I’ll probably have multiple posts dealing with multiple aspects of Manga Studio, both the advantages and shortcomings. This is the first in that series…

I’ve never really bothered using custom tools in any other art package, preferring to use, simply, the keyboard shortcuts. But my current drawing setup sees my Cintiq (a 12″ one) separated by quite a distance from the keyboard – the Cintiq is on my drawing board, the keyboard is on the computer keyboard.

So, suddenly, I find myself using toolbars a great deal more. (As an aside, I’ve also tried using my iPhone as a virtual keyboard, and while it works, it’s slightly frustrating to have to wake it every time I need to undo something).

Custom Tools, finally comes into its own – Here’s the current custom tool sets I have setup. MS allows you to set up multiple custom tools, so I’ve setup “Pens”, “Transform” and “Rulers”.

• Pens – or, rather, “Most Commonly Used Tools” includes the following:
• Undo – Obviously, I never need it (much… er…)
• Save – which means it’s a one-click button to save the file, essential when you’re moving out of the physical world and into the digital
• Cut, Copy, Past – all clipboard options. Though used rarely (unless I’ve done something stupid, like inked onto the wrong layer)
• Clear Selection – this is the CTRL-D command (more commonly called ‘Deselection’ – hence the CTRL-D shortcut)

And then, the tools:

• G pen – I have this set up as a nice, thick pen – acting much more like a brush – though has a weird tendency to digitally ‘blob’ – I suspect that a processor speed issue.
• Kaburu – nice, thin pen – very like a a fineliner, except it never really gets rubbish. Typically set up as .4mm/.5mm
• Eraser – I can flip the pen and rub things out, but I actually find it quicker to select this tool and erase using the pen.
• Fill – ah, fill, it’s fast, accurate and completely unsatisfying compared to inking a big black area on a page. But it’s fast. (Also: no more smearing or waiting on ink drying).
• Laso – The Laso selection tool, great for cutting out masks that you can then ink within – giving nice sharp inking and allowing great big sweeps of the arm to do it.

Transform / Rulers.

Unfortunately, there are some obvious shortcomings – the most obvious of which is that the Transform Tools are all called “Move and Transform…” – actually, they’re not, they’re, variously, called “Move and Transform: Scale”, “Move and Transform: Distort”, etc. Unfortunately, the Custom Tools button width is fixed, which means all of those names are rendered indistinct from one another. This same problem effects Rulers – “New Special Ruler” is the only text you’ll see here.

Similarly, though, less obvious, the custom tools for pens – while they’re colour coded, are simply ways of selecting between the different pens – you can’t, for example, set up multiple pen tools with multiple widths.
I’m hoping, in a later version, they’ll allow the user to either customise the button text – or simply remove the “Move and Transform:” text from the option, so they become the much more sensible “Scale”,”Distort”, etc. (ditto for rulers: no real need for “New Special Ruler”).

Also, with a bit of luck, they’ll allow better customisation of the drawing tools on the Custom Menu, setting up various sized pens at your fingertips.

Have you set up custom tools? Let me know what’s working for you…

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Got yourself a wordpress install? Confounded by some irritating gzunzip error messages in your dashboard (around line 1787 or somewhere)? You may have been hacked.

As far as I can tell, the hack simply adds a whole bunch of links to other websites – not harming visitors to your websites, but certainly make you party to some google fiddling (not that google will blame you, so no panic).

How can you check? well, if you’re techy, stick around… (and for non-techies, there’s simpler solution: find someone technical.)

Step 1 is to confirm you’ve been hacked, head into your Theme Editor and edit the first .php file you see (maybe post.php)

If you see a line like:

/**/eval(base64_decode(

Followed by a whole bunch of letters (aWYoZnVuY3Rpb25fZXhpc3RzKCd …etc…) then you’re almost certainly looking at a hack. If you copy the text between the quote marks (so pretty much all of the goody letters) you can then go to a website like http://www.opinionatedgeek.com/dotnet/tools/Base64Decode/ where you can then paste the text into the text area – press decode and hey presto! it’ll tell you want the secret letters are actually doing. Now, you’ll probably not understand a lot of it (it’s some pretty dense php code) but you should see something like:

if(function_exists(‘ob_start’)&&!isset($GLOBALS['sh_no']))
{$GLOBALS['sh_no']=1;
if(file_exists(‘/home/directory/www/libs/templates/skel/views/elements/email/html/copper.php’))

(I’ve spaced this out to make it readable, but in the code it’s all one long, long line.

The bit you want to look at is the file mentioned in file_exists – this is the actual trojan horse/malware – it’s the bit of code that’s injecting lots of crap into your wordpress – and throwing up those irritating error messages.
You can then either contact your webserver admin guys and ask them to delete that file or go into your server and delete it yourself (or, for fun, replace the code within with “Hello World!” – then visit your site to see just how much that file is used).

Step 2, upgrade your wordpress. If it’s really old you’ll have to do it manually, if it’s new you can do it right away. This should stop the code getting reinjected into your system. Next step is to delete and replace any customised themes, these are likely to have had code injected to call that file.
Step 3, check all of your plugins to see if they have the /**/eval code – if they do, delete it.

