The Section Comics

An experiment in comics

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  • Art tips: General

    1. Leave space for the word balloons. Speech is always at the top of the panel – they are balloons, and like balloons, they generally float upwards. It’s important to leave space for people to talk – so generally it’s best to place the characters’ heads mid-way or lower in the panel. The side effect of this is that you can spend less time on detail at the top of the panel. This will save time, and prevent from having awesome art covered up. 
    2. Photo reference can be extremely helpful – if this is helpful you can use the internet, or run around outside if it helps. The latter will help connect the project to the city you’re in.
    3. Ask your fellow participants to pose for you. This is a good way to get reference for specific, weird poses (and also potentially for the organizers to get photos they can use to promote the event which will haunt you forever… so, maybe make sure to ask the participants if they’re okay with that).
    4. Try to draw the story you’re given in as few panels as you can. Example: If you have a shot of a gun on a table, and in the next panel your character is holding a gun people will understand what happened, and so you wouldn’t need to show a panel of the character picking the gun up.
    5. Listen to the writers (they will be there so talk to them as much as possible – they do need to collaborate with other artists, as well, but without your product, there’s little they can do), but be yourself. They have the story in mind – they are the writers and the directors of this project. But you are the actor and cinematographer. You will decide how it comes out, and how it looks. Try to bring their vision to life as best you can. Make sure you understand them, and do what they need in a way that is true to yourself.

  • Art tips: Digitally duplicate panels

    The fewer panels on the page, the less work will be necessary.

    So if you want to include a lot of panels on a page of two people talking, consider digitally duplicating panels.

    This is done all the time in professional comics, sometimes with minor changes here and there. The story is what’s important, so if you can tell a better story by using identical panels here and there, do it.

  • Art tips: Thumbnails and layouts

    I recommend that you draw quick small sketch versions of your pages in advance. They are called thumbnail drawings (because they are roughly the size of a thumbnail. They do not need to be drawn on your thumbnail).

    The whole team (writers and artists) can work together on layouts with these thumbnail drawings. Writers are recommended to defer to the artists where possible, if something the artist wants to draw fits within the structure of the larger story.

    If you have two artists who are working independently on one scene, or on separate scenes with the same characters, it can really help them to lay out everything together in advance to avoid causing trouble for each other.

    Remember that the writers have to figure out as group where the scenes go and in what order. They are taking the place of an editor in this project, so the more they can see before there is a final project, the less rework they will need to do.

  • Lettering tips: General

    I recommend that lettering (and all final production work) will be done digitally, to allow for easy translation and editing.

    Because this sort of project is not working from a full script (due to the amount of time necessary to write a full script), the writer may need to change dialogue to cover something that comes later. It’s important to have that ability.

    Translations

    In addition, if you want to do the story in multiple languages (as we did with the first GNW), it’s better to be able to redraw and modify the balloons and text boxes. Why? Because lettering itself is an art, and there is also an art to translation work in comics. A translator working in comics would generally always prefer to be working off of the unlettered original pages, because then they can translate the intent of a sentence, rather than the words in it, and draw a balloon that fits that text well.

    Within comics, this isn’t always possible, and often they will get the pages with the word balloons already present. This means that the text has to be written to fit the specific size of the balloons. And because the text has to fill out the balloons more or less uniformly, the translator has to carefully work through the text to make it the same size as the existing balloons. This takes considerably more time that re-lettering and creating new balloons would. It also takes a considerably more specific experience than simple translation would. It’s more like trying to dub dialogue over an existing film and match the movement of the speakers mouth than it is like subtitling.

    Hand lettering

    If you want to hand letter, and you have a skilled hand letterer (or letterers) available, then the key to making that work is probably to create a rough guide for the text and placement during the event. This could be done by printing, and drawing text in pencil over the art, or things like that. The more stable the text is at the end of the day, the easier it is for the hand letterer to work. Editing may be more difficult, however, so it is likely that you would want the hand lettering to be done after the end of the event. So, make sure you have the text placements figured out, and a final script typed up by pencils down.

    If you are going to letter or hand letter, I recommend working with the writers and the artists to make sure you can fit what they need in the space available before you start lettering.

    Font size

    As with the page sizing, you will want most of your dialogue and narration text to be the same size (with the exceptions or yells and whispers, which should be larger or smaller to indicate how the person is speaking).

