If you’re an avid Twitter fan and enjoy comics you likely saw a lot of discourse yesterday around a standard comics script format announced by The Comics Beat. Crafted by Steenz Stewart and Camilla Zhang, the Standard Comic Script (SCS) format is meant to help everyone involved in the scripting process including editors, artists, letterers, and writers themselves. The WWAC ran a great interview with the creators of the template going into great detail about how it works using color and formatting.
Considering there are templates for most writing fields readily available on the internet it didn’t seem like a big deal, but boy did people have strong opinions about it. Many editors and artists–who I won’t name but they’re easy enough to find if you look around–lambasted the template saying it was a mess and not to their liking. Others questioned it simply because each writer has their own style and using it would lose that.
Here’s just one negative take on the matter:
Then this morning, Chip Zdarsky took some time on his Substack to express delight around the template calling it “pretty great and a fantastic resource with well-thought-out components, giving both the artist and the editor extremely helpful information!”
Zdarsky even supplied a spoof of sorts using a similar-looking template:
It’s nice to see Chip add a little levity to a tense situation.
Ultimately the issue seems moot in that those who are angry or critical are either trying to gatekeep or are afraid making it easier for folks to write comics scripts is an unfair advantage. Simply offering a template format doesn’t mean everyone has to use it. Heck, if you’re familiar with Screenwriting software like Final Cut, many people use that which is a template software.
If you’d like to download the (SCS), check it out on Steenz’s website or Camilla’s website right now.
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