MAKING THE PAGE


Posted to Warren Ellis' Delphi Forum, relayed here.


The question was, how does one make a comic page?


I like the idea of thinking of each page as a paragraph. Putting in a hook at the end of every page is exhausting work, and I think can be mitigated by having a story whole that's engaging enough that you keep going to see what will happen.

I write what I call a fat outline. Fat because it's a dump of everything I've ruminated on up to that point (rumination in the head is the first step), and when I'm dumping it all out (like a kid upending the full toybox) I also add in anything that occurs to me, comes to me, or reveals itself as I write. Sometimes it's clarification of a scene, transitions, dialogue will appear full-blown, a character's dress, the layout of a panel, le must visual.

THEN I pull off hunks of the fat outline and flesh them out, clarifying, adding subtext, slaughtering scenes than grind forward motion to a halt or are out of character. When I'm drawing, still more goes in. When I letter is when the last merciless edits are made, or bits might be added for clarification.


Or, to describe using Stephen King's metaphor of revealing a fossil (from ON WRITING): I walk around and around the place where I'm pretty sure there's a great fossil. I poke a bit. If I find a skull, I stay. (If I don't, sometimes I come back later, sometimes not.) Then, I put strings and stakes around it with lots of extra room to manuever. I unearth the skull, usually to my great joy the teeth are intact. I continue brushing away dirt until I have the while skeleton revealed, but not removed.

Excited, I have the juice to go on. I kept brushing away grime, tossing away knucklebones of lesser skinks, maybe keeping the entire thighbone of some other creature to examine later (I often find the thighbone belong to a critter not too far away--CATHEDRAL CHILD had quite a few thighbones in it that LOOKED like they belonged with CC, but turned out to belong to CLOCKWORK ANGELS and IRONCLAD PETAL.)

Finally, the fossil is all out. The last long push is to clean the fossil up, reassemble it, and show it to the world.


I find myself adding something and taking something away at every single step to make the work better. And, as Carla Speed McNeil says, to avoid heads or bodies just yakkin' it oop. I do try to make sure I have something really fun to draw on each page. "Fun" not always being "pretty" and certainly not "funny", but an image I really like, that I really think gives the page punch. On the reverse of that, some pages just refuse to be zippy, punchy or whatever. They're the crossing guards herding your story through the busy intersection: they aren't purty or deep, but they do keep your story-kids from getting smooshed by traffic.

Oh yeah: never stop studying! It's a joy to be able to see your work get better as your add to your store of knowledge and apply it.