1. Come up with a cast of characters that can work off of each other

When starting a webcomic, it’s real tempting to dive in with the first character or idea that you have and begin drawing and writing. But hold on there speedy! If you want some longevity in your strip, you are going to want to think about how these characters interact. What you really want is a cast of characters that can play off each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

When I say “cast” I don’t mean you need a large number. Some of the most successful strips have had very few main characters. Calvin and Hobbes was really all about Calvin and his toy tiger, Hobbes. While there are other characters there, their job is to support the main characters.

In Marooned, the main characters are Captain John, Asimov the robot and Ugo the Martian. There are other characters in the strip, but they support what is going on with the big guys.

So think about who the main players are going to be in your strip, and then think about how they can interact to create interesting, funny or dramatic situations. If you have a hard time coming up with those situations then you need to do more thinking about who these characters are and what they mean to each other.

2. Sit down and write your “character bible”

Once you have a handle on your cast, you need to create what is known as a “character bible.” This is a living document that really only you will ever see. It’s a reference tool for you to help you remember what your character motivations are, what their conflicts are and some bits and pieces about who they are, where they’ve been and where they want to go.

There’s really no one way to build up a reference like this. For Marooned, I have a Google document that I use that is sectioned off by character. (And a “character” can be many things, for example the New Frontier Federation is a “character” in my strip). I have lots of information about who Captain John, Asimov and Ugo are along with pieces about who the lesser players are as well. There’s detail in there that lets me think about who these people are deep down. Stuff that will never see a strip, but that helps point me in the right direction.

Anything and everything is game for this reference. If you think it will help you, put it in there – remember it’s just for you. But there are two key items that should be in there about at least every main character: motivation and conflict. You really want to know what motivates your character and what conflicts they face in their life, because these things greatly shape how they will act. This is true in real life as well, just think about those things regarding yourself.

For Captain John, his motivations revolve around his insecurity and desire for praise and acceptance. His conflicts are both internal and external. He struggles with his hard outer shell which he uses as a protection against failure. He also is very conflicted about working with an AI robot. When you know these types of things you are better equipped to know how your character will act and more specifically, what they might even say in a given situation.

Keep this document living and evolving and it will constantly help you write.

3. Be thinking about your strip and always be ready to capture ideas

Hopefully you are doing a webcomic because you love the art form. Therefore you should be thinking about your strip at least a couple times a day (especially if you are keeping an on-time posting schedule!) Unfortunately, there are very few web cartoonists who do this for a living, so you need a way to capture ideas when they hit you – because if you don’t, you will forget them!

It’s easy enough to carry around a small notebook and a pen or pencil, even if you work outside or away from a desk you can keep it in your car, locker or whatever. The key is to have a place to write down something when inspiration strikes so you don’t lose it.

For me, once again I keep a Google document called “strip ideas” that I cut and paste into. Because I work at a desk I always have access to it. However, I also bring my sketchbook to work, so if I want to sketch it out I can do that too.

Don’t forget night time as well. I’ve had a few ideas in the middle of the night where I had to get up and set them down. It’s best to have something by your bed to record an idea because it’s real easy to fall asleep before you do – and then forget what it was!

4. “Sketch” out your dialog

This may seem odd since we are talking writing, but you have to remember that webcomics are a visual art form. Once I have my strip idea, I sit down and write out the dialog for each panel across the top of the page. Here’s what that looks like (along with some sketches):

The idea is to begin visually laying out the dialog. Your dialog is just as much a visual element of your strip as anything else. Words form shapes and word balloons and groups form shapes that subtlely affect the reader. Plus, you want to fit things in properly. Nearly every time I do this I immediately find some issue that needs changing or something I can add or take away. This is also a good idea to get a handle on if you have too much or too little text.

5. Examine every word

When you have your dialog sketched/written out, it’s time to examine your words. Words are everything! Words are wonderful! Don’t be content just to write “see Dick run” when you could write “Dick sprinted to Jane with gusto!” Cheesy example but you get the point. Think about how your characters talk, too. Do they have a fondness for a certain type of speech or certain words? Maybe your character just would not say that particular word, or you can think of a better word for them (this is where the character bible comes in handy).