Step 4 – well, there is no step four. I’m not sure if all of the above will completely blitz the stuff from your system (I worked in tech support for years, but have been desperately trying to get away from it, so this post is as techy a thing as I’ve done in over a year.)

Hope that helps – if not sort your problem, at least solve the conundrum of

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Part 1 (yesterday) covered everything up to the printing of a pencilled page – or at least my particular workflow. I should point out, this is just how I do it, there’s as many ways to do this stuff as there are comic artists so there’s no real right way or wrong way, just my way…

UPDATE: PS v MS pt2 (8 page pdf file)

Anyhue, part 2, we’ll cover (and this may get very technical and very dull ! just be warned) :

• Scan in (the newly inked pages)
• Place scanned art onto a standard document template
• Remove blue lines
• Clean Scanned Art
• Add touchups (typically moving things around the page, correcting mistakes and resizing hands/heads or other things that I’ve drawn wrong)
• flatten and convert to b&w
• Save as a final document

Scan

Photoshop

As before, scanning is fairly straightforward – select the import, scan and the scanner you’re using, then I normally import as full colour (remember the pencils are blue and we want to remove the pencils as cleanly as possible – which I’ve found easier to do in photoshop than rely on how the scanner does it). Once scanned as full colour, I can then select the blue channel (this will, counter-intuitvely, reveal everything that isn’t blue) increase the contrast and, while still the in the channel convert to bitmap – this produces a neat b&w image that’s pretty clean.

I open up a template (see yesterdays post), placing the newly scanned image into position. Then it’s a matter of clean up…

MangaStudio

I open the story that contains the pencilled pages, scan the image in (this time scan in in b&w rather than full colour – a word on that in a sec) and place the image into position.

A word on Blueline

Non-repro blue or blueline is a technique that relies on an ancient technology for printing. In the good old days, when original artwork was sent off to be photographed the non-repro blue would simply disappear from the process (presumably because of the light used to brighten the page for reproduction). These days though, scanner technology, while it still uses a bright light to lighten the page before scanning it doesn’t seem to make the blue drop out as much (or at all) – so dropping blue is often done after the scanning is done. I’ve found though (and different scanners may give different results) that the blue line that I’m using in photoshop (which is actually a slightly cyan-like blue) seems to be picked up more than the pale blue that I’ve been using in MangaStudio (hence the difference in process between the two). I imagine some more fiddling with settings in photoshop will get me the exact same shade of blue – though with MS selecting the colour for lineart really is very, very simple (making it easier to experiment with the perfect colour for your scanner).

vs 

Well, much of a muchness – bit of an unfair comparison as the process diverge slightly, it’s the clean up is where it gets interesting …

Cleaning Up and Touching Up the artwork

Photoshop

Cleaning up in photoshop is a matter of selecting the Brush tool (press B) and setting your colours to black for foreground and white for background. Once done you can then simply go around the page ‘fixing’ things. Adding white, redrawing bits here there and everwhere. So far so normal. A common problem (at least for me) is when you come across a hand or face that’s been drawn too large or small – the drawing is perfectly fine, it just needs shrunk (or enlarged). Here’s where the slowdowns start. Shrinking or enlarging a selected area (or using the ‘Magic Wand’ to select only a white area) all require that the image is actually greyscale rather than b&w. So the first step is to convert the image to greyscale. Once photoshop has stopped thinking about it you’re then free to start manipulating. Selecting area, pressing [CTRL-T] to transform (you can do this either using the selection or cut the area you want to manipulate out and paste it in as a new layer – sometimes very useful). Sadly, that’s not the end, once done you’ll now have some lovely sharp b&w art with some bits that include fuzzy greys (if, for example, you’ve enlarged a head). So the next step is to convert back to b&w – photoshop thinks and you’re done. (Unless you’ve missed another bit and you have to repeat the entire process). All in all, it’s a time consuming and dull process.

MangaStudio

Cleaning up in MS is a similar thing, selecting the Pen Tool (press P) and using it. MS has a slightly odder option, in that black, white and transparent are all colour options. Using transparent is equivalent to using an Alpha layer in photoshop – though it’s a lot simpler, and not nearly as flexible. But, for most comic artists, simpler is better (certainly for me). Using the cintiq/wacom, the pen draws in black and the eraser uses transparent (in PS the pen draws the foreground colour, the eraser uses the background colour – you can swap foreground and background using the [X] key).
And … the next bit … is kinda where MS leaves PS lying kicking and screaming in the dust. In MS the Magic Wand tool works in b&w – unlike PS, there’s no need to convert to greyscale first. This keeps the filesize low and the processing speeds high. Once selected, again, unlike PS – without conversion to greyscale, you can scale, or rotate or whatever. It very cleverly converts the selected area to greyscale BEFORE you transform it and converts it back to b&w once transformed (as a former computer programmer, I can appreciate how simple and eloquent that solution is – I admit it, even for a comic guy I’m a real nerd).

vs 

Clear win for MS. In fact, this alone would be enough reason to move over to MS, no more ‘Photoshop is attempting to fill the gap’ (a weird message that will appear sometimes when you’re simply moving a block from one area to another). No more little watch as PS takes time to think about what you’re trying to do. This, literally saves minutes (and minutes makes hours and hours makes pages and pages makes MONEY)

One of the reasons MS is so much quicker when it comes to this, is the expedient of not having to convert to greyscale (once if you’re lucky, multiple times if you’re feeling a little underpressure and you keep missing things) but also, once a file is a greyscale the memory required for the image goes from 3Mb for a b&w 400dpi US art sized image to 25Mb for the same in greyscale (a conversion, which took, roughly, 10seconds)

And yes, we’re talking seconds per process here, but they all add up and, worse than that, they turn a process that should be – at best fun to, at worst, unbearable.

