hey i was stalking ur blog lol and wondering do you ever script out ur shorter comics or do you just figure out dialog when doing thumbnails for the pages?

The sketchbook comics I do are drawn and written in the moment usually but on separate pages so I can cut out panels and whole sections of text or false starts easily. The lettering is straight to ink and the drawing is straight to pencil– with lots of erasing sometimes.. – I guess that’s why they’re more separate drawings and less panel to panel actions. 

In my real work stuff (warheads, King city) Where it’s all drawn on the page how it looks in print.  I tend to figure out the rough dialog in layouts and then I type out most of what I’m writing, mostly just to spell check it. and I pencil everything much rougher– and rule out the text in pencil before inking it. 

 In the past I wrote and did layouts more scene by scene but I’ve been thinking of doing it for myself more like how I write for other people where I layout a whole issue before I draw it. (here’s a Prophet script) Ideally it’ll give me a chance to outdo the layouts once I get to the final page. 

Recently I’ve been getting really inspired by my pal Farel Dalrymple’s process. He’s mixing in how he does sketchbook comics into his finished pages- Switching up how big he draws or even if it’s painted by hand of done on the computer– He’ll hand letter the pages he’s working on and then go back and often rework the lettering on the side of a page to paste up fix in photoshop.–which maybe doesn’t sound like much but seeing that to me was an epiphany– because I often get so slowed down by making the lettering the FINAL lettering– the idea that I can hand letter a placeholder and then mess with it later was freeing.  

(a page from his Proxima centauri that Image is running now) 

He did a series called: It will all hurt a few years back- that Image just collected. that he did much more like a sketchbook comic, making it up as he went along. I feel like you can see the difference between his finished and looser stuff– but I don’t think it effects the quality of the work or how much fun it is to read– it’s just different. – so yeah more of that in my own work is the goal. –