tonycliff

Lettering Chapter Two, or "Making Things Difficult"

Added 2022-04-15 20:58:15 +0000 UTC

Usta be, I would write out my story as a long manuscript, almost novel-style. As previously discussed, I am not doing that this time. Instead, I'm using whatever this approach is.

I sit in front of the page in Photoshop, text cursor blinking, paper arrayed all around me. As I've progressed from notes through thumbnails through value thumbnails to the finished pages, I've been re-writing the text. I'm guessing about 2/3 of the time the original text makes it through, but sometimes it gets changed because, I don't know, I bet I had a brilliant idea. But this process does not leave me with a "master" document to which I can refer. So I get to consult these, the original thumbnails:

or these, the value thumbnails:

or this, the final artwork, where maybe if I can still see the blue placeholder balloons (you gotta draw them in because balloons are important compositional elements), sometimes I've changed the text again, on a whim.

I have to consult the earliest version because who knows, maybe my first pass was the best. I made those thumbnails a long time ago, for better or worse. On one hand, they're valuable because they were written during a process when I was primarily focused on the flow of the text and the movement of the story. On the other hand, I've been sitting with this material for months as I've been drawing it, so I have more distance and objectivity with which to review it.

Here, in this one, I've left myself a post-it note on the value thumbnails to expand the text.

The value thumbs have ended up being the closest thing I have to a "master" document, which is why the post-it note is stuck there, but this is a bit of a precarious way of working.

Hey! Let's make something perfectly clear. If you are also a comic maker, and you are collaborating with someone, do not do this. This is one of the perks of working solo. I'm sure you can think of the tradeoffs.

LOOK AT THIS

A reader (hello Debbie!) drew my attention to this work of art from 1891, by Sarah Paxton Ball Dodson. If you've read Delilah Dirk, I'm sure you can see why this might be relevant. Thank you, Debbie!

TWEET TWEET TWEET

The other day I twittered about a common lament among comics-makers. Some complain, "it takes so long to make comics but they're so quick to read." I offered a trick (or "thought technology") to get out of this mindset:

Think of your favourite books or movies or novels. Are the longest ones your favourites? Not necessarily. Which means more to you: that Kate Beaton strip that has become an in-joke between you and your father? Or the extended edition of LORD OF THE RINGS? (The answer doesn't have to be one or the other, it's en

The easiest comics example for me is Tillie Walden's work. She's made a bunch of big ol' books, but my favourite of hers is no more than 30 pages.

Chapter Two of PDAP(DD4) is 88 pages long. To me, that feels very long for a chapter. And great length equals more work. But when I read through it, I don't feel the length at all. It's over before I know it. So, assuming that there is nutritional narrative value in each one of those pages (and they're not just empty calories), I think this is successful comics-making.

I thought about the work of a comics-maker compared to, say, the work of an animator. When I was an animator, I'd work all week to make thirty to forty seconds of finished animation. And that's a lot. Maybe it's different because as an animator, you understand that you are part of the process, one team member in a unit working together to make a single thing. As a comics-maker, maybe you're closer to the work as an entire single thing, and that makes it different. Or as someone on twitter hypothesized, perhaps "you read it too quick" is how comics-makers express other dissatisfactions with the medium.

YOU LOVE TO SEE IT

I was looking forward to the lettering process because I knew the numbers would go up fast. Sure enough, look at that graph grow. <rubs hands together greedily>