Flatten and Convert to B&W

Photoshop

Simple, really, convert to b&w (if you haven’t already done so) it’ll automatically flatten any layers you have and then save.

MangaStudio

As the art I’ve just imported is now part of a multipage story, I will then export the individual page into a photoshop format – simple enough – just export and that’s it.

vs 

Well, not really much in them. To be fair to PS, I know it well enough to understand its quirks and, therefore, I trust it. MS I’m still feeling my way round and will backup and save multiple times to make sure work doesn’t get lost. As I find my way I’m sure trust will come…

Summary

I’ve skillfully avoided talking about MS’s save dialogue. MS uses two document types, Pages and Stories – stories can contain multiple pages. When you create a new document you can create a story or a page. I used to create pages for every document – as I would in PS, but the save dialogue (pictured) was so off-putting I actually found it easier to create a story with multiple pages, that way a 22 page story has only one save dialogue to deal with for the story. Exporting is equal terrifying (at least the first time you do it) being a multi-headed hydra of a dialogue box (fill in one option and two will replace it). Again, I think, this speaks to MS being more windows like than mac like. Having said that, once you’ve figured it out, it’s probably not something that’ll ever worry you again.

In the plus column, though, are many features that don’t have any sort of equivalent in photoshop – especially if you go for MS EX (which is the big brother of the DEBUT version). The perspective ruler makes drawing in perspective a simple snap to grid style option.

So, to sum up, for a comic artist, should you abandon PS (and by PS I mean GIMP or any other non-specific application for handling images) and move to MS? Damn right, you should. But just make sure you set aside a lot of time to get to grips with it. I mean, I’ve owned two versions of MS for over a year, and have only now got round to using it…

BUY IT!

(These are Amazon Affiliate Links, which I’ll get a tiny, tiny kickback from – how tiny? MINISCULE…)
Manga Studio Debut 4.0 (Mac/PC CD) (this is around £39)

Or

Manga Studio EX 4 (Mac/PC CD) (this is around £250)

Or… if you want to try BEFORE you buy…

Download 30 Day Demo for Free

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I’m gradually moving from Photoshop (PS) to MangaStudio (MS) and here’s why: Workflow*. Workflow isn’t something I’ve ever seen covered in any how-to-draw comic books, a lot of that is to do with the fact that workflow becomes more important the more of the art you do yourself – in otherwords, if you’re simply doing pencils workflow is less of an issue. When you’re pencilling and inking (and maybe colouring and lettering) workflow becomes a pretty big deal. Every minute you shave out of workflow is another minute you can spend drawing (and every three/four hours you can shave out of workflow translates to another full page of drawing for me).

So, as best as I’m able I’m gonna compare the two programs for the comic artist.

UPDATE: PS v MS part 1 (8 page pdf)

Here’s my standard workflow:

• Scan an A4 document (something akin to pencils/layouts)
• Resize to fill US comic book size
• Add panel borders (chunky black borders over the top of the artwork)
• Convert pencils to blueline
• Print Document
• Ink (by hand, using a brush)
• Scan in
• Place scanned art onto a standard document template
• Remove blue lines
• Clean Scanned Art
• Add touchups (typically moving things around the page, correcting mistakes and resizing hands/heads or other things that I’ve drawn wrong)
• flatten and convert to b&w
• Save as a final document

Part 1 of this post will cover everything up until the print… UPDATE: You can read part 2 here.

Scan & Resize

Photoshop

Create a new document – I have a couple of standard sized documents I use, for US I open my US comic sized template (which has the bleed/safe area marked off) this is a 400dpi full colour document.
Scan the document (making sure I select which, of the several scanner options I have, and scan) – I scan at A4 Greyscale. Into a Greyscale Document
Place and resize the scanned art within the guidelines.(At this stage I have to be careful NOT to accidentally save the document because it’ll save over my standard document template – I’ve done this before)

Manga Studio

Create a new document (lately I’ve been creating a new ‘Story Document’ rather than a single page – I simply tell it how long my story is and it’ll create pages to match – including double page spreads)
Scan the document (as I’d previously selected the scanner to use, this is a two click option with no worrying about making the incorrect choice)
After scanning you need to select how you want to use the art – normal or 2DLT – 2DLT means 2D Line and Tone, this is for converting a photograph into something that could be used for lineart. Not something I’ve been using, though, so I won’t comment on it.
Place the document – resizing it (this is where Photoshop scores, MS doesn’t do a live preview as you resize an image, so it’s partly intuition and partly guesswork to get it right)

vs 

Pretty much a draw when everything goes right, but more potential for mess-ups in PS which drags the process out much longer than it should (by minutes sometimes)

One interesting observation is that with PS you need to indicate what kind of file it is – whether it’s B&W (for lineart), greyscale or full colour. Each choice dramatically increases the documents size and, therefore, how long it takes to do anything. With MS, on the other hand, you select BW, greyscale or full colour PER LAYER – keeping the filesize low. My PS template is full colour because I need to convert the line art to blue, with MS I DON’T.

