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Advice for Aspiring Comic Creators and Graphic Novelists

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Advice for Aspiring Comic Creators and Graphic Novelists

We are often asked how to pursue a career in graphic novels or comics, so we thought we’d write this blog post.

So, what advice can we offer to aspiring comic creators and graphic novelists?

1. There isn’t one path to follow. As with many artistic or creative careers, each individual will have his or her own path, that they will have to create along the way.

2. As yet there is no school in Britain that is solely dedicated to learning the trade of graphic novelist or cartoonist, although now there are a few in the US (such as The Center for Cartoon Studies, and SAW) and several in France. Some universities have courses on graphic novels, such as the University of Dundee’s MLitt/PGDip Comics Studies. An option could be to go to an art school on an illustration degree. We just learnt as we went along.

3. Being a graphic novelist is brilliant as you get to do what you love, but beware: it’s tough! It requires long hours of work, and most likely you will be working freelance and have no job or monthly salary security.That’s if you’re lucky to get work. Very few creators actually make a living. We do make a living from making comics, but we didn’t at first, for quite a few years, and we certainly don’t take it for granted.

4. Be dedicated to perfecting your writing and drawing skills.

5. Read and learn as much as you can about the medium. Read comics, graphic novels and books.

6. Here are four books you should read on how to make comics:

Making Comics by Scott McCloud

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

Drawing words and Writing pictures by Matt Madden and Jessica Abel

Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative by Will Eisner

7. Go to conventions, look at what is out there and how it’s made, meet other creators, show your work.

8. We’ve written a couple of blog posts with a few tips on making comics, the first one focusing on writing, the second one on page layout.

When we deliver comic and graphic novel workshops in schools, libraries and at literary festivals we are always very happy to see the young people and adults being creative and producing exciting work. Sometimes we even receive finished comics in the post and are often impressed by the high standard. Last week we had the pleasure of seeing the winning comic in Alloa Academy’s graphic novel competition by the 5th year pupil Euan Grieve.

Winner of the Alloa Academy
graphic novel competition

5 Tips on Getting Started Creating a Graphic Novel – Part Two

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5 Tips on Getting Started Creating a Graphic Novel – Part Two

In our last blog post, we gave 5 tips on getting started creating a graphic novel or comic, focusing on writing. In this post we’ll give 5 tips on page layout, or thumbnails.

Making several drafts of page layout, or thumbnails, is often necessary in order to tell a story in the best way possible. With layout, the possibilities are endless, and this is where you can really take advantage of the dynamics of sequential art, playing with and balancing out words and pictures, space and composition, and pacing, to full effect.



A typical thumbnail page or layout page for our Louis graphic novels.

1. Choose a layout style which suits your type of story. If you story is action packed, a dynamic layout such as that used in manga for example, with lots of angled panels or panels spreading over to the bleed, may be most suitable. Or if your story is more realistic, like a slice of life for instance, you may want to choose a more simple, straightforward layout. For our Louis graphic novels, we use a 9 panel square grid rhythm as a basis. This echoes the square format of the books, and reinforces the picture book feel which we wanted to create. This rhythm also suits Louis’ monotonous life.

9 panel grid rhythm: a page extract from
Louis – Red Letter Day by Metaphrog (new edition).

2. Change the pacing to suit the different types of scenes. Pacing refers to the rhythm of the panels and the flow of reading. You can have a basic rhythm (for example, as in the 9 panel grid of the Louis books) and play around with it, depending on what is taking place. On the Louis page below, we slowed the action down by using a big panel at the start, and then speeded it up with small panels.

Varying the panel size: a page extract from
Louis – Red Letter Day by Metaphrog (new edition).

3. The whole page is a panel. See the page spread as a whole. As each panel needs to be structured and composed, so does a whole page, and so does a page spread. A page and a page spread need to be pleasing to the eye and also tell the story at a glance. For example, a Louis page often contains the most important information, or the key panel, right in the middle of the page. On the page below, Louis’ pet bird FC is very ill: a close up of FC lying unconscious is placed right in the middle of the page.

Extract from Louis – Night Salad.
 
 
In the page spread below, the layout echoes the content of the panels: long horizontal panels to suggest the vastness of the desert, set opposite and in contrast to long vertical panels to highlight the dangers on the cliff.
 
Double page spread from Louis – Night Salad.

4. Use empty space. It’s in the gutters (the gaps) between the panels that the imagination of the reader goes wild. You can achieve great effect using blank space. It can put emphasis on an image, for instance. Or it can even help reinforce ideas or what the character is feeling. In the page below, we placed a single small panel on an empty page to emphasise Louis’ loneliness.


