Comic Script 010 - Chapter 1, Page 28

Hey hey 👋🏻

For this month's script post, I wanted to show you guys how Daryl and I edit and change things to better fit a more subtle, "unspoken dialogue" narrative. 

Daryl is an amazing artist when it comes to storytelling without words. His attention to detail in facial expressions and character reactions redefines communication and character interaction. It really sets up the plot and adds that quiet, unspoken beauty you get from watching Miyazaki films or classical anime. 

Another great example of this type of art/unspoken dialogue fusion is the movie A Silent Voice. A lot of the scenes in the film don't require physical dialogue or speech to convey messages or understandings between characters and I fucking love it. It's tricky to develop plot sometimes without extensive dialogue, but I think removing it adds a level of grace and magnitude to the overall story. When you have entire pages and scenes with as little dialogue as possible, it opens up the reader's/viewer's imagination to piece together the narrative you're trying to weave. It creates a bridge of trust between them and your story, which in turn often yields a lot more consumer loyalty towards your story as a whole (lol at my marketing psychology insert).

(When I say consumer loyalty I mean the situation where unspoken dialogue technique, with regards to art, animation, and comics, has a higher potential to create and instill feelings like nostalgia and fondness in readers/viewers.)

The only caveat of unspoken dialogue is it can easily create plot holes that need to be filled by dialogue later in the story. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though, because it can create opportunities for good plot twists, shocking reveals, and spin-off character arcs. The hard part though is timing it all accordingly without leaving readers perpetually confused.

Don't get me wrong, dialogue is still absolutely necessary to develop "good" characters and a believable/understandable plot. But art can speak for itself, and I wanted to fully maximize Daryl's talents for scenes like Page 28.

For this particular scene, we see a little bit of Cal's inner monologue to help direct the ideas happening here. But, as you can see in the script above, I actually ended up cutting a lot of the inner monologue down to minimize the scene and declutter the unnecessary wording. If I could've avoided it, I would have loved to exclude the dialogue altogether. The downside of doing that, though, is it probably would've confused the heck out of you guys 😆 and we already have a lot of holes to fill (from previous unspoken dialogue scenes) in the coming chapters.

Here's the finished comic art for Page 28 as a reference:

That wraps up this Script Snippet! Feel free to message me or comment on this post with any questions or feedback you have :) 

Thanks for reading!

-J

Black Key Incubus, Chapter 1 Script, Page 28 – © James Schleisman August 2018 All Rights Reserved

Black Key Incubus, Chapter 1 Comic Art, Page 28 – © James Schleisman March 2019 All Rights Reserved