Add Panel Borders

Photoshop

I create a new blank layer above the lineart – this is my ‘borders’ layer.

I select the Marquee tool (M) and select ‘Fixed size – 5mm’ – then I draw a marquee where I think I’ll want a gutter. Once placed, I can now drag some guidelines over to the Marquee – they should snap to the Marquee (though sometimes I misjudged and I then have to select the Layer Select Tool to move the ruler). I do this for all of the guidelines on the vertical and then do any I need on the horizontal.

Once done, I can create Marquee’s using the guidelines to create my borders – making sure to move from FIXED SIZE to NORMAL marquees – I draw an additive marquee (that’s a normal marquee and while holding SHIFT to select multiple panels.
Drawing the borders now requires you to add a Stroke inside the selection – using EDIT->STROKE… – depending on the resolution of the image I usually go for either 20px or 30px

Manga Studio

I create a ‘PANEL RULER LAYER’

Selecting the panel ruler tool, and making sure the gutter is 5mm thick on both the horizontal and vertical, I then indicate where I want my gutters (it snaps automatically so it really is quicker than even drawing a line).
Make sure the layer properties indicate that I want a panel border of 1.4mm thick and then “rasterize” the layer. (This creates a new layer with the panel border drawn on it).

vs 

CLEAR WIN for MS. When everything goes right in photoshop it’s still a more fiddly operation, in MS – software, obviously designed for comic artists, I don’t think you could simplify the process any more. This saves several minutes every time you do it. (I should point out though, that it took some time to figure out how to do this in MS – one thing I’ve discovered is that MS is more like Windows software than Mac software – MS expects you to use the right hand mouse button for options, where PS doesn’t)

Convert pencils to blueline

Photoshop

I have an action set up that will convert any layer into a blue layer – I click that and it processes it and bingo bango bongo it’s in non-repro blue.

Manga Studio

All MS layers can be assigned a colour – rather than b&w or grey. I simply select what colour I want to use – and you can use ANY colour.

vs 

WIN for MS. Why? I convert back and forth between colour and grey – with PS it’s a one-way operation (well, I MAY be able to do it, but it’ll be a nightmare of adjusting sliders). Also: the MS layer conversion is instant (since it’s not actually altering anything – just how it’s displayed) whereas the PS clearly processes the art, taking some time to think.

Print Document

Photoshop

Select print preview. Since my template is already setup with print options, I simply print preview, make sure I have an A3 page in the printer and print.

Manga Studio

I’ve been able to print. But it’s a nightmare of confusing options. I THINK they’re all setup now, and I’m confident when I figure this out it’ll be straightforward. But ugh.

vs 

WIN for MS. That surprised you, huh? Ok, here’s why: yes, it’s confusing. Yes, I don’t trust that I’ve done the right thing until I see a print out … BUT… a) it’s FASTER to render the print and send to the printer (because, it’s multiple layers or a greyscale document – even if one of those layers is displaying as blue – as compared to PS rendering down multiple layers of a full colour document) b) like other things in MS, once I figure it out it’ll be a doddle. (Though it does highlight just how confusing some of the options are… but the fact that it renders to print much faster and I can get on with doing something else is pretty awesome…)

And, part 2 tomorrow (or later today…)

*And here’s what an online dictionary says about workflow:
1. The flow or progress of work done by a company, industry, department, or person.
2. The rate at which such flow or progress takes place.

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So, here it is, almost 10 years after first publication, my first 2000AD commission. Some caveats: I’ve removed the lettering (which is a shame as it’s a particularly funny story) and the story is (c) Rebellion Developments.

Some back history:

Andy Diggle first told me at DreddCon (the first one – 11th November 2000) that he’d be happy to commission me. 2000 was the year I turned 30, and it was also the year I became determined to get work into 2000AD – by that stage I’d become known online and I’d become friends with Gordon Rennie who kept pushing the idea of me doing something in front of Andy – without Gordon I’d've been useless and who knows where I’d be now ? (Possibly working for the big two, but who’s to know?)

Anyhue, Gordon wrote a very funny story called Sino-Town – the main ingredient being that Dredd’s helmet computer was damaged causing all of the Sino-City language (ie Chinese) to be mistranslated into English, or, something approaching English – great lines like “<My Iron Balls Are Like Marshmallows Now>”)

So, got the gig, did the work, redid the work, redid the work and redid it. Faffed around and noodled. I had no deadline, you see. Once I had a deadline it was all go. Sent the art to Andy who was a little … underwhelmed (as well he might be) and offered to redraw the entire strip. He was taken aback, I think.

