THE COMING OF THE HUNTRESS

I was in the seventh grade when I started making my own comic books
of a sort.  My first efforts were both written and drawn by me, and
I wrote them directly on the paper I drew them on.  When I met some
artists willing to draw my stories, I still wrote them out in that
manner.  That changed when I purchased Secrets Behind the Comics,
Stan Lee’s 1947 books on how to make comic books.

The book showed the two-column script format used on this ancient
script of mine.  The panel descriptions were in the left column and
the copy in the right.  I would guess I wrote about a dozen to two
dozen scripts in this fashion before realizing it was not a great
way to write a comic-book script.  However, it did teach me how to
convey information to whoever would draw my scripts.

Dating “The Coming of the Huntress” is difficult because I simply
can’t be sure when I bought my copy of Secrets Behind the Comics.
I bought it at either a 1969 Detroit Triple Fan Fare convention or
a 1970 New York Comic Convention.  I would have written “Huntress”
within a few months to a year of getting Stan’s book.  Which means
I was 17 or 18 years old when I wrote this script. 

I don’t remember what I wrote “The Coming of the Huntress” for.  It
may have been for a fanzine.  It may have been intended as a pitch
for DC editor Murray Boltinoff, with whom I had started exchanging
brief notes about his comics and my ambitions.  Those would be the
two most likely scenarios, but it’s a coin toss as to which one was
the actual reason for my writing this script.

When I started mentioning the wondrous things I found while moving
old files to a new file cabinet, this script was the one which my
Facebook friends most wanted to see.  I present it here warts and
all.  I hope you enjoy it or, at least, find it entertainingly odd.
If you’re an artist who wants to draw it, well, you’re undoubtedly
a silly person, but we can certainly talk about that.

Some additional notes:

My best guess is that it took me one day or two nights to write
this script and this was the first and only draft of the script. I
wasn’t much for rewriting in my youth or proofreading.  The proof
of that is that there are two sequential pages numbered “8" and I
never caught that mistake until now.

Some of the original script pages are difficult to read because of
either the passage of time or my not changing the typewriter ribbon
when it really needed changing.  The term “typewriter ribbon” will
be unfamiliar to my younger bloggy thing readers.  A visit to your
local museum of antiquities might be in order.  In any case, I did
the best I could to darken them for their presentation in today’s
column.  I hope my efforts prove sufficient.

That’s the intro.  Here are the script pages...

 

© 2013 Tony Isabella