Latest shortest comic is done

Ah! This is the longest time I ever spent on a single comic page. Anyway I finally thought of the title for it so go read the one-page comic.

Fast car, dead-beat driver and air time one page comic

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A one-page comic I’m working on right now and I might get it done over the weekend. I didn’t notice it at first but when I asked myself what is the premise of this short tale, it turned out to be almost a mini version of the Vanishing Point movie sans the illegal stuff and funky DJ (all the good parts).

I've yet to come up with a cool title for it, maybe you guys can suggest one. Just think of a fast car, dead-beat driver dude and big-air time. Go Kowalski manga style!

How I'm learning to make comics: part 3

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Constructing the comic
One can plan till the cows come home and yet have nothing to show if it isn’t executed. So with the storyboard and pages of dialogue in hand, I begin the labor-intensive process of putting it all together and finally have an actual comic to show my friends. Wait, I don’t have any. Oops, now you know the real reason I make comics…

Paper type and page size
I use standard A4 paper (a format that’s only a little longer than Letter in the U.S.A) for my comics. The only thing that I am particular about is the whiteness of the paper; the whiter it is the better it’ll be for scanning the artwork on it which I will touch on later.

I prepare my pages for penciling by drawing the border for the comic’s ‘live’ image area, the area that contains all the panels on a page. Most professional comic artists create their pages at double the size of the actual printed pages so that when it is reduced to that size, the images look crisper and sharper. However due to the limited size of A4 paper I make mine at only 1.7 times with dimensions of 7.7 inches wide and 11.4 inches high. It’s 170% of the page size of volume (Tankoban) manga books. So why do I use A4 paper and not bigger and better quality formats like Bristol boards you ask? Because it’s cheap.

Penciling
I pencil exactly like I sketch, all hairy and messy, so it’s no surprise that the eraser is my best friend. The pencil types I use are 2H wooden pencils since they are light enough to not leave too much lead traces after erasing. I don’t like using mechanical ones for no apparent reason. As for erasers I prefer the soft rectangular kind and any make will do.

Using the storyboard as a rough blueprint, I first outline the borders of all the panels for the page I’m currently working on before I begin penciling in the appropriate scenes. References are once again a big help in this department because I’m still pretty bad at drawing anything. Thanks to the Web, I search for images as reference photos of buildings and objects for the backgrounds. When I have difficulty in drawing human-forms, let’s say a pose of a character, I’ll sketch out different versions of the pose on a rough piece of paper until I get to one that I am happy enough to use. Obviously the whole penciling process is repeated for every page until they are all done.

Inking
Having completed the penciling of every page of the comic, it’s time to ink them. Even though inking is a fairly easy process of tracing over the pencil lines I still make mistakes like drawing the lines too thick or smudging the ink due to my being left-handed. I don’t use whiteout or white paint to correct those mistakes, I’ll leave them as they are and fix them later on the computer.

I use technical pens for inking, with tip sizes of 0.1cm to 0.2cm. The ones I’m using right now are called Unipin with pigment ink by Mitsubishi Pencil Co. which I can find in most stationery stores. I’ll probably get me some Sakura Pigma Micron pens in the near future to try since I’ve heard so much about them.

Once the inking for a page is done, the pencil lines are removed with my trusty eraser while taking a whole lot of care to not tear holes into the paper or start a fire by my overzealous rubbing.

Read the next part:
How I'm learning to make comics: part 4

Read the previous parts:
How I'm learning to make comics: part 1
How I'm learning to make comics: part 2

A big mess of mecha designs

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Sketches of mecha designs I made some time ago for a comic that never saw the daylight. Do any of them look familiar to you?

How I'm learning to make comics: part 2

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Visualizing the story
Based on the story concept from earlier I then begin to visualize the key scenes for the story and the designs of the characters. Again this is done mentally in my mind. It’s similar to playing out the story in my head as a mini-movie to help me visualize the settings and backgrounds for each scene and set up what the characters as actors in the movie do and say. Unfortunately it’s not in Technicolor since I’m only able to think in monochrome.

Of course those mental pictures are still fairly vague and lack detail, but now I have the key scenes and the general look and feel of the story. One thing I found that helps me improve on story visualization is to daydream a lot. I mean a lot. So the next time someone tells you to stop daydreaming, rebuke him or her by stating you’re exercising your creative imagination and carry on idling your time away.

Storyboard
Now it’s time to lay down my thoughts onto paper by drawing a storyboard. To me, storyboarding is the most important step to making my comics because it determines how well the story will be told.

Using the images I have in my mind from the earlier visualization process, I proceed to break down each key scene into panels, making sure that the reader is able to understand what is going on from one panel to the next. The layout, style and sizes for each panel can be decided on to control story flow and atmosphere; as for example using decreasing sizes of related panels to depict a character’s anxiety. Next comes the working out of what to draw in each panel, the core of the comic.

Should I draw the character from the side or from behind? Is it better to draw a close-up of the characters or a panoramic view of the surroundings? With so many possibilities to illustrate a scene in a panel, and having to keep in mind to maintain the continuance of the scene from the last panel, it’s almost a constant battle to arrive at a decision. When I’m finally done I’ll have to repeat the whole decision process again for the following panel. So it’s no surprise that I find storyboarding a time consuming struggle, but it’s unavoidable since it’s such a crucial step to creating comics.

I structure my storyboard by grouping sets of sketches of panels to each of the comic’s pages. By doing this I know how many panels a page has and the total number of pages the comic will require. Once the storyboard is made I move on to work on the comic’s dialogue before I return to refine and finalize it. As you can see from the picture above my storyboard is made up of messy sketches and notes. If I were to come back and look at it after a month, I probably wouldn’t know what it all means.

