This Changed the Way I Write (For Comics)

Issue #18

A Change in Priorities

Okay, I was going to do a newsletter on drawing water to fit with the earth and fire newsletters I’ve already done–and I will–but first, I had to get this out of me.

I mentioned previously that I’m reducing the length and workload associated with my newsletters so that I can have more time to work on the remake of my comic The Chosen One’s Mentor.

For the last few months, I’ve felt like the only way I’ve been able to make progress is if I turn what I’m doing into a newsletter. That meant for every newsletter that wasn’t tied to TCOM I wasn’t making much, if any, progress. I wanted to correct that.

I still have a goal in mind of having the first chapter of the remake ready to launch on January 1st. This is meaningful to me, because, canonically, the first chapter begins on New Year’s Day in their universe. It feels fitting to try to make the release date and the in-universe date line up.

However, I have a lot of work to do before I can hit that goal. A lot of what I’ve been doing in these newsletters has been indirectly in service to the comic. For example, the first chapter features massive fire and water features, so it’s in my best interest to nail these styles down before I make the comic.

But now that I’ve lessened how much I expect of myself weekly with my learning content, it’s allowed me some time to breathe and put genuine effort toward getting the remake ready to go.

And in doing so, something amazing happened. Something that made me so excited for the remake and my future as a comic artist that I couldn’t help but shove my studies aside so I could sit down and tell you all about it.

It has to do with my workflow. In previous newsletters, I talked at length about how comics are made and how one might go about writing a script and picking their panels for a comic. But, outside of my studies, I wasn’t giving myself much time to practice what I was preaching.

So this week, I decided to sit down and give my full attention to scripting and storyboarding the first chapter of the remake. I’m the writer and artist for the series, so I had the benefit of getting to sit down and take my time getting as detailed as I wanted with this section. Your mileage as a comic writer will vary depending on your workflow and whether you’re working on a team, but stick around anyway, because perhaps you’ll learn something that will change the way you approach your work.

Learning to Let Go

Back when I worked on the original run of TCOM, my workflow looked a little something like this: come up with an idea, usually either a plot or a punchline I wanted to get to, write out a very brief summary of events if the story was long or has specific elements I wanted to remember, sit down at my desk with my comic scripts file open, and start writing a script in order from start to finish.

During my writing process, I allowed the story to unfold organically in my head. Conversations and actions flowed into each other in what I thought were logical ways and I was generally very concerned with making sure my dialogue was on point rather than worrying too much about my visual choices.

This resulted in a lot of scripts that were…wordy to say the least. At this point, I hadn’t even considered how the panels would all fit together on the pages. I trusted that artist me would figure it out later.

This generally resulted in edits to the script happening after I started storyboarding and discovered some chunk of dialogue was too much for one panel, or conversations dragged on too long without getting to the point, or I would have to squash or stretch the script or panels to fit within my pages neatly.

Now that I’ve learned more about intentional panel choices and placement, it quickly became clear to me that this was not an optimal way to work. Just writing a script with no consideration for the panels was resulting in me making comic pages where very little happens visually besides simply switching from looking at character A to character B, or where there isn’t enough action or intrigue happening within six to twelve panels to create opportunities to entice the reader to flip the page.

This made my comics boring. I got so bogged down by my desire to write witty banter or logical conversation flows that I would often go long stretches of time with very little actually happening on the page. This is fine in, say, a book, where you can fly through dialogue scenes and not worry too much about a lack of visual action, because all the visuals are courtesy of the reader’s brain. That’s not the case in comics, though.

So what changed in me?

I stopped thinking like a book writer and started thinking like a comic writer. That’s what changed. I stopped just thinking about the story and dialogue and started thinking about the panels that accompany these elements.

I began by writing a semi-detailed summary of the overall plot and important beats of a chapter. The amount of detail throughout ranged depending on how much I’d thought a scene out by that point, but I intentionally kept a lot of parts vague so that I couldn’t lock myself into long scenes.

Most notes on any conversations that took place centered around the main topics of the conversation and then I had to figure out how to get from point A to point B once I’d decided how many panels or pages I had available for said conversation.

