Characters can be animals, historical figures, or entirely invented from thin air. Make your personality traits as specific as possible will make it easier to jump-start an idea for a plot if you don’t have one. “Willing to do anything to help their family” is better than “loyal,” for example. You can certainly start with the plot first and develop your characters later. The characters and plot are equally important, so the order isn’t necessarily important. Just start with your best idea and work from there. To write compelling descriptions of people or their characters, watch people. There are several ways to observe people, how they interact, and note their manners and habits. These little elements make for great character descriptions. You can sit at a park or a public place like a cafe and observe people. Or watch TV and see how characters are depicted on the screen.
The setting can be real or imaginary. If it doesn’t matter to you and you want to focus on the characters, make it something that will be easy to draw, like the desert. If you’re making a really simple comic, you can simply leave your background blank and have no clearly-defined setting for your story. This is a particularly acceptable choice for comedic comics, emphasizing the writing.
Conflict refers to the 2 people or ideas that are fighting against one another in your story. This can be as simple as superhero vs. villain or as abstract as freedom vs. order. Comedic comics don’t necessarily require conflict, but they sure help anchor the story in something concrete! Your comic doesn’t have to have a resolution if you want to turn your comic into a series.
Speech bubbles in comics are pretty small. Try to keep most of your dialogue as short as possible. A single speech or line of dialogue may require multiple panels if it’s really long. Make notes about what your illustrations might look like on the side of each page as you’re proofreading. This will make it easier to figure out what you want to draw. Share your script with a friend, parent, or teacher to see if they have any suggestions on how to improve your writing. Most comic book scripts are written like movie scripts. Simply put the characters name at the beginning of a line and write their dialogue out. Give each piece of dialogue a separate line to make it easy to read. Make notes about setting, tone, or theme in between your dialogue.
More than 6-8 panels on a single page is going to be too much for most readers to process. More than 3 speech bubbles in a single panel is going to be too much dialogue to fit in one illustration. An individual page usually has 1-3 key actions take place. These actions could be a piece of important dialogue, a character going from one location to another, or a character interacting with another character. Avoid overloading your pages with too many events to give your readers time to process what’s happening. You can always revise the order of your panels or number of pages. Don’t worry about it if you change your mind when you’re proofreading!
You can find pre-generated templates with different panel configurations online at sites like http://comicbookpaper. com/. You can also choose to draw the panels out yourself or sketch where you’ll put them in your digital program. Use a variety of layouts so that your individual pages don’t get repetitive. For example, if every page has 9 panels that are arranged in the same way, your reader is going to get bored. Try to make the last panel on each page a unique, interesting, or powerful moment right as tension or conflict is rising. This is called the “cliffhanger” method and will keep your reader hooked on finding out what happens on the next page.
For example, you can draw the character’s face close up in one panel, filling the entire panel. In the next panel, you can draw them standing on the left side of the panel, leaving plenty of room for background information. Don’t draw your characters floating in the middle of every panel to keep things fresh. Pay attention to how characters are framed differently in movie shots. You’ll notice that characters aren’t always filmed right in the middle of the screen. Comics take a lot of visual cues from movies, so use film shots as inspiration for your images. In order to focus on composition first, draw your rough sketches out before you start inking or adding details. You can use a simple style and make your characters basic if you want to emphasize the story and can’t draw well! There’s no rule that says comic books have to be extremely detailed.
Use a separate establishing shot for each new location. It’s normal for a single comic to take place in 4-5 different locations. A common technique is to “zoom in” on the action. For example, you might start by drawing a city’s skyline in the first panel. The second panel could depict the street where the story takes place. The third panel might show a single window where we see the character sitting down at a desk. This is a good way to establish where your character is without using written words.
Add detail to all of your panels in chronological order if you want a consistent drawing style. If you aren’t worried about it though, you can certainly ink and color your panels individually.
If you’re working digitally, watercolor brushes can make abstract backgrounds pop and keep the focus on the action. If you’re hand-drawing your comics, use cross-hatching, which is a variety of perpendicular lines, to create cool abstract backgrounds. Once you’ve given the reader an establishing shot to indicate where the action is taking place, your readers will assume the characters are still in that location in the subsequent panels. You don’t need to keep reminding them with detailed backgrounds. Hand-drawn comics can be made with markers, colored pencils, or a combination of the two. It’s really up to you!
If you’re going for a simple comic, there’s nothing wrong with emphasizing the story over the images. Feel free to stop when you’re happy with each panel.
Common comic book fonts include Komika, Adam Warren’s pro font, and Badaboom. These are universally-recognizable fonts that people will immediately be familiar with. Using a non-traditional font can make your comics feel unprofessional. Download free comic book fonts online at https://www. dafont. com/. If you’re hand drawing your letters, make sure that you space your letters out equally and keep your style uniform to avoid an inconsistent look. If a character yells or you want to add a sound effect, like “Boom!” or “Ugh!” feel free to put it outside of a speech bubble in a different font.
If you make an original comic on paper, you can photocopy it to reproduce it. You can even get it bound into a book at the printer. If you’re using paper that folds in half, each single sheet will have 2 separate pages on it. For example, if your comic is 32 pages, your first page will have page 1 on the left side and page 32 on the right. The next sheet will have page 2 on the left, and page 31 on the right. This is why the thumbnails are so important! Each sheet will be 4 pages if you’re using the front and back of the paper. When you bind the book, you’ll place your sheets on top of one another and staple them in the center so the pages are in sequential order.
You can find a ton of free templates online at http://comicbookpaper. com/.
Make Beliefs is an easy-to-use site that can be found at https://www. makebeliefscomix. com/Comix/. It also uses pre-rendered characters though, and you can only have a total of 18 panels. You can find Strip Generator at http://stripgenerator. com/. You can import images and draw your own characters in Strip Generator, but the customization options can be kind of tough to make the most out of if you aren’t great at digital illustration.
If you’re interested in self-publishing, you can import your templates into Blurb and pay to get your comics printed professionally. Visit Blurb at https://www. blurb. com/comic-books. Most professional illustrators use a drawing pad that plugs into your computer. These look like big screens that you draw on with a stylus. This is the most efficient way to draw digitally.
