#superflat speaks

My starting point for making comics was having some character designs lying around that I wanted to use for something. Some people come up with the story first, but for me, it was the characters. If that’s your style, then concept art is a good way to plan out the “feel” of your comic:

IMO it’s very easy to fall into the trap of drawing concept sketches forever, so at some point, you will need to move on to outlining the plot of your comic and writing your first draft. All first drafts suck, so once you’ve reached the end, you’ll immediately have to go back and edit things as needed.

Some resources I used to figure out how writing works are Wired For Story by Lisa Cron, as well as Jim Butcher’s Livejournal posts.

Comics invariably take a long time to make unless you choose a super-simple art style, so I included things like camera angles and other details in my script, to remind myself how to draw a particular scene when I finally reached it. Here’s the script version of a page I finished and posted a while back:

Scripting your entire comic this early on means that you won’t be investing huge amounts of time into making any changes to the story. Rewriting is much faster than redrawing.

The next big step is sketching thumbnails of how your comic pages will look. Ideally, you’ll want to have finalized sketches of every single page before going any further, but you could do one chapter at a time, depending on your workflow. Here’s what that looks like:

At this stage, I’m mostly focusing on page layout, panel shapes, and speech bubble placement. It’s also a helpful tool to see where your double-page spreads can go (this is when two pages of a physical book are used to create a single, double-wide comic page).

And now comes the fun stuff: deciding what size your comic should be. I didn’t want to think about this at all, so I just grabbed this template from online:

And also this template for double-page spreads:

And these are the sizes I draw Control Freak at, with a resolution of 350 DPI (the minimum recommended resolution for printing is 300 DPI).

Thanks to these templates and the groundwork laid down in the last steps, I can now actually start making the comic! Here’s how I use the template - note that all of the speech bubbles are placed in the “live area”, where they won’t be cut off during printing.

And here’s the finished page:

Now repeat for as long as it takes to finish your comic!

I personally recommend picking a very manageable art style, as comics take ridiculously large amounts of time to make (I have learned Many Things about this from working on Control Freak), but you do you!