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.

So next thing I know, I kept bothering my wife that there should be soemthing and I'd always complain about it to people. And Larry said, "Well the reason there isn't is that everybody writes scripts different--everybody. I can show you the next ten scripts I get and I guarantee you that every one of them will be formatted differently." I told him that' sbecuase there's no standard--you don't have to stick to the standard but there should be some basic structure that everything follows. He said there is--the pages and panels--and when I asked him, "So why isn't there a software, he said "I don't know." So I shelved it aside again but I kept--every time I would have an idea for what I thought the structure would be, I have a drawer full of napkins, pieces of paper, even the back of a McDonald's bag, of just notes of what I thought should be in the software. Every time I would run into like a blocked point of frustration-- --like Steve Bryan I'm doing a comic series with and he would send me via Dropbox the art to look at and I pulled up the art on my computer and I couldn't pull up the art to look at it and pull up my script and keep it in the same plane. Every time I clicked on one it would go behind and it would drive me crazy. So I printed out a paper script and I'm looking at the artwork and doing all the notes there and then I had to do the notes again online and to me the simplest thing was to have a viewer where the artwork would come up, the page would come up that would be your script and then you could edit the script within it and make notations on the artwork, same exact file, and then you could save it as a PDF and send it back. How hard could that be? Well, it turned out that was pretty hard. But I knew that if we could do that then everything else would be easy because everything else is basically just an accelerated word processor that knows what our needs are. So I coded like a really rough beta and when I called Steve just to get some ideas on the pitfalls...I've known Steve ever since I was a [stand-up] comic--even further than that, we both worked in a magic shop in Washington DC called Al's Magic, which is where I think both of us got our skills in being able to just discuss things and our sense of humor because Al was a huge presence behind the counter and his selling point was so huge. And when I became a stand-up comic years later I found out that he became a digital comic. When I started Digital Seas I found out he started Scriptware. We kept going in these parallel paths. I called him up because I knew that with everything he went through with Scriptware, he would be able to tell me all of the problems I would need to look out for.

Because the Digital Seas software I did was far more complicated. You're talking about using satellite protocols to be able to talk to the ship. The graphic user interface was easy because when I was at AOL we did stuff that was similar to that but whenever anything seems really easy is when I always get nervous because I know that's when it's the most complicated. That's all that life has ever taught me is that when you say, "Oh, this is going to be a breeze," next thing you know it's four in the morning and you're pulling your hair out. So I knew that Steven would be able to tell me the pitfalls because he had gone through it with Scriptware. And he goes, after an hour into the conversation we're getting all excited about it and I said, "Steven, do you want to do this with me?" He said, "I thought this is where we were going with that. Yeah, I'd love to do it." So I sent him some of the code I'd been working on and he said what needed to be changed and this is why I was having a problem there, and because we were both, even though we were both in very creative, fun, outgoing things, we're still like geeky damn nerds. You look at my office, I've got figures all over the top shelf of a bookshelf. I'm looking at everything from 007, RoboCop to Frank Black from Millennium. I mean, one shelf is all screenplays the next shelf is all magic books, the next shelves are all graphic novels. So it was just a perfect fit. So once I realized we could do the collaborating editor, and we started investing our own money, I said the hardest thing about this is just going to be getting it out to the masses to let them know that this exists. And he wasn't actually the first one, someone else had suggested Kickstarter to me but I wasn't a fan of Kickstarter because I didn't understand it. I thought that Kickstarter was begging. That's how it felt to me, was that people were begging for money and I didn't want to be a part of that. So it was actually again a conversation with Larry Young where he said, "No, no, it's really more about pre-sales. I mean, look what Jimmy Palmiotti and a bunch of guys are doing on here." So we went down that path and we realized it's really an all-or-nothing thing and I said, "Well, it's a great way to find out if there's interest out there, that's for certain. Because at the end of the day, I kinda figured if it didn't fly I would just fund it myself which I didn't want to do--who want to dip into their own pocket to take a risk? Any entrepreneur will tell you never spend your own money. As bad as that sound but at least then in the old days I would take angel investments but I knew that they had an immediate return. which is why Kickstarter bothered me again--these people are sending money with no return. So I felt better knowing that most of the poeple who were buying the software were people who were actually going to use it, and all the other stuff was being bought up by family and friends. It made it feel a lot easier. But that was kind of the birth of it--every time I tried to do something that was simplistic in writing a comic book script, and I got tired of people telling me just to use Word. To me as a writer, anything that takes me out of the moment is a hindrance. That's why Final Draft or Movie Magic--that's why it's such a great software because you don't think about that. you're constantly just writing dialogue or exposition. Trying to format it in Word, that was the worst. I'd rather use a template in a much more expensive screenplay software than use Word. And the Marvel Way just isn't my way. I tried and to me it just needed more structure. I couldn't go, "Okay, here's everything I wrote, now draw something about it." I know that's a conversation that over the years I've realized people who draw the Marvel way--there's no talking to them, there's no other way. That was the golden era, that's how things are supposed to be done. And I had another guy tell me that this software is going to be a nail to a coffin in this industry. I was like, are you kidding me? ComicBook.com: I do think that artists are undervalued in today's marketplace because of the rise of auteur kind of comic writers, but I'll also say that the reason that has happened is that there are a lot more writers than artists whose names will sell a book.

