The Making of Our Comic "Justine" pt. 2

(Quick sidebar: I posted a list of some good time Halloween comics reading of at that other blog I keep.)

To continue from the last post, here are some more sketches from the making of Justine starting with the character sketches for Honore. A minor character (his name is actually never said in the comic), this is who Jose started with when he began his character designs.



A lot of good ideas to start with, but the trench coat and sword together were a bit too Wesley-Snipes-as-Blade-ish so we decided to go with a leather motorcycle jacket instead:



Tis good to test out different facial expressions.

Jose's sketches for what our bad guy might look like were all so fabulous I had a hard time deciding which I liked best. Ultimately, we went with G. Jose thought he could do some cool stuff on the page with the longer hair.


But of course we have to have some wolfing out sketches.


You don't see much of the weapons in the story, but in case we did need to show them more, Jose would have been ready. These are some cool looking weapons and I wish I'd written in an opportunity for them to be shown off more. (But alas, I am a slave to the story and can't always have my way.)

Next time, I'll post some of the thumbnails and penciled pages.

The Making of Our Comic Justine pt. 1

So I guess we took September off. Yep, that’s what it look likes. Sometimes one needs a hiatus and sometimes one (Jose) hits the busiest part of their busy season of being all artisty and stuff and needs to make some decisions when it comes to time management. And sometimes one (me) needs to stop writing/looking at/thinking about the story they’re working on so that they can return to it with fresh eyes and ideas.

So no updates on the current project, but Jose and I thought it would be cool to do a few posts on the making of our completed project Justine. Actually, tomorrow (or today, or yesterday or whenever the 12th is in relation to when you read this) is the one year mark exactly from when we first posted our minicomic, so it’s timely too. (Have you not read the minicomic? Click here)

Justine for me started way back in high school with a short story about a teenaged girl who is bitten by a werewolf. That story has evolved almost beyond recognition since that handwritten story. Justine has been through a lot since being bitten, and she went through quite a bit of changes as Jose and I figured out how collaborating on a comic works. When we first talked about making a comic together, we'd planned on doing a longer comic story, but somewhere along the line decided something short and uncomplicated would be the best thing for out first venture.

Enough reading! Here are a bunch of sketches from early to final that illustrate our back and forth of trying to pin down the right look for Justine. And in case you’re wondering, the character sketches and all the revisions are from July and August of 2009.

This was Jose's first pass. A good start, but I asked to see more sketches. I also wanted to go for a "natural" hair style. As a woman who travels the globe chasing after werewolves and fighting them to the death, I figured getting her hair straightened wouldn't be a priority (or practicality) for her.

From this page, we went with the third one of the second row.

In the script I described her as wearing a white jacket and read skirt. I think the next few sketches are self-explanatory.

Where to stash the weapons, a practical matter when it comes to wardrobe (I know this from personal experience) and I really liked the choices Jose made here. We lost the ankle and thigh knife holder thingies in the final design and I was sad to see them go.

After sitting on the choices we made earlier for a while, I thought it still wasn't quite right. So pulled out out a sketchbook and gave it a go.

Look at that swagger in the first sketch. Though Justine is a grown woman/werewolf, she looks very young and I wanted her clothing to reflect a more youthful look, somewhere between 16 and 18 years old, which is how she reels unsuspecting werewolves in. Since I recalled flipping through their print catalogues with friends when I was a teenager, I turned to Delia's online fashion catalogue for inspiration.

And here Jose polishes the design and makes them look acceptable for human viewing. He added even more personality to her in the final product and so she looks a bit different in the actual comic.

Ta-da! Color!

So that's how we came to the Justine we see in the comic today. We also learned that, since I already have ideas of what the characters look like, I should give Jose my sketches from the beginning and save him the time and energy of trying to read my mind since he already has so much to draw.

Next time, we'll look at the other characters. After that, I'll post the thumbnails and other fun stuff.

