Comic-ing (WFMAD Day 27)

I have extreme respect for all comic makers. (Also don't mock my made up word.)

Have you ever tried making a comic before? Have you ever gotten just a little itty bit of insight into how it's done?

It's a lot of work, holy crap.

For those of you who don't already know, I have been working on a comic, myself, for about...four years now? (I'm really slow....like ridiculously slow. I'm still on the first chapter.) You can check it out here or here, although I'll warn you now that it's a Legend of Zelda fancomic (because as mentioned prior, I am extremely geeky). I'm really bad at updating it (like really really bad), but I have put a lot of work into it; so trust me when I say that comics are very time consuming.

Comics, I find, take an incredible amount of planning before you even START them. Changing something in a comic is a lot harder than changing something in a written piece, like a novel (especially when you're uploading the pages online one at a time, like me), so I find that it's better to edit the outlines, the scripts, and the thumbnails until you're absolutely positive that you are satisfied with the story.

Here's a checklist of the prep I go through before starting a comic:

• General outline (Lists chapters, and the major events in each.)
• Character biographies (Written, with information like likes, dislikes, background, etc.)
• Character references (Drawn, with different costumes they will appear in and different angles to be drawn in, to ensure that the character is consistent throughout.)
• More specific outline (This one is a more wikipedia-esque outline, that I usually type on my phone when I have little bits and pieces of spare time. It's a lot more detailed and has pretty much everything that's set to happen in that chapter.)
• Script (All the dialogue, a written description of each panel...basically like a movie or tv show script. I also use this script to separate the chapter into pages, so I have an idea of how long, exactly, the chapter will be.)
• Page thumbnails (Tiny little versions of the actual pages. The drawings are extremely rough, and all of the dialogue is on them. This is basically to get an idea of what the pages will look like, visually, before starting the good copies of them. The dialogue is so that I have less text to sort through when I'm plugging the text into the pages on the computer.)

And that's just the prep, you guys. PREP! Then I have to sketch the pages, ink the pages, scan the pages, tone the pages in Photoshop...

I get tired just thinking about it. No wonder I suck at updating it.

Meanwhile, there are professional comic makers, who are capable of producing an entire CHAPTER in a week. A chapter! I can't even handle a freaking PAGE a week...

Anyways. My point is that comic writers and artists are fantastic and incredible, to have such patience and perseverance to produce such beautiful stories. I have a deep amount of respect for all of them.

Until later,

- Justyne