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GRAHAM NORTON: 'And we've got a doll of you here, from Black Panther'




MICHAEL B JORDAN'S FACE:



Easy mistake to make

Success. Survival.

Survival is the only true measure of success. I didn't mean to imply that BIFF! POW! ZAP! the comic itself grew up, merely that its rather embarrassing tacky green editor was replaced with zeitgeisty X-Files wannabes, who should have been hip cool and modern, but it turned out that the dodgy geezer in the caveman mask was always where it was at.

Agreed. Tharg (and 2000ad's) motto:

Thanks to Julius Howe:

Fleetway's adult titles definitely failed, but in the decade before the year that gave the comic its name, 2000ad lost more readers than Crisis* ever had. Seems like a curious definition of success.

Not sure about the idea that the Rave to Britpop era of Tharg was all trenchcoats and abortions, either. For every Tyranny Rex or Button Man, there are several Dead Meats, Armoured Gideons or Luke Kirbys.

Deadline was a rich kid's plaything. Ultimately, its problems were no different to those of 2000ad (and comics in general): only a few star creators bring in readers; when they realise they can bank more dollar elsewhere, they do.



* According to Steve MacManus's Mighty One (p.259), the first issue of Crisis shifted 80,000 copies. The same source gives 2000ad's circulation for most of the eighties as 100,000 per week, but the added attraction of The Horned God meant it saw out 1989 on almost 120,000 p/w. By the time Rebellion rode in on their white chargers, our ranks had dwindled to 25,000 die-hards who didn't know the meaning of surrender. Once Crisis's readership settled down to its core audience, it sold around 20,000 per fortnight (then month).

Hugh Jackman's touring. Wonder how they'll do the claws?

I knew that name was going to pay-off, eventually.

Lettering god Todd Klein's advice to writers. I would never have thought of something as simple as using a format that allows the letterer to grab text directly from the script.

I've only ever typed something in script format for parody purposes, but I'm pretty sure I committed Klein's cardinal sin of writing dialogue in UPPER CASE, because, you know, that's what it looks like on the page. I'm sure others make the same annoying goofs:


Thanks to Nikki Foxrobot, Ian Sharman, Hde Ponsonby-Jones, Bill Williams, Nic Wilkinson, Lucas Gattoni, Zen Hcmp, Annie Parkhouse, Lois Buhalis and Michael Stock for advice and suggestions

1. Prepare your script in a word processing program that the letterer can access easily. Microsoft Word is the usual standard but RTF format from any word processor works well too. PDF format from Adobe Acrobat should NEVER be used. It prevents the letterer from copying and pasting from the script, the most common method of getting words onto the comics page.

2. Captions, dialogue and anything that needs to be lettered should be in sentence case, like this document, not all caps. Do not use a double space after a period. Do not use tabs. Each section to be lettered should be separated from the rest of the script so it's easy to copy and paste. Such as:

1) BRAINIAC (SPECIAL STYLE):
I am the only solution to Earth's problems.

2) SUPERMAN:
That's what you think!

3) SOUND EFFECT:
WHAM!

3. The writer should decide which words to emphasize and indicate that consistently in the script. Bold italic is the best method, do not use all caps. Do not try to simulate special styles with different fonts in the script! Make suggestions for fonts if you like.

4. Internal dialogue captions (what used to be thought balloons) do not need quotes. Use quotes only when someone is off-panel and doing narration in captions, or when actually quoting what someone else said. Such spoken narration needs a beginning quote in each caption, but an end quote only on the last one in a series of continuous narration captions. Double/single quote rules apply to comics as well.

5. If someone is in the room but off-panel, let the letterer know which direction the balloon tail should go. Whenever possible, the character on the left should speak FIRST, the next one to the right should speak SECOND, and so on. Train your artists to do this and everyone will be happier!

6. Foreign phrases, movie titles, book titles, ship names and any other item needing special attention should be italic. Translated foreign languages should be inside lesser and greater symbols such as <this> with an asterisked footnote such as: *Translated from French.

7.Make sure any notes for the letterer are pulled out and separate from panel descriptions so they aren't missed.

8. If you are working plot-first, look carefully at the art when you are writing dialogue to make sure all the characters you asked for are present. Try to write to fit the space available for lettering. Large panels with open spaces are best for large or many balloons, small panels with little space should have little lettering.

9. Lettering placements are welcomed by some letterers (like me) as a time saver, are not wanted by others. Check with your letterer. The letterer should be given the freedom to make actual placement choices that differ from provided placements if they see a better way to do it. Placements can be done with markers on a printout of the art that is then scanned, or digitally. If you are providing placements, it's recommended that you number each item to be lettered in your script, as above, and use the corresponding numbers in your placements.

