Again, though, it's based on an earlier version of the film, opening with the Grissom scene, as intended (that's why the stardate shows up in the middle of the movie now).
The Making of Star Trek (Whitfield)
- Thread starter Falconer
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Looking back on the the adaptations of TSFS and TVH, they are pretty hokey now. But God, they were great to have at the time. I also loved the Who's Who in Star Trek volumes DC did.
The writers you've heard are mistaken. Myself, I've heard older writers, of both comics and screenplays, tell younger, hot writers to read the dialog they've written aloud, and if it sounds off, to rewrite it. Not all writers want to sound naturalistic, but for those that do, it's better to see if what you've written would sound right aloud before moving on to the next quote.
But screenplay dialogue is *meant* to be spoken.
Not sure what you mean. How does screenplays needing to work as spoken dialogue contradict my statement that what works as written dialogue isn't the same as what works as spoken dialogue?
Yes, that's kind of my whole point...?
And you're both still wrong.
If you've never written for comic books, and/or have never been part of a conversation about it with someone who has, you won't know this. Writers for comic books and comic strips don't write dialog and captions to fit into word balloons and caption boxes. They simply write their script and turn it in to the letterer to be added to the drawn page. The letterer formats the dialog and captions, puts them on the page, and then draws the balloons and boxes around them. There are laughable cases where letterers used too large a font and obscured pertinent artwork, going back to the days when lettering was done by hand directly on the artwork.
That said, it should be clear by now that the writers don't concern themselves with whether a certain line of dialog will fit into a certain size balloon. They write what they need to write to tell the story they want told. Therefore the changes to the dialog in the TWOK adaptation don't make sense. The size of the balloons doesn't matter, the dialog will fit. The changes were made for other, different reasons. And that is what I was complaining about.
When I used to do a comic book review blog with a bunch of other fellows, this is one of the stories that got a real cringe. Pretty sure it was written by Jerry Siegel, and you could see it is not only dialogue heavy, but the balloons take up so much of the artwork space. X-Men #1 had a word balloon is so large, we only see the bottom half of Magneto.
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I have indeed had such conversations with comics professionals. They've advised me that it's preferred in modern comics to limit the word count to about 150-200 words per page as a rule, and no more than 25 words per balloon.
https://downthetubes.net/?p=6793
https://buzzdixon.com/home/writing-2/a-few-rough-rules-of-thumb-for-writing-comics-graphic-novels
So you're wrong here, or at least badly out of date. The age when a writer could fill most of a panel with words is over, as modern comics prioritize the art a lot more. Comics scripts are often edited down to be more terse.
Yep. Take a look at this page of WATCHMEN script by Alan Moore, for example: http://www.watchmencomicmovie.com/photos/typescript01.jpg
In panel 2, you clearly see he's breaking up Rorschach's dialogue into 3 separate balloons.
And according to Kurt Busiek, as far back as the late 70s, there was a rough "35 words per panel" rule of thumb in the industry: https://twitter.com/KurtBusiek/status/1064311757525512193
(Besides, even if comic writers were to leave how to break the dialogue into word balloons to the letterers, surely a good writer would still take into account what would be physically possible for the letterer to fit? They wouldn't just write as much as they wanted, heedless, in the same way they wouldn't ask the artist to draw a hundred elephants in every single panel. But it's a moot point because they *do* decide how to break up the dialogue among word balloons.)
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Out of date I'll accept. But let's be real, today's comic scripts are so short for two reasons;
1) So today's artists can get their side hustle on selling original art,
2) So the publishers can milk the readers by bundling the stories together, i.e. "writing for the trade".
So many older writers and artists who are plausibly better at the craft of comics are out of work for primarily these two reasons, and it's just a shame. This is the reason we need the Heroes Initiative and other charities that support older and retired comics professionals, so they don't end up living on the street.
It was always thus. Indeed, full script was the only way comics were written until Stan Lee founded Marvel Comics. These days it's gone back to full script across the board. The "Marvel Method", as it was called, plot, pencils, script, never gets used anymore.
The reasons why it's done don't matter to this conversation, which is about whether it's plausible that the Wrath of Khan script would've been rewritten for the comics page. All that's relevant there is that the consideration exists. Why it exists is a separate issue.
Yeesh, that's terrible. Not sure why didn't they put Magneto's dialog so it covered his feet and you could at least see his head.
Here’s the X-Men issue. Good times...
That's not at all true. There is not, and there never has been, just one way of creating comic books industry wide. There's no Director of Comics that declares: "Okay, everyone's writing comics full script now." The creators and editors decide on the best way that works for them for each particular project.
Alan Moore is famous for his ultra-intricate full scripts that include every possible detail, but he still encourages his artists to approach things in a different way if they have a better way to go about it. Other writers are more comfortable working what's commonly called "Marvel Style", where the the dialogue is written after the artwork is drawn to a general plot. (And BTW, Marvel Style is not only used at Marvel. It's just called "Marvel Style" because that's the way that Stan Lee's working relationships with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko evolved in the 1960s. Kirby and Ditko were both really strong on pacing out their own stories, and as Lee was editing the entire Marvel line in the 60s, it made the most sense to him to write the final dialogue to their pencils, often adjusting plot points as he went.) With Marvel Style, you're often writing to the available space, or writing to convey plots points the art omitted, or both. And yes, lots of times, the artist might not draw what the script indicates. Most every comic book writer has horror stories about the artist not drawing something vital to their script or plot, either because it was too tough to draw, because they were on a tight deadline, because they wanted to tailor their pages to the art collectors' aftermarket, or all of the above.
When I interviewed Doug Moench around 2013, he told me that he uses a sort of hybrid method between full script and Marvel Style, where he writes a full script for the artist to work from and then revises it after the art is done to best match his dialogue to the art. Mark Evanier has said that he works a slightly different way with each one of his artistic collaborators, sometimes writing full script, sometimes doing plot first/Marvel Style, and sometimes something in between. Keith Giffen plots out his comics by drawing rough thumbnails for his artists to work from. Every single artist, writer, and editor in the business has their own preferences, and if they're at all smart, they'll tailor their approach each time to what's best for the final product.
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