I see the old “full script vs plot” debate is making the rounds on Comic Book Twitter again. For those not familiar, a comic book “full script” is like a screenplay — it tells the whole story, broken down into specific pages and panels with all the dialog included. 1/

In the “plot first” approach, the writer writes a looser plot. You’re still telling the whole story, but not breaking it down into specific panels and not including full dialog. 2/

For my TV writer pals, this plot is very similar to the 20-page outline you turn into the studio or network. You then write the dialog after the story’s been drawn. 3/

To be fair, a lot of writers do a final dialog pass after the art has come in to make sure the art and dialog match up as well as possible. I’ve moved back and forth between both approaches over the course of my career. 4/

Of course, your mileage may vary. Some artists like having all the detail upfront, some like the looser approach. I’ve written plots for artists that then required a LOT of work to dialog because I’d have to figure out how they’d broken the story down into panels. 5/

Characters were reacting to things I didn’t understand, so it made the process more complicated. In other instances, working plot-first with an artist has lead to a pretty amazing collaboration with the artist finding details within a scene I hadn’t considered. 6/

Writing the full script is, for me, a better idea when you don’t know who’s drawing your story. It present less opportunities for miscommunication. These days, I tend to write in a kind of hybrid style — a combo of full script and plot. 7/

Some sequences have all the dialog, some (especially more visual scenes like action set pieces) are looser. It really depends on the particular artist I’m working with and how they’d prefer to work. 8/

If you’re curious, here’s the plot to an issue of COPPERHEAD from a few years ago. This was written for Scott Godlewski, who co-created the book and understood the characters and world just as well as I did. 9/9