Comic production from idea to art

So you’re thinking about making your own comics that no one will read for years to come, eh? Well here’s a step by step look at the terrible process I use for my short story series TerraQuill, which is sure to prepare you for the tedious years ahead. You’ll be a nobody in no time!

But really, if you don’t make comics because you love making comics, well you can go lick a cactus.

Step 1: The Idea

So you want to make a comic, but you don’t know what it should be about. Or maybe you do… in which case skip to Step 2. This step is a quick one, because there is no good advice for coming up with ideas. People are only able to tell you what works for them. There’s no guarantee it’ll work for you. Having said that, here’s where my ideas come from:

Reading other stories and thinking “what if the writer did THIS instead…”

Playing a video game that lets my mind wander.

Chatting with people on Twitter.

Stumbling upon Stumbleupon stumbles.

Walks / runs.

So just do all of those things, and you’ll have like six or seven ideas just waiting to be exploded onto a page, which will be worth fives of dollars years from now.

Step 2: Get It Out

I write my ideas out as fast as I can into a little Moleskine notebook. Just a brief synopsis paragraph:

Young boy leaves his mountaintop home thinking he’s ready to tackle the real world. He scales the mountainside with the aid of a mysterious stranger, learning practical life lessons along the way. When they reach the bottom, the boy learns a hard lesson and is forced to make his first big decision.

Bam. There’s the story. The shorter the synopsis paragraph, the better I work with it. From there, I figure out:

The ending (more on that below)

Ideal page count

Important scenes needed to tell the story

Character descriptions

What I need in the story vs. what I want in the story

2A: The Ending

I like a good ending. Something that makes you want to reread the story, or something that you’re not expecting. Yeah it’s about the journey, and the characters, and the everything else in a story, but tell me a good ending isn’t the banana slices in your cheerios. It just makes it a little better, assuming the milk and cereal isn’t past expiry and also well proportioned.

After the concept and theme are established, I figure out the ending, the beginning, and then travel back and forth from A-Z filling in the rest of the alphabet.

Step 3: Script

This is where things go from completely creative, to requiring some technical knowledge. If you’re going to be drawing your own story, you may not even need a script. Just outlines. Now I haven’t worked for the big guys (yet) but I know that your script must be:

Easy to understand

To your editor’s specifications

Created with the artist, colourist and letterer in mind

Easy to understand

If your script is hard to understand, you’re wasting time and therefore money. Unless you’re writing it for yourself and you’re broke. Which will likely be the case.

Here’s a script page for a story called You’ll Make Your Own in TerraQuill #1:

Some scripts are much more detailed, some much less. You’ll probably want to check out some script books for your favourite comics. Here’s one for Invincible and one for CHEW.

Step 4: Thumbnails and Pencils

I do little thumbnail sketches while I write the script, which help visualize the story before the artwork begins. I can’t write without thumbnailing everything out, even for books I don’t draw. If I’m happy with the script and I know it has the capability for coherently translating to art, I can sleep like 5% easier when sleep happens.

Here’s the penciled page for the script pages above:

There’s no detail to these pencils as you can see, and I would be rightfully embarrassed to hand these into anyone other than myself. But penciling like this leaves room for fun with ink. This step is done on 11x17 velum bristol, as quickly as possible.

Step 5: Inks

I ink with Speedball ink, nib pens, and Windsor Newton brushes. Not exclusively, but their brushes are damn good. I buy my nibs at antique stores in Toronto. They all seem to have bags of old nibs laying around. Since you probably can’t do that, I recommend Hunt nibs or Deleter nibs. Just make sure you wash them with soap before using them, or the ink won’t rest properly on the nib.

Inks are done on 11x17 watercolour paper which I cut down from 18x24 sheets. I use a lightbox to trace the pencils onto the watercolour paper, and draw the margins (bleed / live area) etc myself.

Step 6: Colours

OK here’s the thing: I have no idea what the hell I’m doing with colours. I know Jeff Lemire and Matt Kindt use watercolours, and I love their work, so why shouldn’t I at least TRY watercolouring? I’m reading a few books myself right now and experimenting with a bunch of materials at the moment, which hopefully I’ll never not be doing. So I can’t say much about colouring like this since I don’t know what I’m doing.

Alright, maybe I know enough to get by. But there’s always room to be learning more.

Step 7: Letters

Lettering is often overlooked. If I had it my way, the colourist and the letterer would have their names on the front of the book with the writer and artist. I’d throw the editor on there as well, but that’s a different post.

A letterer has to hope that the writer and artist remembered about them. The letterer has to pray the artist was considerate and reasonable in their layouts and left room for words. The letterer has to put up with “don’t cover my artwork here” and “just cram the letters over there” and much much more. From the editor, writer, artist, and colourist, the letterer has to hear it. So thank you, letterer, for your patience and thank you creative teams who treat letters like art. Because they are.

This was my first letter job so it’s pretty cringe worthy, but I’ve learned. I promise I’ve learned.

So there you go. From idea to page. I throw it all together, and format it for printing / digital which I’m happy to chat about if you ask on Twitter @shawndaley or through email here.

And that’s how you too can fall into obscurity in the best possible way. But really, I hope you enjoyed this look at the process, and you took at least one thing away from it. You can read all my comics online for free at shawndaley.ca/terraquill as well as download them all as PDF or CBZ.

I also mail out free print versions if you can cover the cost of postage. It’s $2.00 in Canada and $4.00 to USA.

Keep, or start, making comics!

PS: One last thing - to anyone aspiring to tell sequentially artistulated stories of their own, but who think “I can’t do that, I don’t know how…”

It may be worth noting:

If you started writing today, you’d be writing almost as long as I have. I started my fist story December 31st 2012, so it’s been about a year for me. Now I may not be happy with every story I tell, but I’d be much less happy with myself if I decided not to bother trying.

Read Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, and over-analyze each title you read to the point where reading them feels like work. Not all the time, but consider reading comics as training and learn from your favourites. Understand and respect the medium, and you’ll be on your way to telling the stories you want to read and in ways you want to read them.

To the seven people who read this, thanks for doing so.