Comics that stand out have GOOD WRITING

You know all those times in English class when you looked at the teacher with resigned disdain in your eyes? Remember how, as you doodled superheros and cartoons in the margins of your books, you wondered why things like ‘semi-colons’, ‘spelling’ and ‘sentence structure’ were important? Do you remember when they asked you to analyze the structure of of a story that you scoffed at words like  “crisis”, “climax”, and “dénouement”? You wondered to yourself when you were actually going to use this stuff anyway? Well, the answer is, in your comic.

Comics are a story medium. Even if you are going to write a joke comic that’s four panels long, there’s still a beginning, middle, and end.  You need to understand things like conflict, pacing, and plot, and tension and how to create them. If you are going to do a long form comic, this becomes critical because the story is the lifeblood and longevity of your comic. Awesome art can attract people to your comic, but without a solid storyline to keep people hooked day in and day out, its just fluffy, pretty art and the readers lose interest fast. Good webcomics, comics that stand out, have good stories and good writing. Dialogue is strong, pacing is  even stronger, and the use of dialogue and plot are masterfully used to keep readers faithfully coming back every week.

Assuming here that I’m speaking to people who are thinking of making English comics, another common mistake that lowers a comics bar is to make simple spelling and grammar errors. Webcomics might give you the freedom to not be under an editors thumb, but you now become your own editor and proofreader, which puts all the responsibility of proofing your work on you. If you can’t spell, you look like an idiot, and constant spelling errors and grammar problems in a comic results in readers having difficulty getting the story out. Comics that are persistently plagued by spelling errors appear unprofessional and its harder for readers to get into the story, and is jarring them out of the story every time they come across one. Its not hard to run a spellchecker or have a proof reader look at your pages before you post them.

Comics are a unique medium to write for, particularly webcomics as they aren’t published generally in one big block, but a single page at a time. The flow of the story on the page has to grab the reader in a very short space of time, not just once, but with every single page. The expression ‘page turner’ very much applies to webcomics that are well written.

Another extremely common mistake is that comic creators don’t plan out their story in its entirety. They start writing, but they never actually take a story all the way through from beginning to end. They don’t plan out their character’s development, pacing, plot, figure out a total page count, edit it, have it beta read, edit it some more, etc. Its important when you are writing comics to have a plan with your story, or you may find yourself written into corners, and having to butcher your otherwise well written comic to suddenly account for massive plotholes or story shifts that mess with the pacing to get you out of a writing jam. A really good comic has a cohesive story from beginning to end. Make sure you’ve planned your story all the way through.

The bottom line: Building a comic is like building a house. If you want your comic to rock from the get go, you need to start with a solid foundation and strong supports on which to put the dressings. Writing and story is the foundation to any comic, from jokes that make you bust a gut to an epic story that spans ages. If you want to build a comic that stands out, your story has to be solid. Not just in concept, but in actual execution. You have to be able to write, and write well. Without solid writing, the readers won’t stick around.

Comics that stand out have GOOD ART

Its been a long debate if story or art is more important in a comic. The reality is that webcomics that really stand out have both. Not only are they examples of excellent story telling, but the art is of such a quality that it really supports the story. This is not to say that all art is shiny and of a certain style, or even has to be hand drawn, but comics are a visual medium and as such require good supporting artwork.

The second part of that is that the artwork has to be suitable to the sequential nature of comics. There are a lot of wonderful pinup artists or artists who do everything BUT sequential art, but the harsh reality is that comics are a unique art form and require art that not only illustrates the words, but breathes them to life.

Generally most of the most notable comics are drawn, either digitally or by hand, although some have managed to carve out niches in less traditional mediums such as 3D or sprites. But all of them that are truly notable display a skill at handling the medium they have chosen. If we keep with the house analogy, the story is the foundation and soundness of the structure, art is the curb appeal and dressings. Art that is strong to the story concept helps to attract readers to have a look, and support the story. When you are choosing how you want to illustrate a story, you need to consider what sort of art work would support the writing, and breathe life into it.  Artistic decisions should be actively made regarding options such as if the comic is black and white or colour, if it is in a particular style (manga, independant, marvel, european, 3D…), colour schemes, digital, traditional, all these factors need to be considered, weighed and ultimately decided for or against in relation to if it helps the written work. There are of course other factors, such as speed at which the artwork can be completed, level of skill, materials available, but ultimately, what the writing needs, should be what it gets.  The artist needs to at least be able to convey the heart of the writing through expression, movement, composition, and mood, no matter if its a hilarious joke or a somber dramatic scene. Cartooning, and indeed any sequential art is a medium that has to tell a story. Each panel has to communicate as much as possible unspoken, and the very best webcomics do this very well.

Comics that stand out UPDATE ON TIME

One thing that makes a webcomic look professional, and keeps people coming back, are webcomics that update on time.  Updating on time shows a level of commitment to your comic, to your fans, and to the work. People are ultimately creatures of habit. In order to get them to keep coming back week after week, they have to always get their cookie when you say its coming. And it will become habit and they will keep checking back. That habit can span over years if don’t correctly, and hold your audience even if you have to take an unexpected break or hiatus. However, webcomics that update sporadically, once a year, or say they update a particular day and never do, are disappointing to their audience. The audience is fickle in that they want their free entertainment and they want it when its promised. Years of tv shows, and before that radio shows, and before that plays,  being on at a particular time of day, a promised time of debut, people want to see it when its promised. They spend all week waiting, and they want their cookie. To deny them their promised morsel is going to damage your reputation over time, and believe you mean, it takes a LONG time to rebuild it when you do get your act together. The solution, especially if you take a long time to do comics, is never to promise more than you can deliver. Make sure you know your production schedule, and err on the side of caution. If you can only deliver a comic every other week, then only promise it every other week. If you can do more, buffer it, or offer it as a bonus. But don’t promise weekly updates or daily updates or any other schedule unless you can deliver.

