Sample Script – Hugo Boylan

Scripted in 2015, for issue 7 of Lightning Strike Presents, Murphy’s Day follows the story of a man whose day is falling apart around him.

I wanted to do something a little different with this script. To this point in my comic making my focus had been on using dialogue and captions to tell a story. I’ve always found dialogue to be the part of writing that comes most naturally to me, but in my mind comics can be about so much more than just the dialogue. For Murphy’s Day I stripped all of that away to present a mostly silent script (the exception being the constantly ticking clock and buzzing phone). I wanted to create a short comic that would invite the reader to give it a second or maybe even a third look, and so I played with the space on the page too, counting down from 10 panels on page 1 to 1 panel on page 10. I’ll go in to more detail of why I wrote the script the way I did, and how the artist and letterer on the book managed to make it all flow together and improve on my script in a later blog post. Maybe…

Heavy Black was originally scripted in early 2014 as a writing exercise.

Titan Comics had put out a call for 6 page stories dealing with a “lost in space theme”, and that struck me as a great opportunity to play with monster horror and to work on rapid tension building.

In 2015 comic artist Rapha Lobosco approached me for script samples to practice on. He took to Heavy Black and asked if we could produce the short comic for that year’s Comic City Festival. The final edition of Heavy Black deviates from the script in a few ways. For example, we felt that a seventh page would allow for the gravity of Charlie’s decision to stick with the reader. There are several other small differences between the finished product and the script (revealing Charlie’s face immediately and ditching her plasma torch early on being two of the most prominent), I find this is a normal teething process for any collaboration. A script should inspire an artist, not dictate to them.

Script by Hugo Boylan

Cover art by Manny Clark

Letters by Kerrie Smith