Anyhue, what was published was the redraw, and here, to the best of my abilities is the sort of critique I’d give anyone who asks (which is why you’ll find some praise in there, even though it’s slightly weird me praising myself and I’m sure now, 10 years later, I could draw it better, but, you know, if it’s good it’s good…)

Page 1

Tall vertical panel – a trick I still use, helps (in my mind) to establish the entire scene, neatly leads the eye down to the young lady at the bottom who isn’t actually very important (first comments about this page in print? why are her boobs so small – cus she’s chinese, I responded). Johnny Woo, on the other hand, is behind her. In hindsight I might’ve made him the main figure on that panel – but that may have been a little too on the nose, the background figure tends to reward anyone who just spots it. Which is nice. (As an aside, hard to make out, but it’s there : “UNCLE WU’S CH[op and go]” and transgender back street ‘chop-shop’ this was a stupid joke that Gordon dared me to put in the art, which I did, later on it became the plot point of a Johnny Woo sequel written by Gordon and drawn by Patrick Goddard for the Megazine.

Let me get this out of the way early: there’s a LOT of bad drawing in this strip – I’ll refrain from commenting on it unless it really needs it, bad shadows, weird heads, Dredd looking like a gorilla, etc. Instead, I’m gonna concentrate on some story telling aspects.

Actually, page 1, looks fine for story telling – some panels could be a LOT clearer on what they’re displaying, but the reader moves about the page as you’d hope – the last panel really is hard to see what’s happening or where, but I remember the pain I went through drawing it, so I’m leaving it all unsaid…

Page 2

Panels 1, 2, 3 I’m not entirely sure what I was thinking there – story telling is all over the place – I think I was trying to avoid drawing Dredd’s bike, in the early days a lot of my story telling choices where dictated by what I could and couldn’t draw.

Panel 4 – neatly frames Dredd, shows a good bug shot of Woo – some of the figures are awful (and the ones that aren’t awful are just bad, but still). And as for that Balloon bubble BLAM! BLAM!… sigh. Tom Frame WAS a great letterer of S/FX before the advent of computers, his BDAM had a meaty chunkiness to it – I don’t think he ever really adapted to the computer age particularly well, which was a shame.

Panel 5 – again, skillfully avoided drawing much of a bike.

Page 3

Panel 1, 2 – fine, neat angle on panel 1 (where’s the backgrounds though? it’s as well Chris Blythe was soaking the art with colours!).

Panel 3 – why are Dredd and Woo shooting at each other in the same direction? That’s stupid. I assume he’s landed or something after a fall – could be we’re looking directly down on him? hard to tell the fabric should have a little more weight to it – although the fact that the bullets are bouncing off the bottom at least hints.

Panel 4 – a face that so resembles a John McCrea’s faces that when I first saw the preview image of Dredd they used in the inside front cover credits I’d assumed my strip wasn’t in it, and John had done a Dredd. Weird, as I’ve never knowingly been influenced by John.

Panel 5 – could’ve done with a little more perspective – closer to woo or dredd, just to make the panel interesting, but it gets the job done (though leaves a massive amount of dead space in the middle of the panel)

Panel 6 – much more interesting angle, good foreshortening.  Not sure about the silhouettes behind Woo though, and I know that’s the inside of a building but it’s a little lacking in anything resembling a real building.

Page 4

Panels 1, 2, 3 – yeah fine, panel 4 – could’ve ramped up the jeapordy a fair bit more by coming in closer to woo and having something not so straight on (basically the “camera” would be beside woo, catching the side of his face a little but facing the oncoming bullet)

Panel 5, 6, 7 – I quiet like the little middle “beat” (which was scripted) but the body language and angle help sell it. I’ve maybe have changed the angle on the last panel to get it similar to the preceding panels (maybe the exact same angle but tighter in on his face and the bullet…)

Page 5

The whole thing has the feel of being in what someone imagines a building would look like – even though they’d never seen a building. Could be a warehouse, could be a hotel lobby, certainly bland. Luckily the story has a rapid momentum that means the reader isn’t hanging around oogling the scenery. Some terribly lazy background figures (a crime I’m still guilty of)

Last panel could have a good foreshortened shot looking own the barrels of his gun as it went klik klik klik, much more dramatic.

Page 6

Storytelling is, at least, fairly solid (even if the drawing is ropey and dredd looks like a gorilla). The reflection of Woo in Dredd’s visor (unscripted, iirc) doesn’t really work – reflection isn’t well enough drawn) and the last little smile with an open panel works fine, even if it is a little bland.

Just before sending the artwork off, I looked at the last panel and realised the story telling on the page would be massively improved if I simply flipped the face into the mirror image – which I did. Giving plenty of room for Dredd’s dialogue and making it look like he was sauntering off into the world.

There you go, hope you enjoyed it. Wasn’t as bad as I was expecting (well, the drawing was but the story telling seems to clip along and keep it readable). I’ll try and do more of these if I can get a chance, please let me know what you think either in the comments (better!) or on twitter.

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I know, I know, you don’t make mistakes. Even so, being able to apply white to an already inked black page is a pretty handy tool. So we’re gonna cover a couple of the more popular methods of doing that, along with a trade secret from Jock.

Tippex (or Liquid Paper)

The great thing about tippex is its ubiquity, every stationary store across the land sells it. And, for most artists, it’s the first way they discover of applying white. It’s pretty rubbish though, it’s glopey and horrible and almost impossible to ink on top of (and it smells terrible). Still, these days there are neat little pens that make applying it easier, but, even so, it’s not a precision tool.