Extract from Louis – Night Salad.

5. Think of what the page turner is. Unlike novels without pictures, when turning a comic page, you can’t help but immediately see what’s going on on the whole page. So if you have a surprise panel, it can be a good idea to show it after a turn of the page, as we did on the page below.

On this page extract from Louis – Red Letter Day,
see how we established a clear page turner.

5 Tips on Getting Started Creating a Graphic Novel – Part One

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5 Tips on Getting Started Creating a Graphic Novel – Part One
We’ve been mentoring the artist Gillian Steel through the making of her graphic novel (see previous post here). It’s given us the idea of blogging a few tips on how to get started making a graphic novel.

Whether you’re thinking of writing and drawing the entire book yourself, or of working with a writer or an artist, it’s a good idea to have an all round knowledge of how comics and graphic novels work.

Naturally, there are no set rules for creating a comic, and every artist or creator will approach things uniquely. There is no right way to begin a graphic novel story and there can of course be an exciting experimentational period of creativity before the exact direction of the story emerges.

In this initial blog post we’ll look at 5 simple tips for writing a comic story.

1. Writing a script. For readability a story should have a direction and a structure, including beginning, middle and end. Writing a script first can be an important step in planning a story. The script should basically be made of dialogue, and where appropriate, and if you choose to write this way, narrative text. Cut back on descriptions. Or even better, eliminate them altogether (except the ones you write for youself as a guide, for example notes on image content). You can of course create preparatory sketches and get visual ideas down at the same time.
The above is obviously not a set rule. Some creators think visually first, rather than in words, and jump straight to thumbnails (see Tip 2), without writing a script. Some do a bit of both. A rare few might even “improvise” and jump straight to final artwork, drawing the story panel by panel without detailed advance planning: Chris Ware, for example has worked in this way. When we make a comic, we both have an input in the story and its content, but John writes the script, and Sandra works from it to produce layout or thumbnails.



Example of a page of script for our graphic novel Louis – Red Letter Day


2. Making thumbnails. Thumbnails, or layout, are basically a rough draft of your story in words and pictures. At this point the artwork is just made of sketches. This is a crucial stage in the planning, as it is where you can work out how the story is actually reading visually. At this stage you can also try out different versions of thumbnails, to find the best possible way to lay out your story. Sometimes we have made as many as 12 drafts of a thumbnail sequence before getting it right! This obviously saves an enormous amount of work later on: imagine you did 12 pages of final artwork, only to realise that the story doesn’t read well and you’d like to redo it. Final artwork can be extremely time consuming to produce.

You can thumbnail chunks of pages at a time, or even better, the entire book. Thumbnailing the entire book has the advantage that you can then read the whole story and decide that say, the beginning needs to be reworked and improved, or that you need to add a sequence in the middle, or develop a character further. It gives you perspective and a better feel for the pacing of the whole story.

Example of thumbnails, or layout pages, for Louis – Red Letter Day.
Extract from the making-of section in the new hardback
edition of Louis – Red Letter Day.


3. Edit, edit, edit. Whether you write a script first or jump straight to thumbnails, don’t be afraid to rework. And then to rework some more. Cut back on word count. A comic story takes a lot more space to tell than a novel, because the art takes so much space. This means that your story can very quickly expand to thousands of pages. Also, there’s not much room in a comic panel to fit text, and, words and pictures work best together when they are balanced. What that balance is depends on your style, but a page heavy in text is likely to put off a reader, or even to lose them all together. So try to keep things succinct. Edit and change the words until they are as good as they can be. Edit and change the layout until you have found the best way to tell your story.

4. The important information goes in the text. Every reader reads a graphic novel novel differently. Some absorb all the information, text and images, carefully. Others skip over the pictures and only read the text. So make sure all your important story elements are in the dialogue and or narrative text, not only in the images, as they may end up being missed all together.

5. Give your brain time to incubate. Leaving a story aside for a few days or more is sometimes necessary. You can come back to it more objectively, take stock of what you have produced and see what needs to be changed much more clearly. Your brain is doing work for you without you knowing about it. Problems can be solved when you stop thinking about them for a while and come back to them afresh.

In our next post, we’ll look at thumbnailing and page layout, so stay tuned.

We’d be interested in hearing how other people approach their own creative process. How do you work and create your own comics? Do you have any tips? You are most welcome to leave your comments below this post!