Dialogue writing
Based on the storyboard I write the comic’s dialogue in the form of a script for each character in each panel as needed. Good dialogue is crucial to giving life to the comic’s characters by making them believable so that the reader is able to relate to them. I use pointers, such as the character’s personality, relationship with other characters, emotional states and reaction to events, to help me think of what they say and how they say it.

Dialogue is my weakest aspect of comic making because of my limited writing ability and command of linguistic rules. I could spend over an hour on a one-sentence ‘thank you’ note and it comes out sounding like a death threat instead. I guess the best solution to improve is to read and write more. Maybe I could start by writing fan mail when I get my Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue.

Final storyboard
Coming back to the storyboard, I integrate the dialogue into it by checking if each panel fits its corresponding dialogue, if it doesn’t, I’ll refine or redo the panel/s. Once that is done, I go through the storyboard again to see if I can make any final changes to improve the flow of the story such as adjusting scenes within panels or removing redundant dialogue.

Character design
I think most comic creators design their comic’s characters at an earlier phase and in more detail than I do. Somehow I prefer to leave character design until the last part of the planning process. I don’t do detailed visual profiles like full body front views, side views and such. I usually only do headshot sketches of a character to work out his or her unique features to portray their personality. I would also create a personal back story of the character to help me envision their typical postures and how they would visually react to situations.

References
As a new comic creator, references are a great source for learning and improving my abilities. Through the whole comic creating process, I would be constantly flipping through my favorite comics for references, I’ll study how the creators play out a scene or the angles and visual effects they use, anything that I can apply to my own comics. Movies and animations are also valuable resources for story themes, scenes and character design.

Read the next parts:
How I'm learning to make comics: part 3
How I'm learning to make comics: part 4

Read the previous part:
How I'm learning to make comics: part 1

Comic or Manga?

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Have you been hearing a lot of the term “manga” lately and wonder what is manga and how is it different from comics? To answer the latter it would be similar to asking what is the difference between fruits and apples. Manga is a type of comic, just as superhero comics like Spiderman and newspaper comics like Peanuts are all comics.

Manga is the Japanese word for comics. When comic buffs outside of Japan first used the word manga they were referring specifically to Japanese comics i.e.: Comics produced in Japan for the Japanese market. These days manga also refers to comics made outside of Japan that are closely based on the art style and typical subject matter of Japanese comics.
I first started my foray into comics with the likes of Marvel and DC superhero comic books. When American comic publishes started bringing in translated manga such as Akira and Appleseed I found myself gravitating towards these comics from the Far-East and neglected to collect my monthly issues of The Uncanny X-men.

What got me sold on manga was its wide range of subject matter, from serious dramas to senseless but hilarious gags, and most of all its aesthetic artwork: I’ve bought quite a few original manga from Japan just to look at the art even though I couldn’t read Japanese.

Having been an avid fan for almost two decades, not just of manga but comics overall, I recently decided to make comics of my own. It was only natural for me to emulate the art and storytelling style of manga. The use of black and white with gray tones compared to full colored pages makes it more manageable as a single person creator and suits my non-superhero stories.

Tokyopop, a major American manga publisher, recently announced that they’d be calling their line of manga made outside of Japan as Global Manga. That got me thinking, should I label my comics as manga or keep calling them comics as I have since I started making them? Or maybe I should call them manga-stylized comics? Or English-language manga? Or Mangalized Comics?

Obviously in the end I couldn’t decide. So I’ll just stick to calling them comics as they are. I guess what matters most is that my comics are able to tell my stories in the best possible way to anyone who is interested to listen.

By the way, in Japan, do they refer to a Superman comic as "manga" or "ko-mi-ku"?

To learn more about the origins and history of manga, have a read at wikipedia.Manga
To read the comics that I’ve made so far please visit my website, Mangada

How I'm learning to make comics: part 1

How I'm learning to make comics: part 1
As some of you might have already read, the reason I am learning to create comics is to share the stories that I occasionally conceive in my head. Of course the stories that are made into comics are only the ones that I feel are entertaining and worth the readers time. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to read about my personal ramblings about the need to maintain personal hygiene. Trust me, you don’t.

So what I am aiming to achieve is to learn the best processes for me to convey my stories effectively by improving my storytelling and art and completing pages at a consistent level and within a reasonable timeframe. If all that sounds technically geeky, it’s due to remnants from my programming days. That’s another story not worth your time to know. Now on to the nitty gritty details.

Story
The story is the essence of a comic, without one it’ll be better to just draw a picture of a pretty girl than a whole bunch of meaningless pictures (unless it’s a whole bunch of pictures of pretty girls). To me, a good story is one that is strong enough to reach its readers emotionally. If it has a high chance of making a majority of them laugh, sad, angry, excited or ponder about the issues that it touches on, then it’s worth the effort to realize it.

Origins of a story
My inspiration for a story usually originates from many sources. Here’s a list of some of them.

• Media I’ve come across, such as news, movies, music, comics and magazines.
  
• Personal experiences
  
• Reflections of issues I’m interested in or concerned about.
  
• A random thought that appears out of the blue.
  

Story conceptualization
From the inspiration I’ll have a central subject matter which I then proceed to build a scenario around it. Once I have a skeletal structure of the story; a beginning, main plot and characters, and an ending, I go through it again and see what else I can add or change to make it more interesting. I do all this mentally in my head and most people who see me in this state think I’m spaced-out. No I don’t do drugs, it’s very bad for you, but most of the time I do just stare into space.

Read the next parts:
How I'm learning to make comics: part 2
How I'm learning to make comics: part 3
How I'm learning to make comics: part 4