    Unfortunately, font size itself is never going to be a clear standard. Even if we consider the art and resolution to be a standard of say 300dpi at 11×17 inches, I can’t tell you a font of 9pt or 13 pt would be the best choice. The is because fonts themselves vary in size widely. You pretty much have to eyeball it.

    Often the best way to determine the font size to use may sound pretty weird. Scan an existing professionally made comic book page (with text), put it into your lettering software, and add text. Size the font to match the size of that page’s text. That’s the font size you should use for this font in your project.

  • Writer’s tips: General

    1. Read the Artist’s tips, especially if you are not an artist, yourself. You job will be to manage them and help them get the pages out that tell your story, so it’s important to understand what the artists are up against in this process, and the recommendations they are getting, so you have as clear a sense of that struggle as is possible.
    2. When telling the art teams what to draw, stick to what you want to happen in broad terms. You are the writer and director, but the artist is the actor and the cinematographer. You have to trust them to use the skill set they have. The less you detail you give, the more they will give you to work with in the end.
    3. Rule of thumb: For all text on each page, you have roughly a maximum word count of 210 words. That is the absolute maximum. Less is more. Each individual word balloon should be at most 20-25 words, each panel (in a 5-6 panel page) at most 35 words.
    4. Make your words count – less is more, but also in this project, your words can be used to cover unfinished art, or art that isn’t working. Write dialog to fit to the finished pages, but also with this sneaky corrective capability in mind.
    5. Try to finish each page in 1-2,5 hours. If your dialogue is finished for the finished pages, meet with the other writers to discuss where things will go next.
    6. Keep in close contact with the artists, and follow what they are doing, as well. At the same time, don’t just hover over their shoulders… that’s weird, and creepy.

  • Digital Team

    We totally dropped the ball on having a digital team in the first GNW. Arnoud from Doe Het Niet Zelf and I thought we’d be able to manage the digital production work in addition to organizing and arranging things. This was not the case. I spent a great deal of time walking around and working with artists to help them with comic technique, giving advice, pointing them to the books we’d provided. Arnoud was managing things the entire time, as well, and the amount of work needed for doing the technical portion of the production was much higher than we expected. This was especially true on the last day of the event when everything needed to be scanned, last minute digital work needed to be done, and etc.

    We ended up having to push lettering to post-production, and continually try to work through the page ordering throughout that process.

    So in reality, managing the digital tasks is a job that’s as important as any other, and you will need people to manage it.

    • You will need someone responsible for scanning hand drawn art
    • You will need people capable of doing digital retouching to hand drawn art
    • You will need people capable of digital lettering
    • You will need people capable of using digital publishing software (adobe indesign, affinity publisher, etc.)

    It’s ideally important to have these people involved throughout the process, because this is a lot of work and it’s not a simple matter of finishing this up after the event, because that will probably take some of the creative work out of the hands of the creators and that’s not the intention of this type of project.  

    Everyone is together during the weekend only. It’s important that the writers and artists can connect with the final product. So it’s good to have a clear picture of how everything is fitting together. This will also help writers see gaps that need to be filled. 

    This isn’t to say that everything with regards to production will be possible in the weekend. It’s impossible to know whether that can be done on such an aggressive timeline, but the more stable the product is when pencils go down at the end of the last day, the more the follow-on work which is done after the event becomes practical, rather than creative.

    What if we can’t do the production work during the event

    My recommendation is that you do the following:

    • Work on the page order through out the event, so that it is solid – try and number the pages in a way that will make it clear where they go.
    • Draw clear lettering guides (i.e. sketches of where the word balloons should go on copies or digital versions of the pages).
    • Type up all text clearly

    In the end, what you want is a final product that might not be perfect or finished, but is something you can actually read (with some difficulty), so that it takes away any need for the production staff to do anything other than make your product shine.

  • Art tips: software

    In the comic industry at the moment there are two softwares that dominate: Clip Studio Paint, and Procreate. There are other options, of course, and if you’re comfortable with one, you should probably stick to that, but these two have really become the standard.

    Clip Studio Paint or Manga Studio (iOS, Android, Mac, PC) has been around for quite a long time. It’s Japanese and was originally designed for Manga creation. It’s one of the best softwares I’ve found for creating pencil or ink drawings on both. It is very powerful. While it goes on a subscription model and is a bit pricier than Procreate, it has a free trial, which means that if you get it a few weeks before a 48 graphic novel project, you probably have time to get used to it and use it there before you pay.

