Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates | Tagged: comic scripting, Comics, comixology, entertainment, Jaco The Galactic Patrolman, manga

From Strip To Script – Jaco The Galactic Patrolman

By Josh Hechinger

Welcome to From Strip to Script, where I take a page of finished comic art and try to derive a script from it, to see what I can learn from the exercise.

So like many growing lads of a certain age waybackwhen, I was introduced to Japanese cartoons via Dragon Ball Z, the adaptation of the back-half of Akira Toriyama's long-running comic.

…And well, I'm not so sure that holds up well, but it got me to Toriyama's other work: the more gag-oriented front half, Dragon Ball, the entirely-gag-oriented Dr. Slump, the not-really-gag-oriented-but-it-has-jokes Sand Land, and less-gag-oriented-than-Dr.-Slump-but-more-gag-oriented-than-Sand-Land-basically-it's-a-comedy-y'know? Jaco The Galactic Patrolman, which I've just picked up.

Since my favorite bit from the book is two pages, and this feature's already running late (ahahahaha *sweatdrop*), let's look at this fun bit of physical comedy.

Remember: of course you should read this right to left, you're super elite (that joke'll make more sense if you read the comic…)

PAGE SIXTY-FOUR (SIX PANELS)

P1. JACO quick-draws his raygun, facing away from the sea. Throw the SFX for the quick-draw in a word balloon (which I'll indicate with "SFX (balloon)", as opposed to the trad "SFX" which should be free-lettering as usual).

– SFX (balloon)                            SHA

P2. JACO turns and fires at us.

– SFX                                             SHA

P3. JACO stands en pointe on one foot as the concrete stone explodes above the water, scaring the crap out of a passing seagull.

– SFX (balloon, explosion)          BLAM

P4. Same pose as P1: JACO drops the raygun back into his holster, with a smug little smile on his face.

– SFX (balloon)                            SHA

P5. The raygun hits the ground, because JACO missed his holster.

– SFX (balloon)                            KLAK

– JACO                                           Oh…

P6. JACO walks away annoyed, holding his holster steady while putting the raygun back into it.

– JACO                                           Darn…

– JACO                                           Blew the finish…

So, What'd We Learn?

– I actually had a surprisingly difficult time trying to figure out to describe the "sound effect in a dialogue balloon" effect? But I also find it completely delightful on the page; making it dialogue almost it reads to me almost like the author making the noises? Y'know, like you would if you were playing with toys?

(I also cheated a bit on this exercise: I'd have had to figure that out pages and pages ago if I'd scripted the entire comic, assuming it wasn't something the artist or letterer came up with because they're smarter than me, but since I'm adapting just this page, I'm figuring it out here.)

– I've talked before about how calling shots too specifically can be a bad habit as a comic writer, but…man, that gag just works better if you match P1 and P4, right? And add the smug little grin? You don't necessarily have to go overboard describing every aspect of the pose or dictate the layout around those two panels, but that's a textbook example of "if you see the pacing in your head, just call it out".

– Less a "learning how to write a comic" and more me trying to derive a learnable moment from how I write about comics, but let's see if I can talk a little bit about latter-day Toriyama and how much I dig where his style's gone.

I've always responded well to Toriyama's "gag style" of character design on books like Dr. Slump and Dragon Ball, where everyone's either a D-shaped pudge with a big head on top, or a leaner-but-still big-headed shrimp. Jaco (the book and the character) leans towards the latter more in terms of body-types, but where Toriyama always draws in a fairly detailed way even in his early work (which got pushed to extremes as Dragon Ball Z went on…supposedly that was Toriyama trolling his long-term fans, though), Jaco looks smoother than anything I've seen Toriyama do, without feeling computer-assisted: Toriyama's characters all have perfect proportions for their cartoony bodies, and move through expertly-composed scenes where Toriyama neither sacrifices detail, nor adds an excess of lines.

I don't think I'm nailing it, but: for such a cartoony book, everything in the book has an internal realism to itself in relation to everything else in the book, because there's not a line in those panels that doesn't need to be there to depict what's in them.

Philly-based comic writer Josh Hechinger [joshhechinger.tumblr.com] is a Cancer, and his blood type is A+. You can find him being a loquacious dope on Twitter, and read his comic collaborations on Comixology.

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