Make a Mini-Comic!

 I love my special studio class with Carol Tyler this quarter! She is a well-known and talented comic book artist and writer, and she is great at imparting her vast knowledge to her students. I just read volumes one and two of her three-volume masterpiece, You'll Never Know, and it was fantastic!

The cover of Carol Tyler's second volume, Collateral Damage

 There is a LOT to learn about the technical processes involved in creating a graphic novel. Ms. Tyler demands that we follow the "rules." These are strict industry standards which exist because of the publishing/ business side of things, and also are a part of an honored tradition for which all of her students gain a lot of respect.
She also demands that we begin with the basics: proper tools, proper inking and layout, and simple, clear storytelling. Her advice ALWAYS helps create a better final product.
In an earlier post I described the process of making a four page mini-bio comic. That project was much more daunting that it may seem, and creating an eight page mini comic was exponentially more challenging. How do you tell a whole story, with a beginning, middle, and end, on eight tiny pages? How do you use illustrations to advance the story without being redundant? How do you find the time to draw the pages, ink them, scan them and digitize them, lay them out properly, print them, cut them, fold them, and staple them before they are due? Answer: you don't. I finished mine an hour late, running in all sweaty from Kinko's across campus. Every student had difficulty to some degree, and we all fell short to some degree, but most importantly, we all know what we did wrong and how to fix it (thanks to dear Ms. Tyler!).
At the time I was creating this mini comic, I was drowning in schoolwork from my other courses, mostly from an art theory/philosophy class. I decided to write about that class, mostly because by brain was too fried to do anything else.

This is the "splash panel"- and it's not quite splashy enough. I should have incorporated some imagery to make it more appealing.

Introducing my main character: Me! (And yes, I know I'm not that skinny. But the cartoon version of me is.)

The titles and authors shown are straight from the required reading list on the syllabus. Notice all the Heidegger? Our professor LOVES Heidegger. My favorite part of the whole project: the hang-in-there kitty in the background.

Actual quotes from the readings.

Philosophers like to make up their own words. They aren't always in dictionaries.

Don't ask me what happens here. It made sense at the time. My brain breaks- because I'm thinking too hard?

Again, it's not clear what's happening here... The idea was that in my struggle to gasp for air, I knocked over the leaning tower of books, which has tragic consequences...

I do like my last panel. I just wish I had been able to spend more time getting to this point. The important thing is I know it's not great, and I'll know how to fix it the next time.

Based on what I learned from this project, here are some tips for those of you wanting to attempt your own mini-comic:
1. Make sure your story makes sense, and has a logical beginning, middle, and end.
2. Make the splash panel inviting! It's the only way to attract a potential reader, so it has to be good! Make sure the title is relevant to the story, and include your name and date.
3. Don't waste an entire page with the word "CRASH!" or any other onomatopoeia, for that matter.  You need that space to advance the story!
4. Work larger, and shrink it down after scanning it to make it fit. The key here is to make sure the larger original is proportional to the final page size.
5. Ink the panel border first. If you mess up, you can always start over. If you've already spent an hour inking the artwork and the letters, and THEN you mess up the border, you WILL CRY.
6. The Ames Lettering Guide: Learn It, Use It, Love It!
7. This part is tricky: laying out the pages for double-sided printing! The best way is to make a "dummy" first. Fold up a sheet of paper in quarters, number the pages, and then unfold them to see the layout. Here's an illustration of that process:

Peek in between folded pages and number them, 1 through 8. Once it's unfolded, you'll see how the pages should be laid out and printed, front to back.

I am currently working on our final project: a full size four-pager with 36-48 panels. It's a LOT OF WORK... I'll be posting the results by the end of the quarter. Don't worry, it will be a lot better than my mini comic!

Update as of May, 2011:
I FINALLY showed this mini-comic to Andre, the professor who taught the class which inspired the story. He loved it, especially the stack of books with all the Heidegger. We have discussed possible sequel ideas. I like the one where dead philosophers come back as zombies, invade our classroom, and freak out because we're interpreting their ideas all wrong. Heeheehee.