A couple of friends have asked me about the nuts and bolts of how I put a Nowhere Band strip together; I’m in kind of a dead spot as I recover from a vacation and wait for class to start, so I thought now would be a good time to do a quick walkthrough of the process. So (click on all pictures to embiggen):

STEP 1 : SCRIPT

Naturally, I start with a script. Actually, that’s not true. I start with a vague idea that gets jotted down in a notebook or a google doc, and then fluffed out to a badly-written paragraph with chunks of dialogue embedded, and then on to a full-on script.

My scripts are pretty minimal (and casual as far as spelling and grammar and those niceties), since I’m just writing for myself and I’ve already internalized all kinds of strip conventions about locations, expressions, gestures, and such. At this point, it’d be really weird to write a script for someone else to draw. I should try it some time.

The hardest thing in the script stage is making sure lines of dialogue don’t get too long to fit gracefully into balloons. I can get pretty wordy – I still basically think of myself as a writer who sort of knows how to draw – so this is a challenge.

STEP 2 : REDLINE

This is the worst step; in any sort of creative work, the hardest part is sitting down and facing a blank piece of paper, and that’s what’s going on here. Everything after this point is basically a form of editing and refinement, cleaning up or enhancing something that already exists. Here, I’m wrestling something into existence. Mornings when I wake up and have to go downstairs and do redlines are the times I’m most tempted to sleep in or volunteer to walk the dog on Rebecca’s day of the rotation.

Anyway: I start out by laying out the panel grid in red pencil (doing this stage in red makes it easy to remove all of this rough early work in Photoshop once the strip’s scanned). The script’ll tell me how many panels I need (I try to keep it around 5, give or take a couple, but different strips need different lengths). Relative panel size usually comes down to a function of how much dialog is in a given panel (remember, I get wordy), how big a thing or space needs to be shown, or how many characters appear.

Continue reading A Walk Through the Process of Creating Nowhere Band →

So, here’s what I’ve been working on. This is the inked (but not colored or lettered) first page of a graphic novel I’m setting out on. This should be a pretty big project, and I’m actually not sure what my endgame will be as far as getting it out into the world- I want to have a big chunk of pages put together before I start thinking about whether or not to run it serially online, for instance.

The project is (temporarily) called Eyeball, and it’s about spyplanes in the early 60s. Or about not getting too lost in your job, depending on which way you want to look at it.

This one’s been gestating for quite a while; I wrote out the original plot and started scripting in 2006. I was really excited about the project, but eventually bailed because 1) I didn’t think I could draw well enough to do it justice, and 2) the thought of doing all of the visual research to get the look and feel right for a story set in 1960 just scared the piss out of me. But now I’m 6 years better at drawing (I still think it’ll be a challenge, but it’s actually possible this time) and, well, Mad Men has gone and done me the favor of researching what things looked like in 1960.

So we’ll see where this goes.