What is a Story Pitch?
This is a modified excerpt from a book I’m working on called The Business of Freelance Comic Book Publishing. It is designed to help you understand how to build a story pitch for a publisher. While this can’t be taken as legal or financial advice, it can help structure a story for characters you don’t own.
Artists, colorists, and letterers can use finished comic book pages to show their ability to transform a script into a professional comic. But before any of that can be done, the script needs to be produced. Which scripts get produced and which stories get told is determined by the publisher.
Many publishers in the emerging, independent, and creator-owned sectors of the industry know what stories they want to tell. In many instances, they are writers who are trying to transform their scripts into comics. At the conglomerate level, publishers hold the rights to valuable IP, but look to freelance writers to create compelling stories for them. This is where you need to be able to present a story pitch to the potential client.
For our purposes, a pitch is a story proposal for an existing IP. There are various types of verbal pitches in the entertainment world, from elevator or convention pitches, and high concept pitches, but the story pitch is a more formal document a writer can use to secure work with a conglomerate publisher.
Dan DiDio, writer, editor, and publisher for both DC Comics and Frank Miller Presents, advocates the following structure for a story pitch:
Logline: A one or two-sentence summary of the story that hooks the potential client and describes the central conflict of the story.
Synopsis: A summary of the entire story, including the premise, the inciting incident, progressing complications, climax, and resolution of the story.
Character Breakdown: A list of the protagonist and all the other supporting characters in their satellite relationship to the protagonist in the story.
Situation and Location: A description of where and when the story takes place.
Springboard: Other storylines that can follow from this story
Art Samples: Capture the look and style of the story. This doesn’t need to be the actual art or original art. It merely needs to convey the proper mood.
Story pitches for established IP often have to balance the existing perception of the characters among readers, corporate plans for the character in other media, and the writer’s unique vision. For a historical perspective, some writers try to deal with these factors by reading up to fifty comics about the character before developing their pitch. Others, like DiDio, suggest that the writer only needs to be familiar with the character’s origin story and their last appearance and avoid being swamped by the “endless middle”. The corporate plans for a character are harder to prepare for because the information is often confidential, but networking and staying informed about film, TV, and game projects surrounding the character can mitigate this issue.
Have fun with your comic.
Gamal
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PLEASE NOTE: THIS BLOG POST IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR LEGAL ADVICE. IF YOU HAVE AN ISSUE WITH YOUR COMIC PROPERTY, DISCUSS IT WITH A QUALIFIED CONTRACT ATTORNEY OR CONTACT C3 FOR A FREE CONSULTATION