Making a Graphic Novel: The Iterative Process

This is PART TWO of a series of posts about preparing to make DELILAH DIRK BOOK FOUR, a new graphic novel.

All my previous comics experience had involved working in small chunks, and now I was embarking on the task of writing and illustrating one long 200-page graphic novel. I needed a way to manage this huge amount of work.

I adapted a technique I already knew. In animation school, we had been taught a method for animating a scene that felt natural to me: you start out rough, with simple shapes and broad ideas, and make repeated passes over the same work, adding refinement and detail with each pass. You focus on the broad movement before fussing with the details. Everything gains greater fidelity with each pass, like a slowly-loading progressive JPG.

I’d do the same with a comic: I’d make one complete pass from beginning to end as a written manuscript. It would read like a novel. I’d use this pass to solve the big story problems, the plot details, the character ins and outs. Dialogue could wait until later. This way, I’d be able to read the whole thing, start to finish, and assess it. I could give it to trusted readers, too. I could make revisions as necessary without worrying about any of the drawings. If it makes sense to change a scene from day to night, it’s a lot easier to change the line that says, “it was nighttime,” than to go in and re-colour every panel. So I solved those problems and made those choices in a text-only format. (If writing a manuscript seems daunting all on its own, I have National Novel Writing Month to thank for helping me feel confident enough to try.)

Then the drawing would begin. I’d adapt the manuscript into little, thumbnail-sized drawings of each two-page spread. During this pass, I solve problems of broad page composition. This is where I do the engineering that determines roughly how much stuff I can fit on a page, and am guided by two major goals: I try to have every pair of pages leave a question in the reader’s mind, and I try to surprise the reader every time they turn the page and reveal a new spread. I don’t show this thumbnail pass to anyone else. The characters are usually stand-in blobs or stick figures.

Then I make a third pass, taking the thumbnails and enlarging them slightly, four pages to a sheet of 8 1/2 x 11” paper. In this pass, I try to break dialogue into balloons and compose the balloons on the page. I refine the panel composition established in the thumbnail. I also start to resolve questions of character posing and “acting.” The stick figures start to look more like the characters they represent. This is the “rough” pass.

After I clean up the text, the rough version becomes something I can show to my editor and trusted readers, again looking for feedback from “fresh eyes.” I’ll make revisions as necessary, and then, to me at least, the book is essentially “done.” You can read it from beginning to end. It’s a finished book, albeit not one that is very presentable to a broad audience. Every step after this third pass is in service of making the book handsome enough to show to civilian readers.

The fourth pass is “pencilling” in traditional comic terms. I draw all the clean line art. Very, very little changes between the rough pass and this one, except that the drawings get tighter and more detailed. The characters look more consistent from page to page.

The fifth and sixth passes involve prepping the pages for colour (“flatting”), and then digitally painting the final colour. Before colouring, I take a handful of key panels and make “colour keys,” rough colour treatments on those panels that help me define a colour palette for a scene or sequence, just so I’m not going into every panel unprepared.

After that, the rest is cleanup. I hunt for inconsistencies and sweep sawdust off the floor. I’ll change some dialogue around, improving wording or clarifying things where they need to be clarified. And then the comic is presentable.

This method of making comics got me all the way through The King’s Shilling (DD2) and The Pillars of Hercules (DD3). DD2 took roughly eighteen months of full-time work between 2013 and 2015. DD3 took roughly sixteen months, and I delivered files in July of 2017. I usually worked from ten in the morning until seven at night, Monday to Friday. I try to keep my working hours humane, because otherwise the work suffers. “Work hard, play hard” is not for me. I am soft, and I am happy. “Work steadily, put your feet up” is more my style.

How do I afford the time it takes to do all this? In Part Three I will tell you.