Process White

Ah, process white, this is what most people come to next, it’s the ‘textbook’ method of applying white. Process white can be put down with a brush – and will often need to be reinvigorated by applying a little dab of water to the paint (it usually drys to a brick in the pot). Process white can be used to do all sorts of cool effects, including splatter for stars, painting thin lines over things (great for rain) and, just, generally correcting things. The problem is, it’s not water resistant. If you go to paint black OVER process white you’ll end up with grey – the black ink will damp the white and cause them to mix, added to that, Process White – with the advent of photoshop – is something that’s disappearing from the shelves, developed originally, to add lettering to photos/

Acrylic White Ink

Here it is. Jock’s secret white (well, it was Jock that first suggested it to me, years ago). Acrylic ink, as with process white, can be applied with a brush. You’ll need to mix it, shaking it up in the bottle will, inevitably, involve lots of white ink flying everywhere (it’s quiet a thin liquid). I recommend leaving the lid off for a little while so it can thicken up a bit. The big advantage over Process white, is that you can paint over acrylic white ink – it’s completely water proof. Allowing you to paint a thin layer of white over a mistake, and then paint black over the top of that. There’re a number of brands available, my ink of choice is Winsor and Newtown (pictured right) mainly because it’s the only one I can find in the shops!

Splatter!

And here’s a thing, rather than using a toothbrush dipped in white ink (and splattered all over the page) try dipping a small brush into the pot and flicking the brush along the lip of the pot around the area that you want the white (or black) splatter. The result is a finer, more controlled spray of ink along with a lot less mess on your fingers and thumbs.

(The links on above are intended for information purposes only, I haven’t purchased from either of the shops online above so can’t say whether they’re any good or not – most art supply shops will stock Acrylic White Ink).

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Being a comic artist involves, as one might expect, quiet a lot of drawing. But, a good proportion of your time isn’t spent on drawing, it’s spent on various admin things. Back in the old days (you know, a couple of years ago or so) lots of that time would be spent dealing with post (packaging art, heading to the post office, waiting in queues, getting annoyed and, generally, NOT drawing). Now, the job a lot of artists dread is scanning.

Every page needs to be scanned and, often, touched up to clear up various things. And, if you’ve only access to an A4 scanner there’s lots and lots of patching things together moving them about and joining them up.

The first scanner I ever owned was a four inch wide hand held scanner (actually, I never owned it, I worked in a shop selling computer equipment – so equipment like that passed through my hands before it ended up with customers). Course, those scanners were useless (though, comparatively cheap), but, to be fair, the computers weren’t really potent enough to do anything with big scanned images.

The next scanner I saw was a monsterous A4 monochrome scanner, costing around a couple of grand (it used a SCSI interface and was lightening fast – in the old days when light travelled really slowly).

Once A4 scanners became cheap, I bought one and have, over time, come to both rely on and really detest the whole scanning process.

I managed, over time, to procure an A3 scanner – a Mustek, horrible it was, slow, grinding, incompatible with mac os x (and, despite new models coming out, one of the most read pages on my old blog was a page explaining how to make it work with a mac) BUT it scanned A3 art – one pass scans were within grasp but it was so shoddy in quality, that, ultimately it sat, dead on the my shelf.

I bought better and better A4 scanners and finally, ended up with a Canon LiDe50. Great scanner, but it had a horrible lip over the border of the entire scanning area making scanning an A3 page in two passes a nightmare (not something I found out until I bought it and unpacked it). Turns out almost all modern A4 scanners had some sort of lip – so I ripped a portion of it off, taped the glass on that side into place and, voila, an A4 scanner that would allow me to scan in two chunks. And, the lip that I left gave me a neat guide to shunt the page into to keep the paper steady making it easier to match up both sides.

And while this was a lot better than the A3 scanner in terms of quality, it was still a pain to have to ensure the pages are lined up perfectly, scan in two passes and then merge together in your graphic tool of choice – sometimes lining the pages up was such a pain, you’d end up scanning in multiple passes – grabbing a panel with each pass.

So, finally, I broke – it was time to spring for an A3 scanner – and THIS time, the market had entirely changed. When I bought the Mustek (£99) the next cheapest scanner was around five grand – my new A3 scanner/printer cost £270. Lots of cash, but worth every penny, and it’s fairly changed how I work.

The process, before, was:

Thumbnail > pencil page > ink page > scan page (avoiding scanning pencils unless I really have to)

NOW:

large thumbnail > scan > print in blue > ink > scan (oddly more scanning, but less effort required to do it)

Tried the new process on a few pages so we’ll see if it sticks, but it’s great. The other thing it’s letting me do, is stop worrying about drawing panels – I now do all my panel borders in the computer on top of the blueline pencils. Print that out and I have a pre ruled page with borders completed, all I’ve gotta do is attack with some ink. Normally, I measure all panel borders out – to try and keep them totally straight, this is a fairly time consuming and laborious process that I’m pretty glad I’ve found a workaround.

Added to that, I can also add photo reference directly to the page, turn it into a blueline guide, print that out (with all the other pencils on a single page) and ink it, thereby totally integrating photos with the art in a way that makes it pretty much impossible to tell photo reference was used.

The large thumbnails are drawn in a moleskin book and, oddly, the proportions of the moleskin end up being almost exactly right for American comics.

Anyhue, if you’re thinking about A3 scanner/printer combo: The Brother DCP-6690CW is brilliant and worth every penny.

