In the end we are all students, I’m also still learning but that can’t stop me from passing on my wisdom of dubious quality. Keep in mind my lessons are general guidelines, there is no one way to draw comics, but as I revealed in lesson 1 there are several annoying cliches, rookie mistakes, and things you might want to avoid in order to keep an audience’s attention.

This lesson will be about the process of planning out a comic itself. I’ll be using my one-shot Mage Knights as an example.

Step 1: Scripting

I used to be resistant to the idea of scripting, since I was both the writer and artist I figured I could pretty much write as I sketched my layouts and ideas visually.

However scripting is a good idea, you can plan out a large volume of ideas and imagery very quickly, even if it’s only for yourself. Actually, the advantage of being the writer as well is you have the liberty of writing a script with visual directions that only really make sense to you in text. If you want to write “Bob squiggles his way to the lower clockwise left of the panel” and it makes sense to you, that’s dandy.

You may first want to start out with a general outline of the entire story, plotting out major story events and then working out the details in the actual script. Keep in mind nothing needs to be set in stone: scenes, panel layouts and dialog may evolve and change during the drawing process and this is something you should allow to happen naturally.

The format I was taught by my good friend Angel was thus:

PAGE ONE

Panel One: description

[character name]: [dialog]
[character name]: [dialog]

Panel Two: description

Of course you can, and should, adjust the script writing process to your liking. However, if you’re a writer only it’s probably a good idea to ensure the artist(s) can understand your scripting format and directions.

Step 2: Thumbnailing

Just like you have to sketch a drawing out first you don’t want to try and dive right into the final comic page. There are several ways to go about thumbnailing, some people like to use a static six panel layout to plan out the contents before they plan the actual arrangement of panels on the page:

Or something like that

I prefer to plan out the layout as I’m sketching the contents, but that’s just me. I usually thumbnail in pencil, but for Mage Knights I sketched them out with my tablet just so I could keep them all organized in a folder on the computer:

Mage Knights page 3 the thumbnail and the final, some panels were changed/added when I was drawing the final page

Step 3: Penciling

Now that you’ve planned out your pages, it’s time to start drawing those pages. And of course before all else you need a good under drawing. So it’s time to start penciling! There’s really no wrong way to do this, you need to choose a method that works best for you, but I’ll just tell you how I do it.

In my comics before I did Mage Knights I would traditionally ink my panels along with everything else. So to draw the page I would sketch the contents of the panels on separate  pieces of paper and then use a lightbox to trace them onto the final page to be inked. Similarly with Mage Knights I drew the contents across a few sketchpads, scanned them into the computer, sized them into the digital panels and then began the digital inking process.

Pencils to final in Mage Knights

As you can see in the above, my pencils are kind of messy and I allow the art to evolve during the inking. But really, having solid pencils is a good idea, so try to smooth out your drawings as much as you can before inking.  But like I said before there really isn’t a right or a wrong way to go about your penciling, so do whatever feels most comfortable to you. But for crying out loud don’t go straight to the inks, you’ll save yourself alot of hardship and heartache by hammering out the details in pencil first.

And that concludes part two of my Comic Making Lessons. Stay tuned because next time I’ll give a lesson on paneling… as soon as I figure out how to explain it.

Related posts:

1. Comic Making Lesson 1 – General Tips
2. Digital Ink Timelapse 2: The Artist’s Bane
3. Comic Updates & Stuff

So consider these posts about comic making to be a series of lectures. The sort of disorganized, questionably helpful lectures you’d get from most aspergian college professors. I’m reluctant to get into the heavy duty technical stuff all at once (especially given my own comics process is haphazard and “learn as I go along”ish), though I’ll be using parts of my current project as an example in the future. For now I just want to go over some tips and tricks and mainly things to avoid.

Avoid Excessive Narration

Comics are a visual medium, and as such it’s important to show, not tell. If your narration gets too out of control you’ll reach the point where you might as well be making an illustrated novella rather than a comic book. Avoid opening the first issue (or any issue) of your comic with narration if you can, as these days it’s just tacky and cliche.  If narration is unavoidable then at least keep it concise lest you bore the audience to tears.

For many beginners it’s tempting to just unload paragraph upon paragraph of the precious backstory they worked so hard on all at once. Not only will this overwhelm your reader but you’ll be wasting material that you could have spread out across several issues or even the entire series. Don’t be so eager to give it all away, give your audience enough info so they can understand what’s going on right in front of them and perhaps the general concept to hook them and then go from there. Let them explore your characters over the course of the story so that they can get to know those characters, if you just bombard them with narration explaining why they should care, well, they’re not going to.

Granted narration can be used well stylistically for say a noir-like or abstract comics, but if this isn’t your aim try to keep it to a minimum. Just watch this video comic review to learn everything you need to know about how NOT to use narration.

Avoid Excessive Exposition

"Your hobbies are knitting and ceramics! Wait, why do I know all this!?"

“Well, Sai!” you may be saying now, “If we can’t use too much narration surely we can tell the story through dialog right?” Right. But just make sure you avoid your characters launching into giant speeches about the plot or their motivation or, anything really. Again, the key is to show, not tell.

Now exposition itself is unavoidable, after all if you’re  too vague no one will know what the hell is going on. The trick is to let plot points and details about characters reveal themselves as naturally as possible through scenes, character actions and realistic-sounding dialog. The worst offender I’ve seen when it comes to painful expository info-dumps is the comic Angel Sanctuary. Don’t get me wrong, for all its ups and downs I do like it and own the entire series, but good god is it bad about this sort of thing.

Basically, many times throughout Angel Sancatury random characters will discuss another heretofore unseen key character, their backstory and traits and then bam! That character just happens to show up one or two pages later. Or a character will show up first and another, largely unrelated, character will go “Hey! I’ve heard of him! He’s blah blah expository backstory blah.”

People. Don’t. Talk. Like. This. I mean if you saw a celebrity on the street would you run up to them, announce you’ve heard of them, and then list off all of their achievements as if they don’t already know? And this isn’t a translation issue, looking at both the scanlations and my official printed releases this exposition was pre-existing. A reader is just an invisible, unknown observer of the story events, and if they come across a random info dump that is obviously only there for their sake they’ll cease to be immersed in the story.

But do keep in mind that it’s nearly impossible to avoid a line of dialog or event here and there that exists only or mostly to inform the reader of something. However,  if you’re smart about it you can disguise these instances and make them flow with the story rather than stopping it short to explain key plot points.

“Just Because It Makes Sense in Your Head…

doesn’t mean it makes sense to the audience.” This is a phrase I ended up using often when I was creating Parody into Dreams (I’ll put it back up on this site eventually… maybe.) That particular Archie brand comic suffered from this problem often where I could not for the life of me figure out what was going on or what they were even trying to convey on some of the pages.

Since I emphasized showing not telling you also need to make sure your pictures are clear above all else. The technical term for comics is “sequential art” for a reason. In a truly successful comic the story and events would still be relatively clear or at least adequately guessed at with all of the text removed. You need to make clear the actions that are happening as well as establish the characters’ surroundings. If you just draw a bunch of closeups or shots of the same character or two mugging for the camera in every single panel with little to no backgrounds you’re going to quickly lose the reader.

And that’s it for my first lesson! Some feedback would be nice to see if people want more and what they want to have covered.

Related posts:

1. Comic Making Lesson 2 – Planning
2. Comic Updates & Stuff
3. Making Comics With Scott McCloud