Navigating the Land of Researchia

As I’ve mentioned before, a lot goes into the in-between steps of going from a tangle of notes to a nice, orderly script, and while I’ve touched on research in terms of character and costume design, equally important is researching settings. This isn’t true only for the part where you have to draw what your characters are standing in front of-slash-in-slash-around.

Working on chapters three and four, I was once again reminded how important knowing my scenery is to getting a scene written.

Parque Gulliver in Valencia, Spain.*

If I want my characters interacting with their environment, I can only write so much without having a good idea of what that environments looks like. Not a problem if the scene is set in modern-day America. I know about modern-day America. That’s totally where I live. The problem is that at no point is my story set in modern-day America. Or even yesteryear America.

Atlas Mountains, Morocco

Each chapter so far has required some whole new set of research, but chapters three and four have been especially challenging because the story takes us to a bunch different locations across the world. Whilst I’m enjoying learning about a lot of cool new stuff, the process is almost always either overwhelming because there’s too much information or frustrating because there’s just not enough.

A neighborhood in India's Cochin, Kerala

Specifically I need pictures, en lieu of actually being able to go out and visit these places (oh, how I wish I could jet off to other parts of the world on a whim). Even if it’s a really short scene that will only take up two pages of the entire project, I still need visual references when it comes time to block characters within any particular scene. ESPECIALLY action/fight sequences.

Bokor Hill Station in Phnom Bokor, Cambodia

Hunting down photos, trying to decide what will work best for the story, getting side-tracked by interesting but irrelevant slideshows…it’s time consuming to say the least. I can spend a whole afternoon “writing” and only have jotted for two lines of dialogue the whole time.

Sigh.

Next time I want to write a globetrotting supernatural tale set forty years in the past, someone stop me. Please.

Arial view of Parque Gulliver in Valencia, Spain.

* An important aspect of choosing a setting is to go for the more interesting locale. While it doesn’t need to be eccentric (unless that’s what the scene calls for) some places are just more interesting. When I originally wrote the last scene of chapter three, I’d set it in an office. But, is having an important decision made by a group of suited men sitting in a conference room really so original? I went in a different direction and thought to set it on a playground, and just in case playgrounds in Spain (where the scene takes place) are drastically different from playgrounds in America, I did a google search, and looky what I found! From conference room to a playground in the shape of a famous literary character. It does pays to go the extra mile, doesn't it?

Final Result

After all the artwork has been completed the next step in the process is to add in the panel borders, lettering and word balloons. All of which is done digitally with Illustrator and Photoshop. This last step doesn't take too long since I'm using the computer as a tool.
Once everything is finished I'm left with a finished product ready to be printed or viewed through a monitor as you're doing right now.

Word Balloons ‘n’ Panels ‘n’ Stuff

There is an important question writers must ask themselves. Possibly THE most important question a writer can ask herself: What can I get away with? That’s really what it comes down to, isn’t it? How far is the audience willing to stretch their suspension of disbelief? And if I need to push beyond that limit, what building blocks do I need to lay into my story to get my audience to go there with me?

But then writing for comics I find a whole new reason to ask myself “What can I get away with?”

I tend to want to cram as many words into a panel and as many panels on a page as humanly possible. (Think I was influenced by Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns, maybe?) I’ve read from various sources that comics creators should stick to no more than five or six panels per page. When it comes to speech bubbles, I’ve read Mark Waid say 20 words is the max, and I believe I’ve read that figure as 30 or 35 elsewhere (Don’t ask me where because I don’t remember...so you also don’t have to take my word for it). Usually, I keep those guidelines in mind and mange to restrain myself...

But there are exceptions to every rule.

For that reason, I am constantly running to my bookshelf and flipping open my graphic novels to count the number of words in especially wordy balloons or find examples of more than six panels on a page, trying to figure out what I can get away with. I find the above rules being broken all the time, but then I have to ask myself why did this writer or artist choose to break the rules here, and more importantly, do I have a good reason to do so?