And, most importantly, I was no longer working in order from summary to script to storyboard. After I wrote the summary, I started writing the script and storyboarding at the same time.

It didn’t take long for me to realize I was really on to something here. That’s when I started to get excited.

Trusting the Process

I’ll admit, it was difficult at first. I had already planned out the first part of chapter one so meticulously that it didn’t change much at all. But the first part is also essentially a rehashing of the original TCOM with some new story beats thrown in.

It’s what comes after that initial introduction where things got wild and creative.

What came after was 22 pages of excitement, character development, and plot setup that wasn’t even in my original summary, but that found its way in naturally to enhance my original idea.

Here’s how it worked:

I had the summary document open on one screen. I was using it as a reference as I worked to keep myself generally within my original idea or to remind myself where I was going. On another screen I had my storyboard in my art program and on another I had the document that would become the script for chapter one open. (You don’t need three screens to do this, but I have three and I like to keep things separated and visible at all times.)

I formatted my storyboard file so that pages that would be next to each other in a physical book were shown as such. This gave me a clear idea of what each page would look like next to its partner page and made it obvious which pages would be the ones before a page flip.

Then my work process went something like this: read a chunk of the story summary, usually just enough to get an idea of what should happen on a single page and what content would follow. Sometimes I tried to think about two pages at once, especially if those two pages fit together to tell an entire story beat, but a lot of times I kept my focus to one page at a time.

Depending on if I was trying to panel for one page or two, I would spend some time thinking about what the most important panels on the pages would be and what would be my page-turning panel.

For example, if I was working on a page with a big reveal from the page-turn previously, I might focus on making that first panel the star of the spread. Or if there was a big story moment like a character saying something important or a sudden shift in the direction of the scene, I'd think about where to place those elements so that they clearly read as important moments or moments that could be placed right before the page turn.

I’d come up with a flow of events, write some dialogue and panel descriptions, and estimate how big each panel would need to be to accommodate text bubbles and actions. Then I’d build out the panels with some rough sketches. Seeing the panels like this gave me a better sense for whether the proportions of the panels and the flow of the arrangement made sense.

Sometimes I’d make a page and something would just feel off. I generally found after I stepped away for a while that the problem was usually because of the panelling. I either needed to adjust the size or shape of certain panels or I needed to rethink the flow of the page entirely and start over.

I wish I’d hung on to the original sketches to show you all, but this two-page section roadblocked me for days before I figured out I needed to flip the visual orientation of the bottom left page, add some panel breaking to make it more dynamic, and add two extra panels and change the sequence of events to finally feel happy with the right page.

And that’s where the biggest revelations came from: moments where I completely scrapped what my summary said and did something else.

Now that my brain was focused on telling story beats in one to two page increments, it quickly became obvious to me when a scene was dragging or when it needed more time to develop.

As I was reconsidering how to present potentially stagnant situations like two characters talking back and forth as something more interesting, I started getting into background details. I started designing panels where two characters are talking, but we’re watching something or someone else while the conversation happens. This made it so the dialogue was telling one story while the visuals were setting up another, which allowed moments to flow seamlessly into each other or add extra characterization.

For example, I have a scene here where originally I’d simply written that Rennen and Nolan had a conversation about the state of things inside the wrecked nursery. It was literally just the two of them talking back and forth. Nothing interesting to see. So I considered what else could be going on at that moment.

There was a nurse in the room changing Levi while they talked. I panned over to her for her quiet reactions to some of the comments Rennen was making about the situation, and then I showed how Nolan notices the nurse and Levi and decides to come over to see his son while Rennen continues to talk.

Rennen is so engrossed in his notes and relaying his thoughts to Nolan that he doesn’t notice Nolan approaching Levi. But when he does, he drops what he’s saying to yell at Nolan to get away from there and scolds him for getting too close to a magical bomb of a baby.

My original summary didn’t have Nolan approaching Levi or Rennen snapping at him for this, but as the moment unfolded it all fit perfectly and took the rest of the scene in a direction that would change how a later scene plays out, too. Plus, it was a nice extra character moment. We get to see Nolan’s desire to be a father and Rennen’s protectiveness of Nolan on display.

