A few months ago, I posted a series of pictures on Instagram depicting how I worked on Immortal issue 3. I figured I should make an actual blog post here so it’s easier to refer back later. I also hope that this may be of help (or at the very minimum, be of interest) to other fellow comic creators.
I also want to note that this is just my process. It’s something that worked well for me so far, but other people may have a better way of doing things as well. And this might change in the future as I figure out better way of doing things myself.
Anyway…
Story and Storyboarding
- Story
The first step, of course, is to have a story ready to go. The process of writing the story and script is an entirely different field of study all by itself – which I would be very interested to discuss in the future too – but in the meantime, let’s assume we already have a story ready to go.
I knocked the outlines for Immortal out over a seriously productive afternoon session at a coffee shop, and then the whole script (in prose form) over an equally productive weekend.
The next step is storyboarding/ layouts/ thumbnails / “name” or however you want to call it.
2. Layouts
Immortal is a 36 page per issue book, and I generally do not start any pencils until all 36 pages of rough layouts are done. I also do this step twice – once for the entire series, right after I finish writing the story, and once again before I start to work on each individual issue. There’s a period of time in my life when i regularly work overtime in the office and I did most of these thumbnails while I was having dinner at Burger King. ^^
I’m not very creative with panel layouts so I find this step very difficult – its takes a very long time to come up with 36 pages of relatively uninspired layouts, but at least it’s quite fun. The problem is this step takes so long I’m usually very eager to jump into pencils by the time this is done.
There are a couple rules-of-thumb that I use for layouts. Assuming this is a left-to-right Western styled comic book:
- The odd number pages are on the right, even number pages on the left. So odd number pages should have cliff-hangers/ page-turners, and cool reveals / surprises should be on even number pages.
- Always have bigger panels/ space allocated to:
- change of scene/ establishing shot of new locations
- introduction of new/ major characters
3. Additional notes:
The thumbnail stage should be one of the last steps in pre-prod, all the “brain work” ought to be done at this point.
Case in point, when I go over my notes on issue 2 – I see a blank spot in the thumbnails – it’s a “I’ll figure it out when I actually get there” sort of deal. Spoilers: I did figure it out when I got there, but it took MONTHS.
I know I needed a city scene, but I had no idea what the city would look like, what the people are wearing, etc. I am not familiar with drawing cityscapes, nor have I done enough world-building or research to design consistent clothes for people to wear. I had to smoke all of these on the fly WHILE actually drawing the thing.
This page became issue 2 page 32, the page that represents to me, all the challenges of making issue 2, and that entire sequence is the main reason why issue 2 took so damn long.
All because I didn’t do the planning properly.
Lesson: do your “pre-prod” before the actual production/ drawing!
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