Tomorrow I start teaching my six week course on creating comics (in Dublin). It’s all built around creating future shocks, but filled, I hope, with interesting/useful observations (and really it’s about any sort of short story writing). Each class is two hours long, and, with the exception of week 5, it’s really a 2 hour lecture and q&as sessions.
This is my second go at teaching this course, and it was interesting to see how it evolved from my first ideas.
My initial pitch looked like this:
Week 1: Coming up with ideas (what makes a future shock, mining ideas, turning those into stories with a twist)
Week 2: Writing a script.
Week 3: Thumbnails
Week 4: Pencils
Week 5: Inking Comics.
Week 6: Cram lettering/colouring in to one week.
Not being exactly sure who would attend such a class, it turned into a “how to write stories for artists” class. While touching on broad drawing techniques (which were heavier on storytelling than actually drawing).
I maintain you don’t need to be a “good” artist to be a good storyteller. You can tell some pretty good stories with stick figures (or just cutting out collages).
I blogged the course as I did it week by week and I intend to do so again. Those blogs will remain free (I’m not a monster!) but I will encourage you to sign up to patreon for any extras!
Tomorrow, week 1, will be about coming up with story ideas, and types of futureshocks/stories and why short stories are the best place to learn. Using some simple word-seeds (I pluck a bunch of nice random words and we start burning through story ideas) the class is pretty packed though so it’s going to be a learning experience for me too.
So, here’s something I’ve literally just finished – it should be spoiler free, you’ll see it in 2000AD eventually.
Page 1, panel 1 (I’ll paraphrase the script here) Opening page. Establishing shot of the exterior of a large refinery (smoking chimneys, filthy) in the middle of a snowy landscape , bad guys 1 have breached a wall in the side of the factory, they have a pair of giant ballistas (for hurling massive sticks like crossbows) Gunfire from inside the refinery as they engage in battle.
All comic drawing is about problem solving. Some writers will have a very clear vision of what they’ve written, some will just know they have stuff they want happening. Sometimes the writers with a clear vision are actually harder – because they’re describing what they see and you’re reconstructing that picture for them (like those puzzles you get where you have to describe the shape you’ve just made to someone who has the same pieces but no idea what you’re looking for).
Breaking this down:
1. 2 x Ballistas (important)
2. Exterior of the filthy refinery, with wall removed.
3. Armies engage.
4. Wall removed.
First thing is, the best way to show this ALL is to get some distance, but with distance it can be hard to show armies (you just can’t draw physically distinct little soldier men) luckily gunfire, s/fx and a general melieu will probably do this job for us.
We want the readers to focus on the battle, while noticing everything around them, and suddenly a solution seems obvious. Sketching it out as a thumb it looks like this:
We’ll put the ballistas either side, drop low to the ground (making it feel like we’re involved, despite the fact the action is happening in the distance) and centre all the action.
Pencils look like this
(digital pencils, thank god for Clip Studio’s perspective rulers, too!)
Inks look like this…
And the draw over (for fans of that kind of thing) looks like this:
The ballistas – at the script reading stage – were a headache, but suddenly they’re doing the job of directing attention in to the battle scene.
Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing today. Hope you like it! (and I remind you: shhh! secret!)
(Looking at this again, I suspect the skys behind the mountains really need to be black to help pop focus, but hey ho!)
Page 1! This strip has only appeared in the irish language, despite the fact it was written in English and stuffed to the gills with puns.
In about a year I think I get the rights back and I can do an english translation. This was cowritten by my sometimes co-writer Scott Ferguson, hopefully the visuals carried enough of an idea that the dialogue didn’t need all the puns.
Page 1: , yo yo and kid yoyo are here to see the man frozen in a block of ice. YoYo demonstrates how stupid the frozen man is, and how much superior he is with his yoyos.
Page 2 Professor time and his time-lards (they’re made of lard!) turn up, they intend to steal the frozen man’s dna to create an army of cavemen!
YoYo isn’t going to let that happen!
Page 3-yoyo and kid yoyo defeat the various timelards (who are all historically accurate recreations of histories greatest warriors … and Albert Enstien) BUT! Prof Time zaps Yoyo back in time! OH NOES!
