Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Bill Finger, Bob Kane, Joe Simon, Steve Ditko, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and dozens of other Golden and Silver Age visionaries produced superhero, romance, western, horror, and crime comics using the craftsman's tools of their day: paper, typewriters, pencils, brushes, inks, and dyes. From the 1930s until roughly the mid-1990s, comic books were produced almost entirely in this fashion, with a few digital blips along the way.

But as electronic tools became increasingly affordable and powerful, the comic book creation process shifted from an analog process to a digital one. In contemporary times, there's a good chance that no aspect of your favorite title is physical until finished pages start rolling off a printing press.

Writing With Zeroes and Ones

"In the analog days, when you'd write fiction, every word was physical," said Bryan Edward Hill, a writer whose credits include Detective Comics and Michael Cray for DC Comics and Ash vs. The Evil Dead and Titans for Hollywood. Although Hill's comic book career blossomed in the digital age, he's familiar with the challenges that faced the scripters who came before him.

"You were writing long form by hand or on a typewriter," said Hill. "Editing required you to do physical labor, as you had to use Wite-Out, cut things, and reglue things. Now, you can just cut and paste on your computer."

This ease of writing and editing speeds up the drafting process, but it also comes with a drawback. As a writer can sit in front of a computer with a nice glass of inspiration in hand, he or she can begin writing a script before the beats and themes are properly formed. There's always the idea that things can be fixed at any time.

"Because it took effort to redraft stories back in the day, writers were a bit more thoughtful," said Hill. "Nowadays, things are sometimes written before the idea is baked."

Hill, whose body of work includes roughly five comic scripts per month, has found a successful formula that incorporates modern tech tools. During our 90-minute conversation about comics, Hollywood, and society at large, he expounded on the hardware and software that helps him weave comic book adventures. Some items were expected; others were complete surprises.

"I use Scrivener to vomit an idea, then I collect JPG images," said Hill. "It could be character designs, it could be real world photography. Sometimes I'll put a slideshow on repeat. I'll make a playlist on Spotify. All of it's going at the same time, and I'm getting the ideas out."

Drafting a comic book script sees Hill launching the word processing standard—Microsoft Word—and typing away. And when it comes time to share and track files with collaborators, Hill finds Dropbox a valuable tool. In fact, it's one of the few digital tools, along with Adobe Photoshop and a Wacom Cintiq tablet, that are essential parts of many comic creators' workflows.



Hill uses a curated Spotify playlist to put him in the mood to tell comic book tales.



Binary Drawing and Inking

Like Hill, Amrit Birdi, an illustrator who has delivered for end-clients, such as Marvel, Netflix, Square Enix, and Warner Bros., uses Dropbox to transfer files—often among his own devices. While writers often make do with just a laptop or desktop, artists require multiple digital creation tools.

"More and more, these device manufacturers are aware you need to share files," said Birdi. "It's easy to open Clip Studio Paint on my iPad, share the file, and then open the file in my Wacom Cintiq."

Birdi has used digital tools almost exclusively throughout his career, and considers them essential elements of the comic book creation process. While some artists still choose to work in pencil and paper, Birdi prefers to open a low-res file and then lay out panels, gestures, and framing. When Birdi worked using traditional techniques, he discovered that pen and paper wasn't a very flexible process.

"If I didn't like a page, I had to redo the whole thing," he said. "Now, I can copy panels, so I don't have to begin again from nothing."

The MVP tech in Birdi's toolset is the aforementioned Clip Studio Paint. The app, which is available for the iOS, macOS, and Windows operating systems, has many Adobe Photoshop-like features, except that it has a stronger emphasis on comics and manga creation. With Clip Studio Paint, you can sketch, ink, color, and create captions and word balloons. Fiona Staples (Archie, Saga) and Dave Gibbons (Doctor Who, Watchmen) are two other professional comic book artists who also sing the software's praises.

"It's the only program that can replicate the pressure I need to get the right line weight," said Birdi. "And Clip Studio comes with a perspective ruler that lets you set a horizon point, so every line you draw follows the perspective."

Birdi cites Adobe Illustrator as another application that comic book artists use on a regular basis. For example, some comic artists begin their projects with rough sketches made using traditional pen and paper. They then scan the work, so the art can be imported into Illustrator. Once the drawing is inside Illustrator, a visual artist uses Illustrator's pens and brushes to flesh out the work and "ink" it. That's just one way to use the application.

Illustrator has an advantage over Photoshop: its use of vector art instead of pixel. Vector art lets you scale you lines, so your work looks great at any dimension. "It's mathematical equations," said Biridi. "You can print vector art at different sizes and not lose the resolution.

