How to Draw (one of my) Comics

That’s page one of the two-page spread “Unhinged” and also page nine of a ten-page work-in-progress sequence tentatively titled “Magic of Comics,” which is a sequel to my “Metacomics” sequence published in INKS last spring.

The new page doesn’t make a whole lot of sense out of context (the character on the right was accidentally doubled during a saw-a-person-in-half magic trick gone entertainingly wrong), but it is a good page to illustrate my step-by-step creative process.

Step one is about as humble as it gets. Sloppy stick figures:

That rudimentary sketch followed (or at least accompanied since I’m not sure which came first) a three-panel script:

1

(wide panel frame)

(one is standing in the box with door open, head and feet sticking out; the other beside him, she’s on other side of box)

H & H: Please don’t cut me in half again.

2

(wide panel frame)

(box is headless now, other angles head)

S: Duck your head.

H in box: Like this?

H outside: (identical pose) No, like this.

3

(wide panel frame)

(box is now footless, other is crouching as though a foot off the ground)

S: Now lift your feet.

H outside: Like this?

H in box: (identical pose) No, like this.

Since I knew the magician’s box was the central element, I drew it first (and added the hinges later):

Then came the photo research. Even though my cartoon style is rudimentary, the results are better if I’m looking at something. For each figure below I probably copied and pasted a half dozen others into a file, before selecting favorites and arranging them in a page mock-up:

It helps to have already visually designed the characters (which I detailed last year in the posts Six Cartoons in Search of an Author and What Race Are My Cartoons?). I just had to relearn how to draw them, using the above photos one pose at a time:

After I drew each, I copied and pasted the figure onto the page, which slowly grew into this:

I created my own alphabet for the first sequence, meticulously copying and pasting each letter to form words. This time I’m using a digital stylus pad and drew each word uniquely:

It took me a while to get the sizing almost right (I ended up shrinking the words more later), before I added speech balloons for the figure on the right (each character has their own distinctive balloon style):

The color stage isn’t about color — I just need literally any color to block out shapes to superimpose patterns later. Except for the gray of her (connotatively brown) skin and his (actually) gray shoes and tie (the conceptual weirdness of that combination deserves its own future blog post).

To restore the details (most especially faces and words blotted out by the gray areas), I copy and paste the original art over top again:

Then I open my “suit texture” file to overlay the blue:

I’d made a different texture for the first sequence, which I happily misplaced and chanced onto this better one from an earlier project. I like how the texture is not consistent:

For the dress, I use a column of text taken from the Moby Dick chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale.” The words are always illegible, but I still enjoy my own inside joke.

The orange bits along the bottom are the same only rotated 90 degrees to represent the inside of the fabric:

Final step, draw and select patterns within the words to make wrinkles, which gets back to the finished image at the top of the page:

Oh, and as always, this is done in the antique software Microsoft Paint.

But I did use pen and paper when I was in elementary school — as I discovered last week while clearing out boxes from our attic.

Here’s my first comic book, drawn almost a half-century ago (and which does not deserve its own future blog post, but will probably receive one anyway):