Page 4: Back in the past, Yoyo is confronted by the ICE AGE! (it’s freezing everything in it’s past) and he finds himself frozen solid, we cut back to Prof Time cutting into the block of ice, ONLY TO DISCOVER THE ICE MAN WAS YOYO the entire time! HURRAH!
And we all agree, that yoyos are the very pinnacle of human civilisation!
Books like this are probably better for writers than artists though. I have a couple of big difficulties with drawing tanks (beyond all the normal difficulties of actually drawing). They are:
How big are people in relation to the tank (3d tank reference objects are brilliantly useful for what the vehicles look like, but useless at giving you a sense of scale) and what the hell is going on inside the tank. As it happens there are some pretty good videos of people exploring the inside of (some) tanks – some of the more well known vehicles have videos touring the crew components. But give me a well drawn diagram everytime.
Anyway, this is gonna take up a fair bit of the next six months… hope you like tanks!
Ah, my dudes, been so busy – three different projects have accidentally collided – it’s a pain when two do, I actually have four but managed to push one back a week or so. All TV storyboarding today (it’s a very weird job).
Again, nothing I can show, so instead, here’s some storyboards for a short film I did a while ago, the film never got funded, but I think the director’s still hoping to go ahead and make it from his own funds. (local amateur film group, nothing big time for me!)
(I hate that I’m sort of half boasting about being busy. I promise, my favourite kind of busy is a single job that lasts for decades, this three jobs nonsense is just awful. Tomorrow the storyboarding is done though – until they last minute rush me. Monday I start teaching in dublin, expect updates about that!)
Comics on hold for today as I ended up doing some TV storyboarding, more of that maybe in my future. Quite enjoy the process of sitting down and figuring out story telling, rather than the usual thing of receiving a script and just going from there. Sadly can’t show you any of it!
Dentist today. Possible one of the most painful visits I’ve ever had to the dentist (marginally beating the last visit when I popped in to replace a bit of a filling that had popped out only for the dentist to announce I needed a tooth removed, that is a day that will live long in infamy)
AND WORSE! Nothing got done. It was literally too painful. So we’re giving it a day or two to rest before proceeding.
My dentist is also one of the ones going private. I find myself entirely frustrated about this, firstly I genuinely believe in the NHS and am willing to pay more for the damn thing to work properly, second of all, sure sometimes I can afford the odd private dental treatment, but I’m a freelancer, at some point I’ll be faced with needing dental work and not be able to afford the damn thing, and finally – and this is particuarly frustrating, now I have to be an expert on what detnal plans are best for me. I don’t want to know the difference between dentplan and bupa dentists. I DON’T CARE. I just, occasionally, want a dentist.
(Back on friday)
My patreon is still sort of functioning, obviously I haven’t updated it in some time, and I feel a bit guilty about that, but I’ve decided to consider it a gift from some people to me to keep you know… internetting. (I’ve given people lots of opportunities to cancel!) There’s a bit of a chunk of change once a year in there that I can download to my bank account (not serious money, but enough to make the effort worth it) and I don’t like locking my posts behind a paywall, though I do like having somewhere I can consider off-the-record (for advance looks and so on)
I’ve just linked the patreon to the blog, not sure how that will work out, we’ll see I suppose.
What does this mean to you? absolutely nothing. If you wanna sign up for my patreon, I can guarantee you nothing beyond my forgetting it exists and then suddenly remembering, but equally I can guarantee as little as you might think it is, in this perilous freelance life once a year it is actually make a quantifiable difference.
Youngest son had a sleepover, well, more of a talk-over last night. First time he’s hosted. Kept wife up all night from yakking, so may also be the last time for that.
The radio DJ Steve Wright died, he was a fixture on radio in the UK since the 80s, and as a spotty teen working my first day job in the mid-to-late 80s, he was the background noise of every single afternoon in work.
The shop, Botanic Computer Centre, was a family owned/run shop that started as a radio hardware shop, in 1949 (originally called Ideal Radio)- run by two brothers Bert and Davey (though actually Davey did a lot of the legwork, it was almost certianly Bert’s shop). By the time I started they were old men, in their 60s and Davey, who spent a surprising amount of time driving me from job to job (we’d sell Amstrad PCW8256s and PCW9512s – giant beasts of machines, with integral crt monitors, and often with vast daisy wheel style printers) and in the process he’d turn on the radio, hear Steve Wright, then complain about “bloody yaya music” and turn it to radio ulster (which was more talk radio)
I find the older I get the more I hear music and think “that sounds like bloody yaya music”.