Don’t be afraid to try new words or even – gasp – use a dictionary or thesaurus! While you don’t need to go overboard in this regard, simply going over your words and seeing how you can add some spice, humor, character or style to your dialog can really help polish your writing.

6. Cut the fat!

Once you are satisfied with the words, it’s time to prune them down. Seem counter-productive? It’s not. In the step previous you were looking for the right type of words. Now you are looking to pare the dialog down to its essence – the very center of the point for each sentence.

This is of primary importance in a comic strip, and especially those dealing with humor. Extra words, or wordy sentences (or heaven forbid run-on sentences!) make for tedious and murky reading for your reader. What you want is snappy, tight writing.

In one of my strips, Ugo is telling Captain John that hey have a place for them to stay. My sketched out dialog was this:

“We can set you and Asimov up in one of the empty dwellings.”

Ugh! That’s awful wordy and clunky. So I cut it to:

“We’ve prepared a dwelling place for you here.”

During the thumbnail sketching, I realized I could just have Ugo pointing to the house, so it finally became:

“We’ve prepared this dwelling for you.”

I was able to chop it down from 13 words to 6 and get my point across much more succinctly. Remember you aren’t writing prose, this isn’t a novel. The visual aspect of a webcomic is just as important (some would say more, some might say less) than the words. Regardless of how you feel about that, tight polished writing will flow better and read better for your readers.

There may be times when you want to say a lot – possibly a bit of exposition or a flashback. Even during those types of panels, you should strive to keep the paragraphs polished and tight. My wife is a writer and just finished a 120 page screenplay. She went over and over this script time and again to “cut the fat” out of each and every sentence. That’s a whole screenplay – we’re talking about one comic strip! So remember to “cut the fat” out of your words.

7. Proofread, proofread and proofread!

By this point, you have seen too much. Hand it over to someone who has not seen it yet and ask them to look for errors. Because if you don’t, you will post mistakes and you will feel like a dufus. If that person is someone you trust you could ask for suggestions at that point on the writing, but that is up to you. I am lucky in that my wife is a seasoned professional writer – and her nickname is “eagle eye” on top of it – so she catches my mistakes.

There have been times when I have forgotten to have her read a strip, and guess what? Yep, mistakes go up on the web site. You don’t need a professional to do this for you, just get at least one pair of eyes other than your own to take a look.

Follow these seven steps and writing your strip should become a joy instead of a chore, and that’s the idea right?

NOTE: I do things somewhat differently, a little more complex now. This article is getting a bit old, however it’s still a workable process to emulate if you wish.

We left off last time with a Photoshop file that has a white background and then a layer than holds just the linework in black – and nothing else. In other words, the negative space between lines is transparent.

At this point my earlier preparation should pay off in the form of super easy selections. I’m not saying working this way is for everyone, but it’s one way to be able to work fast when it comes to coloring the webcomic. So we left off here:

Remember, I had made sure during my inking process to close all shapes, leaving areas that are surrounded by an inked line. You can see by looking in the lower left corner that the leg line of the Martian on the left does not quite meet up to the border. The first thing I will do is quickly go in and extend any lines like this that need fixing. I usually have a few but it usually only takes a couple of minutes. Simply grab a black pencil of the right diameter (B is the hotkey for Brush/Pencil – use your [  and ] keys to change brush size) and extend the line on the linework layer.

Having done that it’s time to select areas and begin coloring. I use the tried and trusy ol’ magic wand for this. Press “W” to get the wand. In my settings, I have the tolerance set to 0 and “Contiguous” and “Sample All Layers” are always checked. This works 99% of the time in giving me what I need. So let’s say I begin coloring the walls here – I make my selections, make a new layer for the walls (make sure you do NOT color on your linework layer!) and – wait – you don’t want to fill just yet.

What you have is a selection that goes up TO your linework. What you want is a selection that goes a bit UNDER your lines (essentially trapping your artwork in old print world parlance). This means your lines will slightly cover your colors. This is good for two reasons. One, you need this in case you ever want to print your comic, so that small variations in registration do not leave blank spots in the printed piece. Two, when you reduce the comic for the web, you avoid the same thing – small areas of the background showing through.

Doing this is simple.  Under the “Select” menu choose “Modify -> Expand” and enter “2″. Viola, now your selection expands by two pixels under your linework. Now you go ahead and fill in your areas. Now hitting that menu each time is a pain, so do yourself a favor and set up an action for it, and then set your actions palette in “button” mode – then you just wand, hit the button, fill – and move on.

Here you can see the walls have been colored – and you can see the “marching ants” where I have selected the ceiling portion. See the “Expand 2″ button? That’s my action. (I have more that I use, I just did this on my lunch at work). You can also see a little document I use for sampling my most used colors open as well.

At this point I’m not worried about John’s face having the wall color. His layer is always above the lower layers, and I’ll show you how I fill his face up in a moment. So I finish filling in the background stuff and the window in the door and I have this:

It’s really important at this point that you are making new layers for each “section” or area of your strip. For example, John and Asimov always have their own layers. Trust me this will make things much easier when you want to change things, as you always will, either now or later on down the road. So next I set up a new layer for the martians and fill them in:

And you can start to see how fast this can go. So let’s move to John’s face, which does not have a closed shape. Generally, his face is the only thing aside from background elements that is not closed. What I do is grab the face color, grab a small brush and draw a line from his nose to his brow in the flesh color like so:

It’s kind of light, but you should be able to see it on both areas here. What I have now done is effectively closed the shape, but with color instead of a black line. Now I can use the magic wand just like before to fill his head up with color. I go ahead and fill in his body and tongue colors as well, and then for his hair I use a slightly larger brush to paint the yellow in.

But wait! I don’t like the wall colors – too light. Ah the beauty of the separate layers – it’s easy to make changes.

Bingo – in about 60 seconds it’s all changed. Another helpful hint – if you make some kind of elaborate selection, or some selection that takes you 10 clicks to get (say there’s lots of action breaking up a background panel and I have to click a bunch of times to get all the areas selected) do yourself a favor and quickly save that selection under “Select -> Save Selection” which is only available when you actually have a selection made. Just type in a name and forget it. If you need it again, go to “Select -> Load Selection” and choose the name you typed in and bam – you’ve got it again without having to do all that work over.

I don’t do a whole lot of shadow and highlight work simply because I don’t have the time and I developed this kind of super cartoony style that doesn’t really need it. However I do it sometimes. Here I made a new layer, set the layer mode to “multiply” and the color to black at about 15% opacity. Then I just added some shapes for some super light shadows on the wall. This is a real basic way to do it, there are better ways although this works.

You can also use complementary colors instead of black and play with the layer modes. As always, experiment with the settings to see what works for you.

Adding Text

Now I need to add my dialog. First I type in all the words and place them in black in their locations. I’m using a font I purchased online for this.

At this point I actually make a layer group and move all the text layers into that folder. It’s just a nice way to keep things organized – plus – when I want to turn off the dialog to see or fix something, it’s only one click, not 10-15 (or more once the balloons are done).

I used to go through the trouble of making the balloons in Illustrator and copy and pasting them over, but it’s a waste of time. I now use a rounded rectangle (U key) to make the main shape to start:

Then I use the path tool to draw the “hanger” to the speaking character. Then I merge those two layers (using yet another action) to get this:

And I do that for all the text, ending up with this:

Lastly I drag a layer group from my palette file that has the strip information – copyright, date and URL and adjust that position and date.

To export it for the web, I select all and do a copy all layers (Cntl-Shift-C) and paste into a new layer. Then I convert it to RGB, downsample to 72dpi and I have it ready to export. Of course, I have another action for that process as well!

Then I save it as a JPG usually and post it to the web – finished! Usually this process takes me under an hour, sometimes as little as a half hour. My whole point was to get this process down to a manageable time frame so that I can continue doing the comic in color twice a week.

Lastly, here’s a shot at what my layers look like:

Pretty simple.

Color Linework

I didn’t mention it above since this particular strip doesn’t really have it, but often I will color the actual linework lines in the background. Because my linework is on a separate layer with no background attached, again this is super easy.

All I need to do is select the lines I want colored (usually using the poly lasso tool) and make sure the layer lock is on, then fill in the color and bingo, colored lines. Depending on what it is, sometimes I’ll just grab a brush and paint the line – whichever is faster. If you look at any of the strips where John is wearing his helmet and the helmet outline is a brighter blue – that’s how I do that.

I hope this two articles have been helpful. This is one way you can process a color comic quite quickly. Again it’s not the only way and may not be the best way, but it’s working for me. If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me an e-mail.

The point of these articles is to show you how I came up with a streamlined process that works for me. This is by no means the only way, or the best way to do a webcomic. This happens to be the best way for me at this moment, for this strip. But you can certainly learn from what I’ve learned and adapt this to your needs. Okay? Great!

This article assumes that you’ve already got a strip idea and characters and such sorted out already. I’m not going to cover writing in detail nor characterization in these articles. So let’s get started.

Dialog and Thumbnail Sketches

When I begin I already have an idea of what the strip is about. I may already have most of the dialog in my head, including the punchline – and I may not. Regardless, I begin by writing out the dialog and working it out across the top of a sketchpad. I make little circles with an initial to indicate who is talking, and I write across the page in blocks to match up the panel in which the dialog will reside.

Once I have that settled, it’s time to do some thumbnail sketching. The point of doing a thumbnail sketch is to decrease the time you spend in the penciling stage. You don’t want to spend all kinds of time drawing different poses and swapping around the staging of the panel, drawing and erasing, drawing and erasing.

Instead, work this out with rough thumbnail sketches – and I mean rough. These are not much more than gesture drawings. I merely want to know how each panel is staged, where people are standing and roughly what sizes they will be, and what kind of shot I’m looking at. So is it a closeup, a mid shot or a long shot, etc. You are never concerned about details at this point.

In rare cases where I think something might be tricky to draw, I might work in slightly higher fidelity to get an idea on what I’m going to do. But this doesn’t happen often. Take a look at the picture below to see both the dialog and the rough thumbnails.

The sketch is merely a guide for me to do the actual pencil work. I don’t have to guess at what I’m doing with a blank piece of Bristol – I can dive right in and start drawing without really thinking much.

Penciling

I didn’t get a shot of a blank piece of Bristol, but essentially before I begin penciling I take out an 11 x 14″ sheet of Strathmore Series 300 smooth Bristol board. I mark out two rectangles 13″ x 4 1/16″ (standard strip size). Often I do this with a non-photo blue pencil, but in this case I used regular pencil (H hardness). For me it doesn’t matter as we’ll find out later.

I mark out the panels how they need to be for the strip, and cut the piece into two (so I get two strips out of one sheet of Bristol board.) Then based on my thumbnails, I pencil in the panels.

My style is very simple – very cartoony – so I try not to get too detailed. My big challenge is consistency – making sure the characters are looking the same all the time. I’m getting better but I still need lots of work. I try to be extra careful that I am “pushing” my poses (an animation term) to give them action and making sure facial expressions are correct and hand gestures are appropriate. I think this goes a long way toward making the artwork interesting to look at.

I also do my best to make somewhat interesting backgrounds, although this is not a real strong point of my work. When the pencils are done, they look like this:

Inking the Comic Strip

So far I’ve enjoyed the whole process, but I’ve really come to enjoy the inking once I got a process that works for me figured out. I use three types of inking pens:

• Faber Castell Pitt pens – size “S”: Used for most linework
• Copic inking pens, sizes 01 and 02: Used for finer lines or smaller stuff
• Micron inking pens, sizes 08 and 02: The 08 is for the panel borders and the 02 is again for smaller, finer work

The Copic is a really nice pen but you have to be careful because it doesn’t quite dry almost instantly like the others. They are also a bit more expensive. I’ve really come to like the Faber Castell Pitt pen a lot – it’s perfect for what I need.

