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Spider-Man Commentary: Outside the Box

"S02E15 "Outside the Box"" 

When I started writing my adaptation of The Superior Spider-Man storyline for the animated continuity, I began by outlining the entire season, then turned to outlining each episode. The plan was to have treatments for each episode in place before I began the scripting process. That way, everything would be down on paper, and I'd just have to turn the ideas into words on a page.

But no plan survives contact with the enemy. In this case, the enemy was me.

For a start, as I explained in the previous commentary, I am not the kind of writer who can work from treatments and outlines. I went awry in other places as well. For instance, after writing the treatment for {item:} I discovered I had already written a script for it -- something I had completely forgotten about. And that script looked nothing like the treatment I had just written. It felt better to me, and was a lot simpler in its content.

I muttered a lot of bad words to myself and did some thinking. And what I came up with was: Screw the treatments.

They were going to be too packed with incident, I felt. Also, they were an immense pain to write. So I decided to go straight to the scripts. My overall outline for the 13-episode arc had told me what notes I wanted to hit, and what I wanted each episode to accomplish and where I wanted each one to end. So my new plan became to rely on that crude outline and wing it as I wrote each script.

It was hard and it was slow, like feeling my way in bare feet across a dark room, but that's how I wrote this episode. The very first scene is taken from one of the Superior Spider-Man books, but the rest of it is mine. I got stuck for a couple of days in the middle, because I wasn't sure the scenes were coming in the right order, but I finally just bulldozed through.

One thing I discovered: I really don't like writing action scenes. Inventing stuff for the characters to do -- That feels like something that an animation director should come up with, and then I should fill in some dialogue.

Which, IIRC, is kind of how Jack Kirby and Stan Lee did it in the comics, right?