Here’s the key info, if you’re dealing with comics:

Pros

• Doesn’t take up too much foot space.
• Prints to the edge of the page
• Seems happy to take my Canson Bristol Board (220gsm) pages (though does leave an impression/dirty mark on the BACK from the roller when they’re printed and, to be fair, they’re heavier than the manufacturer recommends).
• Cost £270 from Amazon, ink seems cheap (found unbranded ink for £8 for two sets of all colours+black) – have yet to replace a cart (uses individual cartridges for each of the colours). So I imagine I’ll be replacing the cyan and black a lot, but not the rest :)

Cons

• Weirdly, doesn’t quiet scan to the edge of A3 – you can lose about 2/3 mm from the edge of whatever you’re scanning. Not a problem for 99.9% of things, but a little a mysterious, none the less. This may be a software issue – I’m not sure.

UPDATE

I’ve had the scanner long enough now to form a decent long term opinion, which is: I wish I’d bought one years ago. Scanning A3 pencils, converting to blueline, printing and re-scanning really helped me get Happy Valley in easily within deadline (including a 12 page Megazine story at the same time). Deffo worth the cash.

Murderdrome was an iPhone comic, created by Al Ewing (Script), PJ Holden (Art), Phil Orr (Programming).

And here’s how it came about …

8th July 2009 – I came up with the basic design of an iPhone comic, how it would work, the essence of a business model, etc. At this point, on the app store there are literally six or seven other comic apps on the there – none of which approach comics the way I felt they should be. And yet, I figured what I wanted to do was, surely, the most obvious thing. (see xcake.org wiki where the original details are noted)

I hash out the specifics of the interface, and sit on it, waiting for an opportunity to learn how to program (see full details of the interface here). At this point I was still working part time as an IT supervisor for a charity.

I had some high ambitions, firstly I felt that the only thing worth doing was entirely new content; I couldn’t see how you could chop up existing material and make it readable (and given some of the apps out there that butcher existing comic material, I’m not convinced I was wrong…)

I’d mulled over the idea of open sourcing the app – allowing any comic creator to download and realise material in this way.

And the extras I wanted to put in are still far ahead of what anyone is presently doing.

The business model, which, for me, was the least important bit, but it was, ultimately,  the thing that everyone around me got the most excited about. Even a simple calculation suggested that the iPhone comic model could be a multi-million pound industry. I offered the following simple example:

Take the top selling comic on the market today (at time of writing this article, it’s BATMAN and ROBIN #1 with sales of 168,604)

Now, assume your ENTIRE iPhone comic market can sell the numbers of that single comic per month, in other words, assume the total, potential, cumulative sales of all iPhone comics adds up to JUST the sales of the single best selling print comic.

(Is that a reasonable assumption to make? well, when you’re dealing with speculation in an untested/unknown area, it’s pretty hard to make any kind of guess, but this, at the time, seemed a reasonable way to estimate the potential market.)

Assume you’re selling iPhone comics for $.99 – then your total market per annum is worth just over 2 million dollars.

(As an aside, Apple will take 30% of the $.99, leaving $.69 for the creators, for a print comic, the figures get much more complex and murky, but, simplistically, a print comic will return, assuming a distribution cost of 60% – leaves you with $1.79, then you have to pay for print – which will decrease per issue, but, assuming it’s $.40 you’re looking at a return for creators of $1.39 – that may look like it’s more profitable in print, but your profits from print may not appear at all – you have to pay the printers, often, before you get any money returned from the distributor, leaving cash flow problems that can scupper even popular books. The apple money comes to you without costing you anything more than a once a year fee of $99. In other words, the $.69 of each sales happens on each sale regardless of the sale of the enterprise, print’s demands are much greater)

And those are the lo-ball figures. It was enough to make you and everyone around you giddy. THIS is why digital comics are interesting from a publishers perspective.

Then, on the 31th of July my friend Matt Johnston was married and, at his wedding, I met Phil Orr. Phil had seen what I wanted to do and we decided to let Phil code the app while I started into Murderdrome.

Murderdrome was originally written by Al as a webcomic, we wanted to work together and Al dusted off Murderdrome (originally drawn by Simon Penter) and I set to work adapting the comic art for the iPhone format.

Two weeks later we submitted it to apple. And waited.

Two weeks after that, Apple rejected the app and the rest is a very minor blip in the history of digital comics.

Updated Just wanted to add: the comic strip below, the TWO page full colour strip, was the entire murderdrome comic – it was on the strength of those two pages that everything followed from. Bizarre, innit :)

So, recently I was contacted by Daniel Boswell, a student who’s doing a thesis on digital comics, and I figured ya’all might be interested in some of the questions and answers. These are my first thoughts – and, to be honest, I was a little surprised at exactly how I felt on some of these fronts, but… here they are… and I welcome discussion (and, even, disagreement!)
What issues arise when converting comics to be read via portable digital devices?

