Script: Pepper Jones, Act I

Writer/artist Shawn Atkins and I have been working on a semi-secret project that was heretofore unannounced… but no longer!

Pepper Jones, Adventure Scientist is about a badass particle physicist who works with the Bevatron atom smasher in Berkeley, California in the early 1970s. I thought I’d share the first page from my recent script:

I understand that this script might look a bit strange to you. First off, Shawn prefers to work from a plot instead of a full script, which is exactly what I gave him the first time.

But this is the third time around and a couple of things have changed. One is that we’re not prepping this as a Zuda pitch anymore. Another is that we’ve tentatively settled on a digest size for this comic, which (to me) means less panels per page and more pages.

I also have a new scripting philosophy (inspired partly by the entertaining script work of Dan Slott): even though readers of Pepper Jones will never see the raw script, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be as enjoyable as possible for the artist. Way I see it, that makes it more fun for me to write and more fun for the artist to read.

So that’s how I ended up with this hybrid plot/full style script. Hope it piques your interest in Pepper!