Quick Request

[zopyrus]

Hi everyone,

I recently wrote a comic for ladiesbigbang and I plan to include a transcript when I post it in November. I want to be as inclusive and helpful as possible, but I'm worried I may miss something by accident. Does anyone have any tips about formatting, and/or what sort of descriptions to include (or what not to include)? Also, if y'all know a better place to ask, I would really appreciate a link!

Here is a little about the comic I wrote (although for my purposes, you definitely don't need to be familiar with canon to help):

Title: The Letter
Fandom: Our Mutual Friend (Charles Dickens)
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Georgiana Podsnap, Mortimer Lightwood, Mr. Podsnap, Sophronia Lammle (cameo). Past and future Georgiana/Sophronia is strongly implied.
Rating: G
Summary: A year after the final pages of Our Mutual Friend, Georgiana finally makes a friend of her own and takes control of her life.
Warnings: The original novel is a minefield of typical Dickens -isms. In particular, warning for extremely problematic portrayals of disabled characters and Jewish characters, none of whom happen to appear in my comic.

Thanks so much--if anyone can take the time to give me some advice, I'd be so grateful.

Comments

[bliumchik]

Did you write a script before drawing it, or did it go straight onto the page? I didn't get finished in time but I was writing a comic script for LBB (I can't draw :P). Regardless, there are examples online of e.g. Alan Moore's scripts which are highly detailed, basically telling the artist everything to draw, looking at which might help you.

The main thing I would suggest is to summarise the layout of the page as the first description - that way people can start with a broad mental picture and fill in the gaps as you describe the text and images.

In scripts normally all the visuals are described first and then the dialogue, but that could be a little jarring in a transcript, so maybe just insert the dialogue with the descriptions of the characters actions.

[sqbr]

I have no really helpful advice, but as far as I can tell the three groups of people to bear in mind are:
People who can see your images but can't make out the details/text (including people using translation software, or with visual processing problems)
People who are reading your text visually, but can't see your images at all (because they haven't loaded them etc)
People using screen readers

Screen readers don't read punctuation very well, so don't rely on different types of brackets etc. to convey information, and avoid non-standard spellings. Apart from transcribing the text, I tend to go more for an entertaining read that captures the basic meaning instead of detailed descriptions that bog down the experience. But I don't know if that's just weak self justification for skimping on descriptions :)

[lilacsigil]

The most understandable transcripts I've seen go something like this:

Page 1
Panel: a large, empty room with a chair in the middle
Panel: a woman sitting on the chair
Panel: a closeup of the woman's face. She says, "Here we are."
Panel: a closeup of the woman's mouth. An off-panel voice says, "Again, yes."

Page 2
etc.

Detailed art descriptions tend to give too much information, but occasionally "warm shades" or "cool shades" or "jagged lines" can be helpful.

[zopyrus]

I'll definitely check out the Alan Moore scripts--thanks for the suggestion!

The main problem I have with the script I've come up with (I wrote dialogue more or less simultaneously with the drawings, so I had to reconstruct a master script from the finished product) is that all my descriptions felt like they were getting in the way of the flow of the dialogue. Like you say, it was jarring. But I don't want to eliminate descriptions entirely, so I'm trying to think of compromises...maybe I could have one block of description text at the beginning of each page, and then do the script from there. Or would that be more confusing?

[zopyrus]

Oh no, this is totally helpful! Thank you so much!

I think I'm going to err on the side of skimpy description too. I tried doing really detailed ones at first but when I read through the final draft of my master script it was just confusing! So I'm glad you say there is a precedent :)

If you don't mind elaborating, is there any punctuation I should avoid completely? I don't use anything more complicated than ellipses and a long dash (--).

[zopyrus]

Thanks for the specific example--that's really helpful. It hadn't occurred to me to do descriptions and dialogue in the same line, but I think it might help make things clearer.

[sqbr]

I find describing things really hard (it's one reason I do more art than prose in the first place), so I probably do tend to make my descriptions too skimpy. For all I know it really annoys people! Here's one of my comics as an example. And looking at it just now, I realised I could make the joke clearer to more people if I mentioned that Fenris is an elf. Deciding what details to keep is a fine art!

This is based on a half remembered conversation I had with someone here, but as far as I can tell no punctuation is bad, you just have to consider what your dialogue will sound like with parts of it missing. For example *this* sentence might be less ~interesting~ with a screenreader ;)(*)

But the "em" and "strong" tags do make a difference to how the text is read. I think.

(*)And this footnote confusing. To anyone with a screenreader: I added some emphasis and a smiley face.