Great Ideas

A new Change Log comic about great ideas!

Good ideas can come from anywhere.

---

Making comics and The Atlantean update

Making comics is not easy. When I first started doing it years ago, I would mostly wing it. Now, though, I have so much more going on in life that I need to be more calculated and plan out the process. That process is a bit different depending on what type of comic I’m working on. With short form comics like Change Log, I have an overall plan or destination that I’m working towards but the focus is on the individual gags for each strip that work within the context of the bigger picture. Longer form comics are different. I think of a long form comic, like The Atlantean, more like a movie. For these, I have to work in phases. Phase 1 is writing the script and designing the characters. Phase 2 is dividing the script up in “scenes”. Not necessarily scenes in the way movies and tv refer to them, but more of chunks of the story. Breaking up the story, in my head, makes a huge undertaking more possible for me. The next phase is going scene by scene and breaking it down into pages. Sometimes that requires rewriting bits here and there to make things fit together like a puzzle. Weird cuts in the middle of pages makes for a bad reading experience, in my opinion, so stuff like that will sometimes need to be worked to make sense and make it flow from one page to the next. Once the pages are broken down, the next phase that I work on is designing the page panels and roughing in the lettering. Adding the lettering is an important step that I used to skip, but honestly, I don’t know how artists manage to compose their panels without doing this. I guess when you do it for a while you get a sense of how much space you need for word balloons but I used to get this wrong all the time. Once all of that is done, I finally get to sketching out the artwork which is where I currently am in the process for The Atlantean. It’s a lot of fun, but so much work. Here’s a sneak peak that will show you nothing…

---

Thanks for reading and if you want to support me please consider buying something from my store or telling a friend about this newsletter. Also don’t forget to follow me on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Have a great week!

-Brad