Greetings Traveller….
The most common question that I get from readers after “why?” is “how did do you make this?” It’s a good question and one that is easily answered so long as I am correct in assuming that it pertains to my comic work. I wish I could say that my work arrives fully-formed out of the orifice of some horrible growth that I’ve developed but, unfortunately, the process is much more time-consuming.
My imagination has always been far out of reach of my actual talents but no matter how poor my technical abilities were I’ve never been able to stop myself from obsessively thinking about characters and scenes that were exciting to me due to how gory or funny or odd they were. So, a good number of years ago, I started making a habit of writing down any ideas I had. They could be anything; dreams, idle thoughts, or full sequences that I’d imagine while listening to music. I’d go over these notes later and see which of them struck me as interesting enough to be worth going through the effort of bringing them to life.
The next step is the script. This is the part that I personally consider actual ‘writing’. Here’s an example of what an Apeiron script looks like:
APEIRON
Book One: Celestial Engine
Chapter 6: “King”
PAGE 1, PANEL ONE
A red desert expands around scattered ruins. A winged creature is almost perfectly camouflaged against the hewn metal.
1 NARRATOR: 22010 H.E.
Page 1, Panel Two
The creature stirs, opening its eyes.
Page 1, Panel Three
The creature cocks its head to the side as it observes something on the ground below.
2 NARRATOR: FIVE YEARS AFTER IZUDIN SAMYATA LEFT DARSHANA AND HER MOTHER.
Page 1, Panel Four
The creature lifts off.
3 NARRATOR: FIVE YEARS BEFORE MAYA’S SACRIFICE TO RETURN DARSHANA TO THE WORLD OF THE LIVING.
Page 1, Panel Five
A horse-like cyclops grumbles as he pulls along a floating coffin through the red wastes as the winged scavenger circles overhead.
4 NARRATOR: A HARROWING PASSAGE THROUGH HAUNTED LANDS HAD ALREADY BEGUN.
And so on. This gives you an idea of the general format that I use for all of my comic scripts. Once I’m happy with the overall script for a chapter (dialogue I sometimes continue to adjust even while coloring and placing the final touches on pages) I then move on to making an extremely rough draft of each of the pages on cheap printing paper. This is wasteful but gives me a good idea of where the text will appear on the finished page with the art before I begin thumb-nailing.
Thumb-nailing is making a small sketch of the pages for a comic chapter with numbers that match the numbers on the lines of text in the script. My thumbnails look like this:
I then scan the thumbnails and, using Clip Studio Paint, I create the format for each page that includes text, panel lines, and space for art sized for an 11×17 inch page of Bristol paper. I’ve been using the Strathmore 300 series Bristol Paper since I began Apeiron. This is an example of how the pages look when I’m set to print them:
Black ink tends to smudge under my sweaty hands when I pencil and ink so most of the panel lines I print out in light blue (or green) so that the smudges don’t show up as much when I scan the finished pages back into the computer. In my most recent pages I’ve even been making the text light blue or green. I really hate how the black printer ink smudges when I work.
Next time: Drawing.