Farrington: Right. That's true, that's true. if I see Mark Waid's name on something, I pull it right off. It just got to the point where I knew if I didn't do it, somebody was going to do it because that's what pushed me to really get started because I remember what happened with Digital Seas. When I pushed myself into making it happen, we took a few months putting the original design for a dog and pony show to take to the cruise lines. I realized that the one component I would need is the satellite connection so I came up with the idea of partnering with a satellite company and then taking it to the cruise lines, which is what I did. But when I went to approach the one satellite company that had the majority of the cruise lines--I knew this was the company I had to do it with--they were just about to go with someone else who came up with a very similar idea to mine but it was like these floor-top models. You remember those Pac-Man games at the bar, you'd set one down on the table top? It was just that--they were going to put them all around the ship. And I was like, "No, I'm going to put in an Internet cafe where you can do upsale on drinks and food and they were like, "If you hadn't come to us literally yesterday with the phone call, meeting today, tomorrow I was signing a contract with this other company." So every time I think about that, I go, "You know what? Speed to market, let me get it done. I can do it, I know I can do it. Once I had Steven on--originally I was going to use him as a consultant--the speed to market literally went from a year and a half to six months because we know what we can do. Then getting a programming team on top of it? Anyway, it just made sense and I said, "Let's just do it." My wife was so glad to hear that because she was like, "I'm so tired of you saying somebody should do this!" ComicBook.com: I don't think I've ever had this conversation, in terms of why it doesn't exist, but I do know that every time I start a script, I do that Google search to be like, "Has anybody created this in the year and a half between when I wrote my last comic and now?" Because it just seems like someone ought to have already. Farrington: I think part of the reasons had to be just understanding the market. If you look at the amount of people in the world who are creators and then you look at the amount of people that are really the professionals making it happen--not that everyone isn't a creator, but I'm talking about people who are doing it on their own without the Big Two or independents or so forth--if you look at that pie, a very thin sliver of that pie are the ones who are actually doing it on a professional level, quote-unquote.  And people don't understand fanboys. People don't understand that market--is there money for that? They don't see why they should invest in doing this wondering if it will even happen. I'm kind of the perfect storm--I'm the fanboy who has a software background, a business background and I know how to bring things to market. But I'm not going to be stupid enough to think there's not somebody else out there like me. I'm not unique. But at the same time it's hard to think you're going to jump into a world where it's unsure whether you'll get a return on your investment. That of course ultimately made the Kickstarter model even more appealing to me--I certainly would get a sense for what's going on. But look at Final Draft--they know who their market are. Most people who buy Final Draft are never going to have a screenplay produced. Out here, everybody on the corner is writing a screenplay. And I didn't want to do something that was going to be expensive. I mean, my friends that were writing comic books, even a lot of the pro guys, they're using Final Draft and templates. When I heard Scrivener came out, I was thrilled. I mean--free? Are you kidding me? But then it just ran into the same stuff. So I'm going to do a software that has nothing to do with what I do but it's going to throw me a bone and let me do it too. And I loved the outlining feature on Scrivener but it still didn't do what I wanted it to do. And then it was open source so there were people writing their own templates...it was just the fact that you had to shoehorn something in, specially when I have a background in coding. It's like when you watch film as a filmmaker--you see all the nuances of what it took to make that one scene, from the lighting to the way it was edited to obviously how it was directed, maybe an acting choice. It's the same thing when I look at code. It's like, "Why didn't they do this or this or this or this? I know you can do it."

ComicBook.com: Well, and every specialized community has that thing. One of the first things I look at when I get a new comic is the lettering. Farrington: The one thing I've learned in just the last seven years with comic book people--and when I was a kid, I was comic book people. I would have those arguments about who could beat up who. But these guys now, they're adults and they're having that same argument but they can leave the comic shop and become a whole different person that you could reach and talk to and actually have a debate.  But they go into that shop and it's like they're Captain America and the shield goes up; you just can't reach them. So I had to be really careful about thinking that this was going to work. But you're right--everybody just kept going, "Why isn't there something like this?" I get at least three or four comments through the Kickstarter comments saying "I can't believe no one's done this. I've been waiting for this for years."