Bianca and the Satanic Witches: Deep Inside Bianca: From Mind to Script

A short article about the script writing process of the ongoing web comic.

Bianca the Satanic Witches is not traditionally scripted comic. As I have already explained elsewhere, the story started with just the issue one and a bunch of characters, and found it's form through a process which can almost be described as evolutionary.

Since I am myself responsible for every artistic decision that is related to the whole project, I don't really need to write a common outline, describe the action and meticulously type out the dialogue. In fact, that would only be a cumbersome waste of time.

What I, in this instance, laughingly call scripts actually look like this:

So what the fuck is that, you might ask. And you should! My scripts are written only for myself as tools for the various stages of the production process, and are not intended for anybody else to understand. But with you permission I would like to now explain how I do (or did - all the Bianca -episodes are already written, you see) the thinking in terms of a new episode and how the story magic happens.

First I have the basic idea. I have the story somewhere in my mind and I know somewhat what I would like to see happen in the next episode. Sometimes I underestimate the space I need to relate some series of events, and a part of the overall story I imagine would only take one episode to tell actually requires two or three.

But to actually know what I'm doing I need to start putting lines down to paper. I start creating very crude story boards. That is what I would do even if I would write a more conventional script - then I would just describe my story boards to words for the artist to read.

This comes very easily to me. I tend to see action in images without much trying, and the amount of images per page is a very easy thing for me to decide. It's all about the form, you see - what information what page is meant to convey. Page in a comic is almost like a scene is in film - although comics have scenes as well. But it is the intermediate fragment between the whole piece and a single image.

In the end I have from five to ten such pages, drawn very fast and loose on the left hand side of a landscaped A4 - always an already used one's backside, since I am a cheap little bitch who refuses to waste decent, unused paper for such a purpose.

Voila - I now have the earliest and most basic incarnation of a new story episode.

While I'm drawing the images, though - usually when one page's pictures are all thought through - I write the dialogue too. I write it to the same paper as the pictures are, but to the right hand side. First I do it in my own native tongue, since it's easier to think in that language. And then, either to below them or on another page if there is no more room, I translate them to English to the best of my ability.

This is, of course, difficult, since I'm not a native English speaker. Usually the dialogue changes quite a few times as I find new ways to improve it, even at the inking stage of pictures. Also, sometimes I come up with new lines that I like or think are important and put those in. So the script is by no means set in stone.

My handwriting is atrocious. Luckily I can make it out fine and nobody else really needs to. But even the comics themselves sometimes look unclear, and I truly try to write those as well as I can!

Then I start thinking about the pages themselves. As you might have noticed, when I story board the pictures, I just put them on the most simple rectangles possible. This is because my single track brain can't process so much information at once. But if I would end up drawing every page in the most common, easy boxes, the pages would look extremely dull and boring. And would also be boring to do!

It's not just the images and the words, but the very composition of the page that helps to tell the story. So I try to think ways of expressing some kind of feeling that I want to convey by the very shape and relative size of the panels.

I think about the border lines. Does the image have borders or do the backgrounds just fade into white? Do we have marginals at the sides of the page, or do the images continue to the very end of the page? Are the marginals white or coloured or textured? Do the images overlap? Do the characters "break free" from the panels through the walls? Are some images bigger than others? How big compared to how small? Etc., etc.

All these things effect the final result and how the page looks at a first glance, so I try to be mindful of it.

Of course, sometimes I still use the most basic form of "Asterix-y" page composition: just few rows of pictures on a white background or a simple grid. I firmly believe in contrasts, and for the more effective pages to show through you need to trust in simplicity every now and again. So I don't want every page to be a hot mess of whatever weird shit I can pull out of my ass either. These are the subtleties I often battle with. And yes, sometimes I just lazy or can't come up with anything more inventive, so I just go with the most basic solution there is. It is known to happen.

So, to figure out the page composition I draw another variation - either to below the dialogue or on another page -, a small, sometimes just a thumbnail version of every page. This time they have no images whatsoever, just the picture frames put in a formation of my liking, marked by my very own form of hieroglyphic symbols. So when I start drawing the episode I need first to figure out what size the images are before I start drawing anything, and at this point the page composition map comes in handy.

Then the only thing left is the whole format itself. That is what the front cover, among other things, is for. There I write the name (a.e. the number) of the episode, draw a little map of the dimensions of a ready page (yes - I do this individually to each and every script even though I already remember them even in my dreams) and whether the pages have visible page numbers or not.

On the first and last page I also write whether or not I want to have a title (the number of the issue) or title box (mainly my name) and at the end some sort of message (for example: "To be continued...") somewhere visible. I don't always, because I feel that affects the feel and style of each episode.

From the beginning I didn't want to lock myself too tightly into any kind of format. I wanted to be able to do Bianca as I saw fit at the moment: whatever serves the story that particular time is the way to go. That's why the series doesn't even have a logo I would use all the time, but imagine a new one every time! Every decision affects the feeling the story leaves behind. The only reason I have any kind of page count (no more than ten pages / episode) is because knowing me I would otherwise slip into a thirty-page episodes that would take way, way too long to do.

As if they didn't already.

So, that's how I did my scripts to Bianca and the Satanic Witches. Now all that is left to do is staple the pile of papers together and put the newborn script aside until it's time to start drawing that particular episode. I also use the scripts when I have the ready made line art, colour pieces and whatnot and it's time to start putting them together - because then I have something that tells me what the ready made page was intended to look like.

Here in the end I have a comparison of a page, from the script page to the page composition map to the final thing: