Working to The Social Network OST and bits and pieces of Joe Hisaishi.  No words.  Just melodies pouring in to help the conversion of text to visuals.

I am about three-quarters of the way through.  I’ve had my second coffee.  My wife is asleep.  There is a slight drizzle outside and a chill to the air that plays on my fatigue and determination in equal parts.

Laying a book out tends to be the most tedious and challenging part of making comic books.  At its heart, comics are storybooks, and thumbnailing is the very first time the story is being told.  By the writer.  To you.  This is when the soul of the comic is formed, and when you boil it down to its purest form.  And what that purest form is to you is what it’s going to be for everyone else.  This is the best bit.

Visual Problem Solving, Alex calls it.  It’s no lie that it’s not easy getting a story across with no words.  But when it is done successfully, it is that much more powerful because the reader is a participant in the story’s telling.

It is a cold Tuesday morning and I am making comic books.

Script and Art by John “The Reverend” Amor

Letters by Rey “Potent Citrus” Siasar

Urban Animal #2 will be available for purchase via cash or massage at the Second Cebu Comics Convention this October 1st.

In reviewing my scripts and self-editing, I find that I am often guilty of using redundant dialogue, so I’ve been keeping to a set of guidelines as I go along:

1) Dialogue should be brief.
2) It should add to reader’s present knowledge.
3) It should eliminate daily conversational niceties.
4) It should push the narrative forward.
5) It should reveal the speaker’s character, directly or indirectly.
6) It should show relationships among people.

— Elizabeth Bowen

I have a fairly good ear for dialogue, but where it gets wonky is when I have to make different people talk in different ways.  There’s this joke about Silver Age comics not exactly being known for their character-driven dialogue — when Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, and the Flash get into a car and drive into a tunnel, if they continue whatever conversation they were having in the daylight, now that all you have is word balloons in the dark, you will have no fucking clue who is saying what.  I heard this on a podcast once, and it just cracked me up.  It speaks to the importance of having dialogue genuinely reflect the speaker’s personality, and that’s what I’m trying to build on today.

Anyway, below is a brief breakdown of best practices I’ve seen my collaborating wordsmiths use in their scripting format.  Note, what is discussed here has nothing to do with actual story but more what the script looks like when it is sent to the artist and other people working on the book.

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Comics are a collaborative medium and as such should, ideally, be easy for multiple heads to work on.

1) Indicate important elements at the first page of every scene. Even if the element doesn’t appear until later, if you want a character to wear a specific sort of hat, the pavement to have a specific cobble, or the skyline to have a certain hue to it, indicate this early on and not on the panel it comes into focus.  Artists need to approach the scene with all these factors in mind beforehand, so it is vital that they know what they are or else they run the risk of drawing something completely different.

2) At the page header, include a panel count. Page 4 (6 panels).  While true that an artist takes each and every panel as it comes to make it as eloquent as possible, also note that the page has a finite amount of real estate.  How big you make the first panel directly affects the size of the last.  That action sequence in the middle of the page directly affects your establishing shot up top.  Letting your artist know in advance how many panels you’ll be needing mentally equips him as to how best to approach the page’s flow.

3) One action per panel. A number of writers, especially those coming from straight prose, forget that one panel can’t show a man opening a door and walking through it at the same time.  It’s an understandable fault, but if you want to keep the artist sane, do try to remedy it as quickly as possible.  If it proves a difficult habit to break, be open to your artist’s suggestions to either remove redundant panels or create addendum panels to help progress the page narrative.  Remember that your artist wants to tell the story as clearly as possible as well, so help him help you.

That’s it for tonight.  I love you all, and Izzy you owe me a backrub.

#1 Artists are proud of everything they create. Nope.  More often that not, we are painfully aware of how a piece could have been better, even when our peers compliment us or at least gently bend us over.  We know we can be better.  And while most of us can take constructive criticism like normal people, also keep in mind that no one sits at a desk, whips out his art equipment, and intentionally tries to suck.

#2 Artists are insulted by reference material. No way.  There may be a handful of artists who scoff at drawing from reference, but the majority appreciate it and tend to consider it a genuine effort to make our job easier, may you be a collaborating writer or even just a fan commissioning a piece.  Nah.  Whatever helps us make the finished piece better is usually appreciated.

#3 We like flowery scripts. This is a weird one.  Some writers tend to fashion scripts thinking of their collaborators as the audience.  Though there may be a bit of merit to that, nine times out of ten, an artist will prefer that you just say an alley is dark rather than “oppressed by the shadows of the adjacent concrete monoliths.”  While yes, it serves to help the imagery, keep in mind that you don’t need to sell us on the story.  We are already working with you.

#4 We don’t need praise. We do.  Admit it, artists.  The biggest reason you’re still on Deviant Art is the ego stroking.  Take me for example, after a day’s work, I’d like to hear more than “ooh, that’s nice.”  What’s the matter?  Am I a puppy?  Did you pass out because my page is so awesome and that’s why you can’t say anything more?  All I’m saying is… If you’re a writer receiving pages and you like them, tell your artist you do.  Don’t just ask for the next one.  Show the love.

#5 We’re always in the mood to draw. This is probably the most common misconception, and understandably so.  When comic fans see us at cons, it’s at artist alley.  When writers hit us up, it’s within the context that you are a collaborator whose job it is to illustrate a story.  But of course, just like every OB-GYN gets sick of staring at vaginas every now and then, sometimes we just want to sit at our desk and NOT be holding a pencil.

So that’s it.  Five common misconceptions about artists.  I’m pretty sure I’m wrong about a couple of them and very right about others, but this is all from experience, so bear with me.  Now back to work…

Aside from camera placement and shot angle, two other very good uses of thumbnails are the preconception of Shadow Placement and Shorthand of Expression.  Figuring out where your shadows go in this miniature version of the page saves you a lot of time and ink.  It’s not just shadows really, but blacks in general.  If the page reads smoothly as a small sketch, there’s no reason for the finished version to be weak compositionally.

As for shorthanding expression — it can get tedious when you’re already drawing the page and you need to keep checking the script to see if the emotion on your character’s face fits what he’s saying and doing.  If you indicate this in your thumbnails ahead of time, you save yourself quite a bit of hassle later on.

Here, people, is the mock cover to the second issue of Urban Animal.  I’ve been drawing it on and off for the past couple of weeks, and today I was blessed with a three-hour window to just slap some color on it.

I had come up with various plays for the layout of this thing — from showing the main character in mid-transformation, to a dinosaur doing an Abbey Road crossing — but I decided to just go with my gut and hint at a key moment within the issue.  I was initially conflicted about whether to make the rex snout bloody or not, but the deep red color turned out to be a nice point of interest.

When in doubt, go for the gross out.

Download Urban Animal #1.

Download in PDF

This .cbr file features the first full issue of the mini-series, minus the bonus sketches and introductory text.  Urban Animal is © John Amor and Fort Bastard Studios.

Download Urban Animal #1.

Download in PDF