At this point I have to mention that I draw and ink my stuff in a very specific way for a reason. I try to make almost every single shape a “closed” shape. This saves me loads of time in the coloring stage because I simply select areas with the magic wand tool in Photoshop and color away. The only exceptions are Captain John’s head and some background lines.

So, when I begin inking I’m making sure to extend all lines to the frame border and close all shapes as indicated. I do not vary my line, I draw a simple, solid line with the S pen, in keeping with the simple stylized look I shoot for.

The key with inking is to try and not lose the spontaneity and fluidity of your pencil work. This is tricky at first, and takes lots of practice. Essentially you have to just dive right in almost like you do with a pencil. I try not to think too much at all when I’m inking. I open the pen, start with John’s nose and just charge ahead.

While I’m inking I’m trying to pick out the best line in the pencils, and I’m trying to stay loose. I certainly make the occasional mistake or do something that I don’t like the look of. Sometimes I just leave it alone because it’s not a big deal. If it’s something I feel I can’t live with I either use some white out and go over it or fix it digitally. You have to be careful here, because a digital drawn line with the mouse and brush/pencil tool doesn’t look quite the same. So I only do that for small fixes. (I do not use a tablet with a pen, so I can’t get that natural look digitally).

So here’s the inks in the first panel:

Final Inking and Frame Borders

I continue on in this way until all the panels are complete. Now it’s time to do the frame borders. You can hand draw them if you like. It will often give the comic a nice organic feel. You really have to decide what type of look you are going for overall. In my case I like the perfect lines that I get with a T-square so that’s the way I go.

The best way to do this is to use a table that is square, like a drawing table, and a T-square. But a regular old ruler will do if that is all you have, it just may not be as spot on. What I do is line up the straight edge of the paper with the T-square, tape the board down using blue painter’s tape (which won’t ruin the board), making sure my horizontal lines are parallel with the T-square. That looks like this:

Then using the T-square on the right side and bottom edges of the table, I ink all the borders. Again I am careful to get my lines that I inked to the edge of the panels to line up with the panel borders. The final piece looks like this:

Scan Comic Strip and Prepare for Coloring

The last stage of part 1 of the process is scanning the finished artwork. I scan into Photoshop using my Brother all-in-one scanner/printer. It is very important here that you consider if you ever plan on printing your work at this stage. Because you need to scan and color properly if you do.

I am planning on printing, so I scan at 600 x 600 dpi in “True Gray” format. This is going to give you a nice large file, which you want. I have to scan in two pieces due to the 14″ length of the paper. Then I put the two pieces together. Here’s the scan settings:

And a shot of what it looks like raw, scanned in:

I merge the layers to have “layer0″. At this point I have a Photoshop action that does the next set of steps for me, so I don’t have to manually do it every time, which is a real time saver. The steps give me a nicely prepared strip to color. They break down as follows:

• Image > Adjustments > Threshold: I choose a setting of 130. This is what gives you that aliased black line. It will seem to look like total garbage, all jaggedy and such – but don’t worry. When it’s reduced or printed, it looks like a nice smooth line to the naked eye. This makes life much easier during the coloring stage.
• Reduce file to 300dpi: This might be somewhat controversial, as some people want to have that 600dpi file for printing. I really don’t think it’s necessary to have it that high, and it makes working on files difficult. 300dpi is sufficient for printing and will save you much hard disk space and large file headaches.
• Convert the CMYK: This allows you to print your final piece. When you’re ready to post to the web, you simpy convert to RGB first.
• This is the best part. Select all and copy your artwork in your layer. Create a new channel (an “alpha” channel”) under channels in Photoshop. Paste your artwork in that channel and invert it (cmnd I). Select all again and copy. Go back to CMYK mode and back to the layer (you should still have all selected) and delete the layer so you have nothing showing but the transparent background. Then go to Selection > Load Selection and choose the alpha layer from the dropdown list. You now have your inked lines as a selection in your layer! Fill them with black, and bingo, you have your linework on a separate layer. This is golden for coloring work.

I now have my prepared strip ready for coloring which looks like this:

In the next article I’ll talk about coloring the strip and posting it to the web.