But software is nothing without accompanying hardware, and Birdi's gear includes three excellent devices: the 10.5-inch Apple iPad Pro, 13-inch Wacom Cintiq, and 22-inch Wacom Cintiq. They each have different uses. Biridi uses the larger Cintiq when in his studio. Conversely, the smaller model is the artist's go-to device when setting up a workspace at a con or hotel room.

"The Wacom Cintiq is the best for pure drawing," said Birdi. "The nib and pen on that screen is incredibly accurate. I get perfect lines on the first try. The iPad Pro is sometimes a millimeter off."

Amrit Birdi uses multiple tablets to draw and ink his comics.

Still, the iPad Pro has its benefits. Birdi stated that the iPad Pro is possibly the best all-around creation tool at his disposal when he factors in size, feature set, and the device's truly standalone nature; the Wacom Cintiq requires you to connect to a computer to customize brushes. However, both devices dramatically reduce the page creation time, which is a huge plus.

When Birdi drew using traditional pencil and paper, a page would take 10 hours, and inking just as long. With digital, Birdi cranks out a page of full pencils and inks in a half day. And in the comics game, time equals money.

"We can do a graphic novel in four months vs. year in a half," said Birdi, referring to the speed of his illustration studio, Amrit Birdi & Co. "That's attractive to publishers, writers, to everyone."

Digital penciling and inking appear the perfect contemporary creation methods, but there are drawbacks associated with abandoning the classic analog process. And one of the digital ills has little to do with artistic vision.

"I used to work on big A3 drawing boards," said Birdi. "The devices I use now are smaller than an A3 drawing board, so I'm constantly hunched over and have a LED shining in my face. It's probably not the healthiest thing to do."

Interestingly, Birdi cites a more nostalgic loss that comes into play when digitally creating comics. For the greater part of the medium's existence, comics were made with pencils, inks, and dyes. Electric brush strokes are a relatively new activity.

"There's a certain part of the art form, the act of crafting to paper with pencil and ink, that's lost," said Birdi. "I almost envy guys who do the traditional stuff. Comic book pencils on paper look so good."

Still, Birdi believes that the digital benefits outweigh their downsides, and that it's less about the tool and more about the mark you make.

Digital Letters From the Heart

There's an old adage that great lettering work is invisible to the reader, and that poorly implemented lettering is a visual abomination. That's a very binary statement, but there's much truth in it. Good lettering is unobstructed, letting you focus on the words and characters; bad lettering makes you want to toss a comic in the trash. Lettering has been a part of comics for since its inception, and is an artistic skill in and of itself.

"Analog, working with pens and ink on actual art boards, was how it was done for decades," said Chris Eliopoulos, a prolific letterer who has applied his hand to a variety of titles, including Image Comics' Savage Dragon and Marvel Comics' Daredevil. "It was an art form as much as a skill. But, it was slow, mistakes were made, and once it was on paper, it was extremely tough to change anything."

However, the rise of digital lettering dramatically improved how captions and word balloons are rendered. By working with ones and zeroes, Eliopoulos, and other letterers, can easily change dialogue at a writer's or an editor's request. Plus, digital typography is more uniform and clean than its analog counterpart.

"I've created my fonts in Fontographer and now FontLab," said Eliopoulos. "I use Microsoft Word to open scripts and copy the text. The lettering is done in Adobe Illustrator where I've also created a bunch of word balloons of different types. I use Adobe InDesign to layer the lettering onto the art. I work on an iMac and use a Wacom Cintiq. In total, the cost of all those things runs in the thousands of dollars. When I started, I used a $1.29 pen holder, a box of pen nibs costing $10, a $15 bottle of ink and a $5 Ames Guide."

Though Eliopoulos believes that digital lettering has many benefits, he cautions those those who view it as easy or secondary work. He recommends that up-and-coming letters learn the fundamentals of typography, design, and layouts, and how individual letters work together. In short, you need to take the lettering game very seriously.



Chris Eliopoulosadds adds words to a Spider-Man comic using Illustrator, his main lettering tool.



"These days I see people buying a font, getting Illustrator, slapping it together, and calling themselves a letterer," said Eliopoulos. "There are so many people out there thinking it's a fairly easy thing, but the people who will rise to the top and get noticed are the ones who treat lettering and typography as an art form and study either digitally or analog. I learned so much by doing things by hand, but your mileage may vary."

Electric Rainbow

Like lettering, the colorist's job has undergone profound changes. In the analog days, colorists painted color guides, onto which they'd write out CMYK percentages to create colors. Then, an artist would take that color guide and trace it on amberlith film and separations were made from that by hand. But as colorists adopted new digital tools, the creation process changed. Initially, it was rough going.

"Eventually, it got to the point where someone was doing the color separations on computer, but they were generally not artists," said Matt Hollingsworth, a colorist with a list of credits that include Catwoman: Selina's Big Score, Hawkeye, Tokyo Ghost, and Wolverine. "At that point, we were allowed to just fully paint the color guides, but the color separators would usually not do a good job on the rendering. So, the shading on people's faces, for instance, would look horrible."