For almost all pre-existing comics (ie stuff that’s either been published already or designed for print) the biggest issue is dealing with the size of the screen, and the corresponding ergonomics of the device. Ie, bigger screens are better for reading, but, right now, bigger screens mean that you have to use a desktop or laptop computer – neither of which are particularly convenient for reading comics. Smaller screens have to either cut up the artwork (as iVerse, uClick and other publishers have done), present the art in some smaller windowed format (the comixology app handles that by whooshing the reader around the panels, the Comic Reader Mobi handles it by allowing you to double tap to auto-zoom in on text boxes) the Infurious Heroes comic reader deals with it by presenting the entire page in landscape mode – requiring you to swipe the screen up or down to read, and includes a double tap to zoom.

The issues are different when creating new content.

What digital publishing systems and digital rights technologies are being used to produce comics in this way? Can you also explain how the technology works, in layman’s terms?

Did the above answer that? (If you need more details I’ll happily follow up)

Coming soon is the Longbox project, headed by Rantz Hosely. Longbox promises to be an ‘itunes’ for comics. Although, I think, the issue for digital comics will remain finding the perfect device to read comics on.

You mentioned Murderdrome being banned by Apple. What kind of impediments and regulations are being imposed by its seeming monopoly of portable media (with the iPhone and touch) and what alternatives are there for artists wanting to digitally publish their work.

Well, apple are slowly opening up. When Murderdrome was ‘banned’ (and it, strictly speaking wasn’t – we were asked to resubmit and remove the offending material – a practical impossibility, sadly) there were no ratings system in place for material like comics, Apple have since altered the app store to allow ratings on all kinds of apps (including books). It’s still not a perfect system, many apps, for example, have had to accept a 17+ rating simply because the offer access to material via the internet (indirectly offering access to adult material).

Publishing your work digitally is easy, there are all sorts of ways of doing it (myebook.com, issu.com and simply setting up a blog with a comic on there). The trick is the publish your work and be paid – a much more difficult thing. Apple’s app store was (and still is) the only viable way to manage micropayments to millions of users without the artists/publishers having to deal with any of the corresponding infrastructure required to do so. So, for example, one person could create a comic, publish it on the Apple AppStore and receive micropayments world wide from a captured audience of 14million or more users for a one off cost of $99 (which is Apple’s fee for allowing you to be a ‘developer’). Those costs do not change, as apple take a 30% cut of every comic (in the form of an app) sold. Compared to traditional print, that’s almost a magical option!

What kind of response and consumer feedback is being seen in response to these digital initiatives?

So far it seems to be very positive, everyone recognises that the current method of distribution is ‘broken’.

What do you see as the relative strengths and weaknesses of print comics vs. digital comics?

Print comics can be very beautiful – and remain real objects that people are attached too – beyond their content, the shape of the book, the tactility of it and the smell of print are very attractive for a large number of people (myself included) and that’s something digital comics can never duplicate.

On the other hand…

Digital comics require less physical space (a MASSIVE reason that many people, as the grow older and have kids, find to stop reading comics)
Digital comics are often much cheaper (99cent / $2 is the common price point people are talking about as opposed to $2.99/$3.99)
Digital comics are much easier to distribute (worldwide distribution is as easy as local distribution; 2000AD for example, while very popular world wide is almost impossible to get overseas with any regularity)
Digital comics promise to increase the revenue to the comic creator (in the case of the App Store, 70% of the cost of the comic goes to the comics creators, in the case of print, you’ll be VERY lucky to see any profits at all – and, if you do reach a point where costs are covered you will only ever see around 40% of the cover price – money which will be used to pay for print on the next issue)
Digital comics never go out of print (or out of stock)
Digital comics, like comics themselves, can be created by anyone with a bit of time.

How much of a threat do you consider digital piracy to be and what affect do you think it can have on the print industry (particularly in regard to the market for American works by major publishers like Marvel and DC)?

I think going digital is inevitable, digital piracy is ALSO inevitable, but I’m not sure I’d agree it’s a threat – until Marvel / DC start selling material online in a decent format (ie CBR) digital piracy is not only NOT competing with legitimate sales it’s actually increasing the potential number of comic readers. If you could make ALL pirated content disappear tomorrow (ie unplug the internet for EVERYONE) those people would NOT wonder around looking for comic shops, they’d simply stop reading comics. They’re reading pirated comics because, for them, there are no alternative methods of getting comics (and, in the case of some comics, ie Marvelman, Zenith and others, there are no ways to get those comics at all). Marvel have a digital distribution system but it’s so poorly put together, my feeling is that the only people reading it are marvel ‘zombies’ who are, in all likelihood, already buying the comics.

As with the music industry, until a method of selling comics digitally in a cheap DRM unencumbered format is available, it’s hard to compare the distribution of free CBR/CBZ comics with the lack of ‘potential sales’. If digital piracy where really a big issue, then iTunes would be out of business. Present a central method for people to buy material they want in a fair price without DRM and piracy, while it will never go away, it will certainly never steal real customers.

“Customers think the price is really good where it is. We’re trying to compete with piracy — we’re trying to pull people away from piracy and say, ‘You can buy these songs legally for a fair price.’ But if the price goes up a lot, they’ll go back to piracy. Then, everybody loses.”
Steve Jobs.

Does it pose a risk to the development of digital comics for portable media?

No. Anything that creates more readers of comics is a good thing.

(There may be some follow up questions which I’ll also post here and I could probably do with a good copy editor, but there you have it. Thanks for Daniel for allowing me to post this up…)