    Procreate (iPad) One of the earliest art tools designed for iPad, Procreate is fantastic to work with, it’s simple, and it has a great community for finding tools that might help you. It’s priced very reasonably at around 11€ and is used by professionals to create comic books.

    These are some great tools, and I recommend trying them out if you want to go digital with your art.

    A note on resolution of final art

    There is one thing to keep in mind – Procreate will restrict what you can create based on the power of your iPad. If you have an iPad Pro, you can create much larger works, and export at higher resolutions. If you’re on a standard iPad or iPad mini or possibly even an older iPad Pro, you will be restricted to lower resolutions. Clip Studio, on the other hand, can handle larger resolutions even on lower powered machines – though you may find that it crashes when working with very sizeable art.

  • The Importance of Diversity

    Diversity within your group of creators is important, for many reasons. First, truthfully, as a white, cis-gendered, straight man, born in the US, I’m pretty certain (owing to 75 years of cultural dominance in the TV and film industries) that anyone reading this paragraph could credibly tell my story if they wanted to up to a point. I am the central character of modern entertainment. Anyone from a different background telling my story is likely to add new depth and interesting angles to it that I might miss, myself. 

    Diversity is important because perspective matters and people need and want to see themselves represented in fiction, but in addition to that, new stories are interesting stories. If you hear the same joke more than once, it’s no longer funny. The same horror story and it’s no longer scary. 

    Yet we keep telling the same stories again and again, with the same sort of hero. Joseph Conrad has a lot to answer for with regards to this idea of the hero’s journey, but he’s dead, and it’s time to focus on other possibilities. 

    So it’s important to get people who do not have similar lives involved together in this sort of project. Because in a limited time such as this, the only way to ensure the story doesn’t fall into cliche is to ensure that as many people with different experiences and perspectives as possible are involved.

    The Dangers of Symbolism

    Additionally, there is no time in a project like this to plan symbolism. Anything symbolic that happens is going to be accidental, and potentially will be offensive and not at all what anyone in the project would want or intend. 

    More people, with more perspectives, give an opportunity to catch that. This is not to say it is their job – everyone is there to create comics. But more eyes on potential issues is always going to be a good thing. 

  • Stretching the concept

    The whole idea of a 48 hour graphic novel was just a crazy idea I had. I do not own the patent on crazy ideas. 

    What I want to see in the future is people stretching this idea and trying new things with it. I hope to one day see someone make a full color project in 48 hours. However, knowing what is involved there in getting something colored, and printing, etc. I don’t know that I would want to be involved with the process, myself. Just happy to see the end result. 

    I also believe that 8 creators could manage a book – 4 writer artists, 4 dedicated artists with experience in digital publishing software. I’d really like to give this a try – creating a small digital, punk version of this project, where everyone maybe meets up at a house and brings their own food or joins online. 

    And maybe someone else out there has another brilliant idea – the recommendations in this blog are more about what seems to be necessary, and what worked and didn’t in the events that have already happened. Don’t be afraid to experiment, and if you’re going to fail, fail big!

    Remember that the final product isn’t as important as the experience. It takes 2 days out of your life – that’s like 0.007% of your life. If you don’t get what you want out of the first try, you can try it again with another 48 hours. 

  • Lettering tips: Affinity Publisher

    Most people putting together print works these days will use Adobe Indesign, and the rest of the Adobe creative suite – which costs 60-90€ per month. 

    I recently started working with Affinity Publisher, and while your mileage may vary, I have to say it’s a better choice. Purchasing Affinity Publisher, Designer, and Photo together only runs 165€ total (55€ each), and on the iPad the apps can do everything they can do on the computer, and only run 22€ each (Note: Affinity Publisher is still not yet available for iPad as of this moment).

    But beyond the price, and quality of the products (which I’d say is quite high), the reason this might be the best choice for a 48 hour graphic novel is that if you have all 3 tools, there’s a feature they have called “Studio Link” which allows you to do everything together within Affinity Publisher. Photo retouching, and vector graphics (which is heavily used in digital lettering), and put everything together into a print file. 

    It speeds up my process dramatically, and I love it. Plus, if it does work for you, it costs the same as about 3 months of Adobe (or about 1 month once Publisher is released for iPad).  And everything can be sent to InDesign, if necessary.