Seeing the Whole Thing At Once

I like the feature in my art program that allows me to see all the pages in progress at once.

Professional TV and film writers use a bulletin board with index cards to map out their stories - I've tried this a few times and it makes sense to me, but I've never gotten very far with that method up to now, at least when I'm trying to write a script.

But if I'm making a comic, and can thumbnail my pages, even with sloppy/scribbly drawings, it's the best way for me to put together a page…or even a story. It's great to be able to jump around, work on the beginning, the ending, and scattered points in between, and change them as I refine the story. On individual pages this is how I do it as well, with scribbled panels, then word balloons, then refining and moving around the scribbles and word balloons until the page takes shape.

The last thing I do is actual drawing. This has been the approach for my most successful pages I think.

The ability to edit and move things around at every stage is surely the best thing about making comics digitally.

On the other hand, when I watched the Deep Space Nine documentary where the writers met to write for a day on an imaginary new season, they worked from the beginning of the first episode. Like, they'd talk about the cold open and say what they thought could happen. Several writers would suggest this or that event, and someone would write down the best idea. They'd work through to the end of the cold open. Then they'd start with the beginning of act 1, to each commercial break. Finally, they'd come up with a compelling end for the episode.

I'm guessing that if they were really working on the show (or any show), they would go back and refine what they'd come up with in that first outline - or in a more serialized show like DS9, they might continue on with episode 2, 3, 4 and so on to the end of the season, and THEN go back and refine.

For my new issue of my comic "Chatterbox", I'm figuring out my outline this way, mapping out the logical steps of what the characters would do next and what would be exciting or intriguing obstacles for them. Working from beginning to end. Of course, I already have some general ideas about where the characters and series are heading, but there's a LOT of space in between to figure things out. This "step by step", chronological approach is helping me figure out the story actually.

What's your process? Do you start with an outline/full script? Or do you approach it from a distance like me, with a lot of scribbling and moving things around?