Strange Adventures #1 Script

Writing for Two

Hey! Tom here. I am back from vacation after previously being back from Covid, which means I guess I’m more back than ever and hopefully back for a long time, which means I’ll be posting more and more. Again.

To start out this trend, as it’s been a while, time to put out another of my scripts!

Mitch Gerads, Doc Shaner, and I did a comic a year or so back called Strange Adventures, which is one of my personal favorite books I’ve ever worked on and which earned us an Eisner and a Hugo nomination. It’s the story of Adam Strange, Alanna Strange, and Mister Terrific all telling lies to each other as the world burns.

We got a real gift this week when the great James Gunn, a true nerd, kindly and cooly posted a cool and kind endorsement for the book on Twitter. This had the incredible effect of sending a ton of new readers our way. So it felt like a good time to get the first script up here for any of you who are interested in how we started the series.

Somewhat uniquely, Strange Adventures features two reflecting stories—one the in present one the past, each told by a different artist—that merge in the end into one narrative. This was always the conception of the book from day one, to sort of reveal the truth while you see the consequences of the lies.

One of the things we wanted to do from the beginning was not to have the art just change with the page breaks, but instead to have panels from both artists on the same page. Also, I wanted to avoid a transition narrative that would more typically connect these abrupt changes (“meanwhile on Rann years ago…”), so that when you jumped from present to past there was more of a jolt than you’d have if I guided you with words—a style I stole from Jaime Hernandez in Love and Rockets.

This would normally be an impossible task to pull off. Or at least something really hard that we could brag about for ages. But I had two of the best people in comics as my partners and we all happen to be best friends who talk to each other really too regularly. So the integration was super smooth and easy, just a text here and there, and there’s no bragging sadly to be done, beyond to say, “It looks so damn pretty.”

Part of that ease was achieved by putting the series on a regular grid. I had worked in the nine panel grid for Mister Miracle. In Strange Adventures, I worked in the three panel grid, which I most associate with Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier. We had three characters and three perspectives, so it also helped thematically too. But mostly it allowed the artists to mesh their work together, because it was easier to predict the lay outs everyone would have.

Then, as you’ll see in the script, we had an incredibly baroque and complex system to determine how the pages were split in this unprecedented comic book situation, which was I uh well I uh I just put the artists name next to the panel they were going to draw. And that worked!

Here’s my letter to the two astounding artists (and the amazing editors) explaining the actual mechanics:

ART NOTE: Panels and pages are divided between Evan and Mitch. If one is doing a whole page, his name will be just at the top of the page. If a single page is divided between artists, the names will be on each panel the artist is drawing.

ART NOTE: The comic is being done on a three panel grid, three stacked horizontal rectangles (think New Frontier). Unlike Mister Miracle, we can break that pattern a few times in each issue, but only by combining or dividing the rectangles, not be imposing a new structure (again like New Frontier).

When rectangles are combined in the script I write:

Panels 1 and 2:

(this would be a 2/3 splash taking up the top 2/3 of the page).

When rectangles are divided, I’ll write:

Panels 2.1:

Panel 2.2:

Panel 2.3:

(this would be three panels taking up the space of the second tier rectangle).

Or I might write just.

Panel 1.1:

Panel 1.2:

(This would be two equal panels taking the place of the 1st tier rectangle).

This seems complicated, but I’m sure once you read the script you’ll get it. Thanks!

After all that rambling, here finally is the script for Strange Adventures #1. Let me know what you think in the comments below. Thank you for coming here and checking everything out. If you haven’t had a chance to pick this book up, I hope you do. We’re very proud of it.

As always, these scripts are for paid subscribers. If you’d like to subscribe, here’s a button to do that, and we are insanely grateful for your support.

Strange Adventures 1 Substack

145KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download