Me at work in the sister shop to Botanic – A&F Corner. I suspect this was actually around early 90s?
It’s weird when a company you worked for for so long no longer exists, especially an IT company, but then Bert – a very smart man, with – even in to his lates 60s/70s was fascinated by tech (I remember us looking at the images from the first rover on mars) always thought the internet might be a flash in the pan.
This weekend finished part four of the Dredd story I’m doing (it’s six parts – two more to go! Always excited to finish something, a final sprint towards the end) it started with me determined to do the entire thing with a brush, but, frankly, my hands and eyes and possibly glasses aren’t really up to it. It went to half brush/half pen, and finally all digital.
I think everything is now likely to be digital (though I’m aware, I’ve been here before).
Managed to wrangle it back on deadline too.
Did a couple of pages of a pitch series too – three pages of that to go.
And just started a new thing. Five issues, 20 pages per issue.
There’s an unfortunate bit of overlap, but hopefully it won’t be too bad – now kids are back in school and my wife’s arm is healing enough to get some work done.
Tomorrow I head off to a local TV company to do some story boarding, tbh I could do without it – but it’s hard – impossible even – to turn down work, especially when I came into this year with nothing at all lined up, except bills.
The five issue series should see me through to the new year with work (sept/oct/nov/dec/jan) and after that, who knows?
Hopefully one of the random pitches will find a home. I’d like more american work, this five issue is with a US company but I struggle to get US work (I want to say I’m a poor networker, but I’m good at meeting people I’m just horrendous at follow up, and it’s follow up that gets the work – there’s a part of my brain that just doesn’t do well at contacting people after a few months and saying “Oh hey! Remember me!” but we all gotta do it.).
Here’s an attic sketch. It starts with a quick google sketch and then picking some elements of an attic I think will quickly distil the essence so we can see it’s an attic from multiple views. It also needs to break a couple of rules (gotta be taller to fit in what I need to fit in). Then you play a game of “how many things can I think of that will fit in here” (and you amaze yourself with how limited your imagination is). Try it!
Attic: boxes. Big bags filled with stuff. Old mirror. Bird cage. Rolled up carpet. Stacked newspapers of a specific date. Brush. Light bulb hanging from ceiling (which means you need to figure out where the electric is coming from, so probably visible cable of light bulb tracing down to either a wall socket (unlikely) or a cable trailing behind a bolstered wall), a entrance (is it a side entrance? unlikely, from below? probably, trap door like thing) more boxes and er… oh god..
And then you try and not draw all of that stuff because the story isn’t about that (unless there’s a specific prop you’ll need later)
I can’t remember when or where I first read this little bit of writing wisdom, certainly it was a long time ago and it’s stuck with me, though not for writing. It’s from the book “100 ways to improve your writing” by Gary Provost, I’ve since ordered the book up (it’s a fun little collection of snippets like this that I’m sure can help any writer). I’ll let you read it and tell you what I think…
This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.
So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words. Write music.
Ok. Now, as this applies to comics – writing comics isn’t writing. Your reader will only ever read the words you’ve written if they’re included in dialogue or captions (or any other narrative tricks you’ve picked up), for the most part you’re writing for an artist and there it’s about clarity and being succinct. (Five words sentences? Great as long as it’s of the line “Dredd stands firm, looking grim.”)
But what is important is that the lessons within this little gem be applied across the board to your comics. Instead of “five word sentences” think “small identical sized panels” – a few? ok, But then let them explode! Build up energy with a bunch of panels, burst out with a splash. Make the panels interesting to look at and it will be interesting. Humans are easily bored, it’s a genetic thing (I once saw an experiment with a sea cucumber showing how even something with barely a brain can be bored) it’s why flashing lights attract us, why sitting still can make things invisible and why the coctail party phenomena works.
Your comics can be guilty of many crimes, but boring should never be one of them.
