"WATCHMECOMIX"

{click to read}



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For no reason other than the fact that I always really like to look at stuff like this from other artists, here's my process for this comic.



1: Color guide. I draw some really light, basic pencil shapes in a small sketchbook, figure out my panel compositions (which, as you can see, often change between here and the final product), and then go over it with crayons or whatever else is handy. I spot blacks first on both the color guide and the page itself -- it helps me figure out how much or how little color I need, what choices I should make regarding the overall page design, et cetera.



2: Penciled page. I always draw and ink the panel borders first, just so I know exactly what I've got to work with. Even on my Gwen Stacy comic, which didn't have any panel borders, I drew them in with really heavy pencil and then erased them when the pages were finished. I typically pencil pretty light because I'm always erasing when I mess up or change things. You can tell how many tries it took me to get any one part of the drawing right from how dark the pencil marks are, like in the first panel the car is barely there and the girl is way more substantial since it took me so many lines to get her right. I press harder and harder every time I redraw a line, I guess out of some weird mixture of increasing certainty and frustration. I also always draw faces really hard, though I need to stop because they're tough to get right on the first time and nothing looks worse than a bunch of visible erasures over a face. Oh well.



3: Inked page. Like I said, I spot the solid blacks first with a big heavy C marker, get the basic shapes and contrasts in place before I go any further. So on this page that's stuff like the car, the black parts of the color-tunnel thing, Nixon's silhouette, and so forth. If the page looks too white before I start the linework, I try to use a heavier line and add more blacks. If it looks too black I see if I can shave any of the shapes down a little with wite-out, and draw with a thinner pen and less holding lines. How a page looks in black and white can make me reconsider my color scheme too, like from here I decided there should be a greater number of colors in some panels than were on my guide, hoping it would balance out the blacks.

Then I ink the linework, which is pretty self-explanatory. A lot of the time I try to "true up" a bad pencil drawing in ink rather than erase and do another pencil version because I like the spontaneity the lines have when you haven't drawn the same shape too many times. It's usually a worthwhile sacrifice for me to get a more handmade look on the ink lines over more polish on the drawing. Lettering always comes last, so I can adjust the size and shape of the balloons to what I drew. I never write out a script or anything, so the actual words on the page aren't fixed until I take the pen and put them down. I'll also have to adjust the dialogue to fit in the panels sometimes, otherwise I can get way too wordy and cover up all the art.



4: And once again, the final colored page. I color directly onto the art, usually with some combination of pens, markers, wite-out, and paint. Usually Sharpies are my main medium, but I used highlighters on this page for a little extra pop (which totally failed to show up once I scanned it, but it looks sick in person). If I have any images to paste onto the page, I do that last of all, after I've put down the colors that are going to go around it. I used the Lou Gehrig photo on this page mostly because I saw it it the New York Times the other day and thought it was the most beautiful picture I'd ever seen, that it deserved to be enshrined somehow. There's also the fact that this particular comic came to me in a dream and I could only remember two of the nine panels when I woke up (namely 3 and 8), so I was stuck for compositions. But also, the book that inspired WATCHMECOMIX was about destroying your idols, and when I was a boy the only person I held higher than Superman was Lou Gehrig. So I ripped up his beautiful photo and cut holes in it and stuck it to a comic book page, the end.