This is how a lot of the chapter ended up playing out. I followed the summary when it made the most sense, but I was now allowing myself to change the story on the fly as natural moments for characterization presented themselves. By the time I was finished with this chapter, I had several extra character moments that I hadn’t planned and they all contributed to fleshing out the characters in really interesting ways.

These moments presented themselves because I was thinking about the visuals alongside the story, which pushed me to come up with more creative visuals to keep things interesting. It’s something I simply wasn’t doing in my original run, and now that I’ve done it this way I can’t imagine going back.

Words truly cannot express how excited I am to get to show you all the finished product. I loved my characters in the original TCOM, but in one chapter they’ve all already shown sides of themselves I was still building toward or hadn’t even considered in the original. Rennen gets to show so many facets of his personality across the first chapter and even side characters like the nurse get a moment to be in the spotlight.

I’m so happy with the way it’s turning out. The little changes I made in the first chapter have already had ripple effects on the upcoming ones. It’s also been a bit of a pressure release to only have to worry about getting a summary done before I start storyboarding. Storyboarding itself takes a really long time now since I’m planning the panels and dialogue as I make it, but it’s creating a more organic and streamlined version of the story. And that’s so awesome.

Anyway, that’s already over four pages of ranting covered. I hope this sneak peek at TCOM has made you as excited to read it as me, or I hope that hearing a little about my creative process has helped you in thinking about your own.

Painting of the Week

And with that, let’s wrap up with the painting of the week.

This week I wanted to challenge myself. I wanted to play with texture. I wanted to test my ability to draw solid lines. And I wanted to incorporate some of what I’d learned about glazing and color.

I got this image in my head of a rack of leather belts. That would challenge me to make leather and metal textures, force me to use straight and hard lines to render the belts and buckles, and it would keep my color palette limited, which would make me use glazing and color mixing to shade my work convincingly.

My only problem was I could never quite seem to find the right reference images for what was in my head, and I didn’t want to work without one. So I settled for using whatever reference images I did like as the base for this piece.

I started by covering the canvas in a leathery texture. It took a lot of time to build up, and it lacks refinement, but I think for a first attempt it was pretty good. I think the only thing holding me back here is that I lack the tools that would allow me to make a leather texture easily.

Specifically, I might look into getting sponges. Artists use sponges to help create texture in their pieces by using them to add or take away paint in organic ways. I used a paper towel to help me out here, but it could only do so much.

I painted a couple of belts across the canvas and felt alright about them. By the time I finished them, I was feeling pretty tired and ready to call it quits. But that big, open gap was definitely bothering me.

After stepping away a while, I figured out what I wanted to do. Just like last week, I flipped the canvas. Once I did this, I knew what I wanted: one last belt and buckle to make it look like this was a bound, leather book.

I couldn’t quite find a buckle that made me happy, so I adlibbed this one using what I’d learned so far. I also took some time to add extra details to the belts I’d already made. I was definitely feeling more confident in my ability to keep my hand steady, but my lines are still pretty shaky.

But here’s why I didn’t want to work without a reference.

After walking away from this piece for a bit, I came back and really looked at it.

It quickly occurred to me that based on what I’d observed from making the other belts that my adlibbed belt had an obvious design flaw.

That is not where a buckle would logically go on a belt. It can’t open like this. I had a belt buckle that was literally useless.

What I needed to do was put the tongue of the belt on the left and flip the prongs to the other side of the buckle. Then it would function like an actual belt that would realistically be able to hold something closed.

Thankfully I realized this before my paints had dried, so I was able to use the colors I’d mixed for the last belt to correct my mistakes.

All things considered, I think I covered them up pretty seamlessly. You wouldn’t know I goofed up if I didn’t tell you.

This is why references are so important for artists. You might think you understand the mechanics of how something looks or functions, but when you try to work off just the image in your head, you may be surprised to find how little you truly understand something.

Granted, I feel like I now understand belts better than I ever did, but I’m still going to pull up references any time I want to draw a belt with any amount of detail.

So take it from me: never hesitate to fact check yourself. Otherwise you might put something out into the world that is embarrassingly incorrect.

But that’s all for this week, gang. Tune in next week for water drawings. For real this time. Thanks for reading.