Please, do not follow my advice on creating a comic (part 2)
Before start reading this post
TL;DR: This is the second part of a series of post about how the creative process of a comic that I’m almost finishing has been done. If you wanted to known how did this all start, just go to Please, do not folllow my advice on creating a comic (part 1) under your own risk :-)
Disclaimer: as mentioned in the previous post, this is just a chaotic diary/log about my creative process as an amateur having fun creating his first comic book. So, please, do not consider this as any guide to follow, just as an experiment about sharing my experience as a kind of not-to-follow advice list.
Lettering and balloons
I must admit it, I’m lazy. So, when I decided to start working on this comic the first thing that I did was to search what fonts I will use for introducing all the texts in Scribus in an easy way during the setup of the scanned sources once I prepare them via Gimp.
I decided to go through the following fonts: Back issues BB for common conversational text on ballons, and Best Friends for BOOM! metaphors kind of fonts. Also, for balloons, Scribus made it quite easy to create a simple element as a balloon as shown here.
Easy, right? so, what happened then? That sometimes a scene/situation that you are trying to emphasize in a specific panel cannot be tied to an isolated and fixed font/tool/utility. So, I would say 80% of my time I was fine through that creative decision, but the devil is in details, so the 20% was harder than expected in terms of the final design.
So, for example in the previous panel, you can see a girl screaming. I decided to hand-draw the balloon and the lettering because I think it is its better fit (there are a lot of examples in the comic with the same situation). I wanted an irregular balloon to express anxiety, fear, etc., and also irregular letters too which can be overlapped between them. On the other hand, I can do this using the fonts+tooling combination mentioned before, but, as I said, I’m too lazy and it could take me hours to reach the desired final that I can achieve by hand in minutes.
Does it mean that the right way to do all the BOOM! kind of lettering is to perform it by hand? Of course not! as my Galician colleagues used to say: it depends, mainly on how we want the complete page and/or some single panels to look.
As you can see in this image, I decided to use the tool-ish font+balloon combination to represent a simple roar of a dinosaur, and in the next panel, a scene of the arrival of some police/fireman trucks with its siren sound integrated and growing in size providing the sensation of loud. To be honest, I do not like how the “GRR” looks like in this scene, because it weirdly looks so perfect compared with the rest of the elements. (I’m planning on to ink it manually in the final version before going to print — not decided yet)
Sixth bad advice: Mix all the styles in lettering/balloons design without considering the consistency of the final results, because, who cares about it when you can be faster than usual?
Regarding balloons, there is an additional concern. Should I include them inside the initial drawing of the page/panels? When I draw the draft/thumbnails pages I used to add them (not always) just to identify where to locate them and how it could fit in the final draw, but once I go through drawing a scene I used to not include them, which sometimes makes me crazy when I’m setting up the entire content via Scribus and I‘m not able to find a good way to integrate it inside the panel
Seventh bad advice: Do not take into account where a balloon will be located inside the panel. 100% of fun guaranteed when you will try to identify where to locate it in your final design
Backgrounds and templates
I think that one of the best ways to deal with backgrounds is to start drawing them and after that try to make your characters to interact with them as best as you can. While I was drawing the comic book, professional artist David Rubin shared his concerns about this topic and how he set up his creative process about it.
Also, I love to reuse these backgrounds multiple times, changing their colors, using a little piece of the entire background in a single panel, or making some transitions. Here you can see some examples:
This background is one of the first ones I created for the comic, it is where most of the action takes place for some of the characters, so I tend to use it several times in partial or full views and with different colors to express if the action takes place during the day or night
In addition, I used to use the backgrounds as templates in order to make it feasible to introduce the characters using some transparencies with Gimp. For example, I wanted to reuse the same background with Guillermo (one of the main characters) in the bed, and in another panel the same without him, so I created both elements (background and character) in separate drawings as follows:
Finally, here you can see another example where I planned to do some transitions of the same characters in a scenario/background. As you probably noticed, the lettering (woo-woo) was also reused in the panel that you have seen before in the previous section. Just another template example.
So, my point here is about a balance between efforts and the quality of the final result. I mean, I was happy with the obtained results but it takes me time to prepare all the elements, consider sizes, make them all fit well together, etc.
But, is this the right path to go? I remember, when I was drawing this, that I was reading Paco Roca’s comic book “El Tesoro del Cisne Negro”. In that comic, there are a lot of transition-like scenes where the main characters are talking in some different places and the camera does not move (example), and each panel is different from the previous one (different positions per involved character and also the different versions of the same background with little differences). So I remember myself thinking about it while I was reading that comic that maybe it is easier to draw each repeated-background, instead of doing the work of template+transparencies magic with Gimp. And Yes! I tried … and Yes! I was not able to do it because I’m not Paco Roca!
Eighth bad advice: Do not reuse your drawings, specially backgrounds!
I would say that reusing and drawing a lot of your backgrounds makes your work consistent and in the right balance. At least it worked for me.
Stay tuned! I will continue with more advices that nobody requested soon! Next time I will talk about style (influences and target) and color. Hope you like it! and please, do not hesitate to provide your feedback!