10. Remember that the letterer is part of your team, don't keep secrets from him. That mysterious character who turns out to be a returning villain? Let the letterer know when he first appears. It may be a secret surprise for the reader, but the letterer needs to know when you do in case it affects the lettering style. If your story has narration captions by a character who won't appear until the last page, the letterer still needs to know who is narrating. Every narration caption should be labeled by speaker just as word balloons are. Or if it's omniscient author narration, say that.

11. Perhaps most important of all, MAKE SURE THE SCRIPT IS A CLOSE TO FINAL AS POSSIBLE BEFORE SENDING TO THE LETTERER. It has become a common practice among newer writers to treat the lettering draft as a first draft, and then do major rewrites after the first round of lettering, or sometimes several rounds of rewrites. This is unfair to the letterer, taking up time they need for other jobs, and usually they are not paid for that extra work. Script and art editing and proofreading should be done BEFORE lettering, not after.

Hi Chris.

Hey guys!

Don't get the opportunity to check in here as much as I'd like these days, but I just had to share this exciting news (without reading the posts immediately before mine!)

https://theplaylist.net/danny-boyle-screenwriter-alex-garland-20090909/

[loved]

Yeah - though the blue b/g on that suggests it isnt a Dredd inner monolgue - he talks to Smiley about coming to his little house and bringing it down, but ultimately Dredd's "YOUR small house?" rant this week seems like a little but more reality breaking "I know I'm in a story called "The Small House", so I'd better make a pun around it when I kill this dude" moment than anything else, if it is indeed the case that no one openly refers to Smiley's set up as "The Small House"?

I've read the story now and I see your point. Nobody, not even Smiley, even refers to his lair as his house*

I loved Dredd's original and thematically consistent method of dispatching The Smiles. Hopefully, a few years from now, some clever artist given a script that calls for a scene on the West Wall will depict a sun-bleached half-skeleton embedded in the rockrete^TM.

Smiley using a Dark Judge 'Teleporting(!)' belt was consistent with a character retroactively dropped into the history of the strip, but if we were looking for a thematically appropriate way of overcoming a character defined by secrecy and invisibility, maybe exposing him publicly and letting the masses tear him apart would have been even more apt than a hidden assassin (Gerhart).

Having Smiley's justification for The Apocalypse War echo TB Grover's motivation - that the city had grown too large - was very clever, meta, and made me chuckle.


* That's probably just the kind of oversight that creeps in when writing a story with lots of moving parts, but Dredd taking a look at the title text floating above the panels on the first page and commenting on them fits with the self-referential mode - characters aware they're in a story - with which Williams has become associated, most notably with Ichabod's self-aware horse - 'I am a horse' - and that story's use of panel borders as a plot point and *literal* obstacle for his characters to overcome. Like I say, in this case, it's almost certainly a minor, unintentional aporia, but (even inadvertently) it's of a piece with Sam's misunderstanding of his function in the same narrative (2105) and the self-reflexive mode established by Williams from his very first Dredd (The Biographer, 1537). Sigmund Freud, a man who saw cocks everywhere he looked, thought there was no such thing as a meaningless mistake, and that even these kind of slips were revealing of psychology. Even if you can't fully get behind any theory proposed by a fella who fancied his mum, it's interesting to wonder what psychological tells might creep into the work of someone writing a character they know belongs to someone else. Distancing techniques that project and comment upon their own feelings of alienation and imposter syndrome, I'd expect ...

That raises a question -the story is called "The Small House", but is that phrase ever used in the story?

The phrase was repeated a couple of weeks ago, when Dredd busted into Smiley's sitting room:

['I think Henry said to me at one point that he fancied drawing Dredd on horseback. I'd written a sort of "phantom" horse into my Dredd story 'The Man Comes Around' that RM Guera drew so beautifully. So bringing the horse back at the end of Enceladus - like a symbol of Dredd at the very end - that felt really exciting. Taking Dredd to some primal, guttural place. The subjective walls of reality kind of crumbling a bit.']

All horses are magic, as is friendship. Did My Little Pony teach you NOTHING?!

I realise everyone else has moved on with their lives and started Christmas shopping and stuff, but I remembered where I read Rob Williams describing the decision to include Champion The Wonder What All That Was About Horse in Enceladus:

'I think Henry said to me at one point that he fancied drawing Dredd on horseback. I'd written a sort of "phantom" horse into my Dredd story 'The Man Comes Around' that RM Guera drew so beautifully. So bringing the horse back at the end of Enceladus - like a symbol of Dredd at the very end - that felt really exciting. Taking Dredd to some primal, guttural place. The subjective walls of reality kind of crumbling a bit.'

https://2000ad.com/post/4304