By D. Lynn Smith
When I was writing for television, I would meet people who, when they found out what I did for a living, would then say, “I’ve been thinking about a script. I hear there’s a lot of money to be made.” It always amazed me that they thought it was just as simple as sitting down at a computer and setting fingers to keys. They had no idea how much work went into studying the form, the structure, the formatting … essential the craft of writing teleplays.
The same is true of putting together a comic book. Once again, I’ve had people tell me they were thinking about doing a comic book and ask me how I did mine. Once I start describing the process, their eyes glaze over and they rethink their decision. It’s not as simple as learning how to write a comic book script—not that that is at all simple as I have explained in earlier blog posts. Writing the script is simply the first step in a very long series of steps.
There are six different areas of art that need to be addressed: Penciller, Inker, Colorist, Letterist, Cover Artist and Graphic Designer. Many times creators (writers) of comics are also artists, so that makes things simpler. But if you are like me and don’t have a lick of talent when it comes to drawing, then you have to go out and find someone whose style matches the look you want for your comic.
Before you go out and look for an artist, you need to decide what kind of comic book you are going to do. Do you want it done in the superhero style? Do you want Manga? If you want Manga, what style of Manga? Do you want realistic or edgy? What look best suits your story?
I wanted an edgy, realistic urban look to my comic. I wanted my people to look more realistic than cartoonish, so I needed an artist who could draw that kind of art.
The first step is to find a penciller. As I pointed out in my previous posts, scripts have to be very specific in details, number of panels, etc. This is what the penciller will be using to render your story into visual form. The artist must have a good combination of illustrative skills and a strong, storytelling ability.
This is the stage where there is a lot of back and forth between the writer and the artist. It’s an extremely collaborative medium, much like working on a television show where you have actors, directors and all kinds of crew trying to interpret your vision while incorporating theirs as well.
This is what the artists do in comic books, and it all starts with the penciller. Pencillers are responsible for the layout of the scenes and the way each scene flows from panel to panel. They choose the arrangement of the panels on the page, the shape of the panels—basically they determine how the reader reads each page. They tell the story of the script through their art and placement of panels.
The week before last I provided you with a thumbnail, from our artist Amelia Woo. Here’s an actual penciled page, just before it went to the inker. (In our case, Amelia also did the inking, so it didn’t have to go anywhere.)
Here is the thumbnail of the same page for comparison:
Panel design really adds interest to a story. We ran into a problem with our English letterer, Nikki Foxrobot, because Amelia used an unconventional panel design and Nikki felt that it could hurt her reputation if she lettered the panels the way Amelia had arranged them. I disagreed; I loved Amelia’s design. Nikki is incredibly talented and I truly think this came down to American comic sensibilities vs. British comic sensibilities. I could be wrong …
Indy comics here in America are really experimenting with panel arrangements. I recently picked up a Vertigo Quarterly comic book that has 10 different stories in one book. They were the equivalent to flash fiction in the prose world. The second story, Who Is Uber, had the panels running all the way down the page, stacked on top of each other on one side of the page. You read these first, then returned to the top of the page and read down that side. As a reader, I had no problem with this because the artist arranged the panels in such a way that I automatically followed his unconventional set up.
I read another comic, and search as I may I can’t find it right now, that had panels arching across and down the page with one big panel behind them. Again, I had no problem following them at all and found it very, very interesting.
So I really like the unconventional panel set-up. And, since I see it in almost all the Indie comics I read, I don’t even think of it as unconventional.
So the penciller, working from the script, is responsible for the panel layout and the design of what is happening inside each panel. Then comes the inking. But that is next week’s entry!
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