Comics Process Showcase - Skatergirl edition

2024-07-19

Hi again! How has the weather been for everyone lately? It's been okay on our end, but the heat wave today has me feeling like one of those packets of vegetables you put in the microwave to steam. Thankfully my studio-rat-room is quite cool, and the feeling of the metal legs on my chair is fantastic on my autistic little feet LOL. I've been ruminating more on where to go from here with the moe talk from last time, and I had some really great input from my peers about the creation and evolution of genres, which I'd love to use as a framework to talk more in depth about the cute girls do cute things/moe genre, but I'm gonna keep that in my pocket for another day.

For today's post specifically I wanted to showcase my work so far on this short 1 page comic we've been tasked to do for summer school :3. Since this isn't really a tutorial thing, I'm gonna glaze over quite a lot of info that I think is really important to keep in mind when working on comics, but I may talk a little about those topics more in depth and with an appropriate amount of clarity so people can actually learn something from it. As such, just expect more chattering from a madman as opposed to any real insightful words ahaha.

Since I tend to gravitate towards character-focused narratives, I'd used that as my spring board for the initial concept. I had just recently discovered Chica Umino's work, and I was really inspired by those baby-doll eyes.

[Above: art from Chica Umino's 'Honey and Clover']

I took that vibe, with a little bit of Popeye's own Olive Oyl sprinkled in, and like an alchemical reaction my weird little femme was born! Her design practically punched me in the face, it was a really easy one that came like nothing. I also gotta add another added bit of credit to Keith Stack for his absolutely ridiculous funny lesbian comics which had a big hand in giving me the idea of a stupid lesbo funny comic in the first place!

With our protagonist down, I just needed to make an appropriate butch for her to be obsessed with. Lately, my baby has been watching/reading a lot of sapphic stories, and as an homage to them I decided to base the love interest on them.

From there the story really kind of fell into place, cool butch skates, falls over, the heroic femme saves them, and they kiss and ride into the sunset... is a lot easier said than executed in just one measley page!!!!

For all my non-comic-artist readers, the act of writing a one page comic is a notoriously difficult task. Having a full character arc described in one page (Establishing the world, creating a problem, subverting expectations, solving the problem, and a conclusion) is really difficult in the cramped space of one page. This is especially difficult because theres only a certain amount of panels you can comfortably have on a page, which changes drastically depending on how big the finished piece gets to be. This isn't a hard and fast rule of course, but it is true more often than not. If you pick up a manga, the general amount of panels you can get tends to be between 5-6 (excluding any tiny panels for setting a scene, as these don't have a large amount of information in them). In an american standard size comic, you tend to have anywhere from 9-12 panels, while in a european (primarily french/belgian) comic the average number is more like 12-14. This does directly corrolate with how big the actual paper its printed on is, because the bigger the paper the more text, information, and drawings you can stuff on it. Of course, this in itself has its own difficulties, since an A3 sized comic book page can be more difficult to read than not :3.

There are more reasons than just the size that can contribute to the difficulty of writing a one page comic, but it would take me all night to list every single reason I can think of, and way longer to demonstrate them all. So for my sake, just believe me when I say, writing a one page comic is hard mode.

With all that in mind, here's a taste of that creative process. Not shown here are many many many failed attempts at thumbnailing this page, as well as a vague script I'd written for myself. I think its good to point out that I usually go art first or dialogue first, depending on how the initial inspiration comes to me. A lot of my currently published/finished comics are art first because these comics tend to be a bit more superficial. Meanwhile my dialogue first, or to be more specific prose first, comics tend to be more complex in their ideology, and the art takes a bit of a backseat to that.

I hope that with time I'll be able to merge both approaches, but as I currently am in my comics journey that's still a bit of a future dream.

Next comes the layout stage, which is essentially taking the mess that is my thumbnails and trying to assign proper composition, facial expressions, and really trying to hone in on the overall story. One thing I personally tend to do is sketch out key poses/expressions seperately to try and get a nice exciting and fluid image to work off of. This is also pretty helpful to me as I struggle to draw within the actual panel, and framing is easier post-drawing for me. Because of this particular style of work, I scanned in those pages and photobashed them into the following final layout:

Here I've also added some provisional dialogue which I definitely didn't think too hard about, and will probably get all up in a tizzy about later on XD. I tried to use CSP's panelling tools to create the panels in this layout, so I'd have a nice clean and actually symmetrical line to trace over later one, because I honestly just hate the look of straight lines in my comics LOL... One thing you might notice is that I avoid cleaning up my sketches at this point. the reason for that is that I actually find it easier to draw on a messy page as opposed to a blank one, I don't know why that is to be honest! Finally (almost finally) I took this layout, printed it out, and I've slowly been working on pencilling the final page. This is a part of the process that's kind of new to me since I tend to just wing it? But I'm trying to get a clean expressive foundation to use when finally inking :3

And so with that you're all up to date with where I'm at with this project! In a future post I might talk about the final piece and how I feel about it, but till then I hope everyone's had a nice cool day, cuz I definitely haven't!!

Currently Listening to: My partner watching tiktoks across from me on our tiny dinner table.