I like to think I do, at least when it comes to putting so many panels on a page. It’s the grid, man. It’s all about THE GRID.

The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller is the graphic novel that got me all hot and bothered for comics. When I first started reading it, I found it confusing and chaotic, but I soon fell into the rhythm and beats of the story created by utilizing a 16-panel grid and it wasn’t just the story of The Dark Knight Returns that opened up to me, but the idea of comics as a unique and dynamic form of storytelling.

In Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen, a 9-panel grid is used. What amazes me about this is that they really put so much in each panel. It’s not just closes up or silhouettes or a fractions of larger images (as is so skillfully done in the 16-panel grid for Dark Knight.) Though they’re small, Gibbon fits full-on action sequences into those panels, and/or a lot of talking.

With the grid comes the ability to exaggerate time, play with repetition and beats, to set images in juxtaposition to each other in columns and tiers and diagonally across the page; and when you break form – putting one big panel in the place of two or three or covering the whole page – there is no mistaking that there’s something significant about that panel. It’s not that you can’t do that with less panels on a page or going at it free-form, but for me, the grid pulls it together in a very immediate way even if I only use it for a few pages out of an entire story.

I know that as a newbie it’s dangerous to look at seasoned professionals breaking the rules and think that makes it alright to go wild and crazy, but I promise that’s not my intention. I just want to do what’s best for my story.

And sometimes that even means only putting 5-panels on a page.

Original Painting

This is a preview/example of what the original pages look like before they get retouched digitally and all the panels boxes and lettering gets inserted. The size of these original sheets measure 15 by 22 inches which is larger than what is traditionally used (11 by 17 inches). I've come to realize that working larger gives me more freedom to create different brush textures and it saves your hand from cramping up trying to get all the small details when working on smaller panels. The idea for working large originally came from researching Nathan Fox work and realizing he works on 18 by 24 inch sheets for his comic work.
If you notice the panels on the left side of the page with the wolf are only inked in with black and aren't rendered like the other two panels. The reason behind this was to separate them from the other panels since they were going to overlap, which seems to have worked. They'll separate even more optically when the panel borders get inserted.
That's all for now, enjoy the preview!

Putting It All Together

As a late-comer to comics (I didn’t get into them until towards the end of college), I make it a point to educate myself about as many of the different aspects of comics, especially – but not limited to – the making of. As they said on School House Rock, it’s great to learn, 'cause knowledge is power!

That song also says something about the mind growing flowers and it’s very weird and it’s best if you don’t stop to thinking about too long. Anyway…

I thought I’d share with you some of the comics how-to videos and articles (and stuff) I’ve found in recent weeks. Most of these are from some of people I’ve read in the past couple of months, but couple are things I come across in random articles and such.

The power is yours!

Writing:

Mark Waid: Writing 101 (blog post series) and 15 Minutes with Waid (podcast series, a bit tangential.)

Scottie Young: The Making of my Graphic Novel pt. 1 (video journal)

Penciling:

Kazu Kibuishi: Step-By-Step Process pt. 1

Inking:

Kazu Kibuishi: Step-By-Step Process pt. 2

Doug TenNapel: Making Comics with Doug TenNapel (video)

Coloring:

Alan Beadle: Flattening

Kazu Kibuishi: Step-By-Step Process pt. 3

Lettering:

Blambot: Hand Lettering Comics and Comic Book Grammar & Tradition

Scott McCloud: Lettering Comics in Illustrator (and part two) (video)

And covering many aspects:

Dave Kellett: How the Comic Strip “Sheldon” is Created (video)

Doug TenNapel: Making Digital Comics with Doug TenNapel (video)

Scott Young: To find more of his The Making of My Graphic Novel video journals, you kind of have to pick through his Youtube Channel or blog (start in July 2010) for the entries. Also, check out the posts “The Project Chronicles” as it seems the series started out as regular ol’ blog posts.

The digital age, eh? Information at your finger tips