Colors didn't match exactly, either, so the final printed comics often bore little resemblance to the original painted color guides, which led to much frustration. Colorists began to do the separations themselves, on computers, which improved the overall quality of the colored work. In 1995, Hollingsworth worked on a Mac with 144MB of RAM; these days, he uses far more powerful hardware.

Like Birdi, Hollingsworth uses a 22-inch Wacom Cintiq tablet; it serves as the main screen on which he digitally paints. But Hollingsworth also has a second, more powerful screen on which he views pages, sets up digital brushes, and works in Adobe Photoshop.

"I have an iMac from about 18 months ago, with a 27-inch, 5K monitor, 32GB of RAM, 4GHz Intel Core i7 processor, and an AMD Radeon video card with 4096MB [RAM]," said Hollingsworth. "Corel Painter requires a lot of RAM to work properly and runs really nicely on this machine."



Matt Hollingsworth uses Adobe Illustrator to color Seven to Eternity.

Corel Painter is the software that Hollingsworth only occasionally fires up, though he's using it a lot for an upcoming 2019 comic book entitled Little Bird. For that project, Hollingsworth sets up pages in Photoshop, works on flat colors, opens them in Painter for rendering, then sends them back to Photoshop for final compositing and glows or lighting laying over top of the lineart.

However, that's not Hollingsworth typical creative workflow. For most gigs, he uses Photoshop with some real, analog paint thrown in to give it a more natural look.

"There are a lot of things that real paint does better," said Hollingsworth. "The actual brush strokes and paper texture look great. For this reason, I often use real paint and digitally composite it in Photoshop. Much of my work these days is a mix of real paint and digital paint."

Bringing It All Together

For the most part, comic book publishers no longer have bullpens, the fabled workspaces where creators dreamed up some of the world's most iconic characters. Nowadays, technology lets writers, pencilers, inkers, colorists, and letterers remotely submit work using tech tools. LionForge Comics, for example, uses DropBox, Google Drive, and WeTransfer (a service for sending . As you can imagine, keeping track of all the moving parts requires supreme organization, especially at a company like Lion Forge that publishes multiple titles per month.

"We store the files on our internal Dropbox, sorted by publishing imprint, then title, then issue or volume number, then stage of production," said Hazel Newlevant, Assistant Editor, Lion Forge Comics. "Editing involves a lot of traffic control, moving pages from inker to colorist or colorist to letter, which we do by sharing relevant Dropbox folders."

Editing comics has another vital aspect besides traffic control—actual editing. Lion Forge's staff uses Adobe Acrobat Pro DC to transform pages into PDFs, make editorial notes, and then email the PDFs back to the creators. Particularly large high-resolution files prompt Newlevant and company to use Smallpdf, an online tool that compresses PDFs into email-friendly sizes. The editors keep copies of the original edits in their Dropbox system so that they can compare the changes against the edit notes.

In addition, the publisher's editors and project managers use specific software to track the whereabouts of the various comic book parts. "We use Firebrand Title Management to watch our deadlines for each title," said Susan Sordo, Project Manager, Lion Forge Comics. "Title Management sends daily notifications of pending tasks and upcoming deadlines to each user, and we update the information accordingly."

Title Management is software commonly used in the prose-publishing fields, but it works well in the comic book space, too. "It's great for centralizing all information about a title in one place that's accessible to any branch of the company," said Newlevant. "We set deadlines for each stage of production, using different templates depending on what type of comic it is, and check off boxes to indicate they're complete."

Lion Forge Comics editor Hazel Newlevant inserts notes into a PDF file using Adobe Acrobat Pro DC.

Communicating deadlines to the creators demands more ordinary apps. Lion Forge sends the creatives a list of deadlines in an email or Excel spreadsheet at the start of the project, and then send them periodic reminders to make sure everything is smoothly moving along.

And when the digital comic book pages are complete, Lion Forge uploads the digital files to Comixology and uses WeTransfer to send the digital files to the printer. Shortly thereafter, a comic book, such as Accell or The Castoffs, is born.

A Little Bit of Old, a Whole Lot of New

The comic book medium has stood the test of time by evolving from simple comic-strip collections to thrilling, original stories that fuel Hollywood's billion-dollar box office receipts. And as comic books have morphed, so have the tools that are used to make them. Pencils, inks, brushes, and dyes still have their place, but, without question, comic books are now a digital industry.

Of course, you never have to buy a paper comic at all; many people exclusively read digital comics. Publishers who want to be on the absolute bleeding edge can take the entire matter to its inevitable conclusion.

"The process never has to be analog; it can be a fully digital process," said Hill. "And if you get batshit, you can give [a comic] a bitcoin price and the entire process is digital."

Products Mentioned in This Story

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