Glenn Farrington Wants to Kickstart a Whole New Way of Writing Comics Scripts

One of the most interesting comics-related projects currently on Kickstarter has to be Glenn Farrington and Steven Sashen’s ComiXwriter.A new script software, Farrington had the idea to launch the first one that’s specifically tailored for comic books, as opposed to being a screenplay software with a comics template. It was, as you might expect if you’ve ever tried to find such a product, a project born out of frustration and the exasperation that such a product didn’t already exist in the marketplace.You can check out the Kickstarter video below, and check out their site (they’ve raised over $12,000 on the way to a $35,000 goal) here.Farrington, who is also working with First Comics on a number of upcoming projects, has worked as a comedian, screenwriter, software designer and more before making his first foray into graphic novels with the upcoming original hardcover Lives, which will debut at San Diego Comic Con International. He joined us to speak about ComiXwriter, and the process by which he decided that it needed to exist.ComicBook.com: What made you decide to do it? It seems like something that ought to exist already…Glenn Farrington: Right, and it seems like anything I come up with, that’s always the background thing. When I came up with the idea for Digital Seas, everyone’s like, “You men there’s no way to do do Internet on a cruise ship? They’ve got everything else.” I was like, nope–and the whole time I was working on it I was like, “someone’s gonna think of this someone’s gonna think of this…” and this is the same–this is frustration. I hate to say something was born out of frustration but really that’s what this became.I sent an e-mail to Larry Young, actually, is how it all started, out of the clear blue saying I had an idea for a graphic novel. It was based on a screenplay of mine that had won a lot of awards but when my manager put it out there were two other plays in town that were kind of like it so it got bumped around. So I was like, “This would make a great idea for a graphic novel,” and so I did all the research online. I’d never written–I mean, I’ve read comics my whole life but I’d never written any at that point. This was four years ago, maybe five at this point, and I had seen a quote by Larry Young on one of the comics websites when I was going through trying to figure out who I could send this to. I knew enough not to send it to the Big Two, that would be stupid, but I was very naive about the world, then, when it came to comics. I sent him an e-mail because it seemed like this was the type of story he wanted. He said “Meet me at Comic-Con,” and I went down to Comic-Con and he said, “Sure, let’s do it.”So the first thing I did was look for software because I knew it had to be–you know, it was one of those things, it’s gotta be there. I’m a screenwriter for a living; I’ve got so many options that it’s crazy and I couldn’t find one. And I called a buddy of mine, Josh Gilbert, who’s another screenwriter and he said, “You know there’s a template right in Final Draft, you can use that, it says ‘Comic books.’” And I tried it and it was okay, it was fine but it was mor elike a screenplay format and it ddn’t really do a lot of the stuff that I wanted to do with comic books and the sample scripts I had gotten weren’t exactly like that. And it kind of sucks because I got used to that so now I kind of like that format but it’s still not what I wanted to have as the basic offering.