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Posts Tagged ‘creating comics’

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The basics of creating comics: pushing through uncertainty

August 6th, 2010 | by mentalcat
Posted In: Blog

Back in high school Danny and I decided it would be cool to film a parody of Back to the Future utilizing puppets and an old VHS camcorder.

We were both wrong and right.  Right in that it was fun and therefore cool for us.  Wrong in that for the spectator it was the opposite of cool…though in retrospect it may border on  horribly awesome.

I need to mention that we apparently didn’t believe in either editing or multiple takes.

We didn’t even have a DeLorean.  We opted instead for Danny’s charcoal gray Mazda GLC.  A car similar to the DeLorean only in its rarity, except that you may actually see a DeLorean or two still running on the open road.

In our defense we were 16 years old and it was 1991.

I doubt it will ever see the light of day unless we want to attempt to unleash a viral video that goes worldwide becoming hugely popular and yet ruins the opportunity to do any reputable work for the rest of our lives.

I recently found the script for that creative milestone.  A document that I wrote entirely out in pencil so I could erase, and then went back over in ink so it could be photocopied.

It was a different time, kids.

Working on a long term project like a graphic novel feels a lot like that script (minus the adolescent enthusiasm.) Slaving away at odd hours all alone… going over each page once in pencil, another in ink, thinking it’s cool, but wondering if it’s only cool for you and then thinking halfway through that you’d be happy with horribly awesome.

But at some point you have to commit to the uncertainty, be willing to accept the possibility of failure, and swear your next book, even if this one is good, will be better.

And that’s the key.  Your next book.  Then the next.  Then the next.

The only alternative is to stop and one day years later to  wonder if any of it would have ever gone anywhere.

And that to me is more frightening than failure.

-B

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The basics of creating comics: paper and intentions

August 4th, 2010 | by mentalcat
Posted In: Blog

On occasion I run into people at conventions who are interested in the process of creating comics.  The first time creating your own book can be daunting, especially when you consider all the facets of the process: writing, pencilling, inking, lettering, caffeine intake, and lonely hours at a desk.  It can be twice as perplexing for a complete novice who is unsure about the basics such as paper,  reproduction size, printing options, and at what point you abandon any delusions of winning an Eisner.

Vex wasn’t my first book, but it was the first time that I, along with Danny, handled every aspect from beginning to end ourselves and was the largest single project I’d taken on, weighing in when all was said and done at 144 pages.  (And yes, the entire book is finished.)

When people ask what kind of paper to use, I usually tell them that I use Canson Comic Art board that you can pick up in a convienent pad at just about any art store.

The truth is that it depends on your intentions.  Do you want fancy pants pages to sell to collectors?  Do just just want to get the story done?  Really, you could do it on copy paper if you wanted.  Granted different inks will go down a little different on every surface, but if you’re just wanting to get the story out then do whatever it takes to get it done.

I did the first 4 pages of Vex on copy paper.  This is because our intentions with this book were to simply tell the story.  We went back and forth in terms of how to publish and originally decided to do half pages online at a time.  So I laid out pages traditionally (in an 11 x 17 format) then divided it up in half and inked it on 2 sheets of copy paper.

On this plan it would have taken approximately 976.9* years for the book to be completely released online. So for the rest of the book I drew it at standard comic size.  11 x 17 paper, for a traditional comic book size reproduction.

The whole point is if you’re more interested in telling your story than selling off original pages, then simply find the medium that you’re comfortable with, figure out how you want to publish it, and draw it to fit those dimensions.

And if you DO win that Eisner, I’m pretty sure you could sell of the copy paper pages anyway.

So get to work.

*A random number calculated by someone extraordinarily bad at math.

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