full scripts typically require this—after I get pages from the artist, I go back and revise the dialogue and captions to ensure that it blends seamlessly with the art. So anything you read below might not be the final copy as it appears in the book itself. Although it’s close.
I do full encourage and trust Gabe to alter the layouts as we go—with any script, it’s still just a guide to help drive the visuals, but if something works better than what’s written, well, I’m all for it.
Below are the first three pages of the script, just to give a small sample of what form the thing is actually taking. Better than that, though, are the first three pencil-and-ink pages from Gabriel. I laid them out side-by-side so you can see what was written, and then how the script was interpreted and improved upon by Gabe. Captions and word balloons are added after the final color files are sent back to us by colorist Jay Fotos (the same guy who worked wonders on our LAND OF THE DEAD comics, too).
THE GREAT AND SECRET SHOW #1, Page 1:
THE GREAT AND SECRET SHOW #1, Page 2:
THE GREAT AND SECRET SHOW #1, Page 3:
As you see on the third page, a particular medallion is mentioned. This medallion is essentially the final clue that opens Jaffe’s eyes to a larger mystery and greater power than he ever thought possible. As such, it’s the lever that starts the great machinery of the book, but not in and of itself all that important. Which is why Clive didn’t spend too much time on its description—it’s more of what it does than what it is. However, we wanted to take it a bit further. So Gabe set out to design this as if it were an actual medallion. I think you’ll see, by the end result, that it not only looks like that, but is now going to serve as kind of our overall symbol for the book (look for the final image here as the back cover to issue one. It’s too good not to use anywhere possible). Now we just need to find someone who’s able to make it into a real medallion as a good keepsake from this series…
The medallion, as first envisioned by Gabe:
A more tightened-up version:
And finally, the finished medallion (click the image for a larger version):
Next Time on The (Hopefully) Great and (Not-So) Secret Show: More scripting discussion, more art, and the second issue’s cover, too. Happy new year!
/chris
E-MAIL THE AUTHOR |
ARCHIVES
|