Comics that stand out HAVE A GREAT WEBSITE

As webcomic creators, we can’t discount the power of good website vs bad website design for attracting or repelling readers. Most of the best webcomics also have really great site designs that make the comic easily accessible, and the most notable features of the comic site are easy to find and access. They also tend to pick colors and schemes that are appealing and easy on the eyes, and that compliment their comics. Good websites are also clean, and not overcluttered with advertising, buttons, and widgets. A lot of people do use the wordpress/comicpress combo for setting up their websites, which is fine of course, but a lot of people lack the ability or willingness to truly customize it so it doesn’t look like a generic site.  Website design needs to be both engaging visually, but also able to guide the users eye to the right places, and showcase the content, namely the comic, in a good way.

The most common mistakes are either to leave the site too plain or make it too busy. A stark white and black site with perhaps a header, no additional graphics, text links, etc. While this can work with blogs, with webcomic sites, it tends to just look lazy and boring. Then there are those that swing the other way. They try to pack too much into too little space. All sorts of adds, visual links, blinking buttons, widgets, polls, vote buttons, etc all packed onto their front pages.

There needs to be a balance. If you aren’t any good at web design, do yourself a huge favor and find a webgeek or webdesigner friend who can help you out. Working with a webdesigner can open the possiblity for things you may never even thought of. Also, asking for critiques on your website from fellow creatives can be helpful in refining your site.

Just always remember, the comic is the most important thing. You should have a very good reason for it not being on the front page.

Comics that stand out DELIVER MORE

The comic is great, and that’s what people come for. Ultimately, that’s what people want, but a lot of the great comics offer a little extra, either in between updates or as a part of the update. This can be in the form of blogs, tutorials, resources, wallpapers, gallery images, character information, world information, or simply really strong interaction with fans. Comics that can deliver additional content generally stand out as being more complete, giving readers something to explore.

The more you can give to keep people busy and engaged in between updates, the more value it adds to your website as a whole. Websites that do this well build audience not only for their comic, but for additional content. There’s also always a chance that people are going to come for the extra content and then check out the comic.

So, you want to start a webcomic, but there’s a problem. You can’t draw. Well, that fact doesn’t have to be the end of your webcomic dreams, but it does mean you may have to go a slightly different route than those who already can.

If you have ambitions to start a webcomic, and aren’t particularly artistically skilled in drawing, chances are, your talents lie in writing. This isn’t a bad thing, but the problem is of course, with comics being a visual medium you are going to have to figure out how to bring your writing to comic reality. There are actually several options, as a LOT of writers run into this problem, and many have devised clever, nefarious, funny, or ingenious workarounds for the problem.

Option 1 – Learn to draw

Some brave writers opt for this particular option. Teach yourself to draw, or set out to draw. Many artists have to learn how to write, its not unfeasible for a writer to learn some artistic skills. Much like writing its simply a matter of learning the basics and then practicing your eyeballs out. Comics don’t have to be artistic wonders, and even very basic art can support a well written comic. xkcd is a case in point. Its extremely witty and well written, but its completely done by stick figures. No one can say that the artistry in that comic is top knotch, but it is enough to get the writing across. And that’s really all you need. But if drawing is totally not your thing, or you require much higher quality art than you can provide, there are other options.

Option 2 – Learn how to model in 3D

Many people have taken to learning another skill, 3D rendering, to bring their comics to life with software such as Poser. Poser and similar software has a huge wealth of resource available for models, clothing, backgrounds, etc, and also a very large community for support in your learning efforts. The software itself will run you some cash, about$250 USD for Poser, but there are free 3D software packages out there, such as Blender. If you are already well versed in 3D rendering, this might be a very good option for you. If you aren’t willing to learn to draw, but are willing to teach yourself how to do this, you may find it a viable option. There are successful examples of 3D rendered comics out there. House of the Muses is an example of a fairly successful 3D rendered comic.

There are however, criticisms of 3D render comics. One common complaint is that they all look the same. This is because people tend to use the same 3D models and many amateurs don’t take the time to learn to customize the characters enough, or spend enough time on their rendering to make the scenes look good. Some comic makers have attempted to fix this using filters to make the figures look more comic like, or doing the basic posing/art in poser, then exporting it to photoshop or another painting ish program and then painting over the renders to provide a more organic look. There are also complaints of the models looking to ‘plastic’ or unrealistic. Many new renderers don’t pay attention to important details of texture and lighting, or the nuances of the body. You also run into the problem of the uncanny valley. However, if you put the effort into it, it can still be a viable way of illustrating your comic.

Option 3 – Photocomics

If you don’t want to put the time into learning to render software, maybe photography is your thing? There are some comics that have turned to photography as a means of illustrating their stories. Union of Heroes is one such comic that has turned to photography rather than the pencil, and has done so with reasonable success. There is debate in the artistic community as to if this is ‘cheating’ or not, as comics are debated to be ‘sequential art’ not ‘sequential photography’, however, done right, it can be a viable means of visually communicating your story. You will have to spend the time rounding up models, costuming, lighting, and taking pictures.  There are a few comics that have turned to using items such as lego men or fantasy minis as their photographic models. An example comic that uses this technique is Irregular Webcomic!.

Option 4 – Sprite Comics

I actually hesitate to bring this up, but it is a ‘genre’ of comics that has evolved out of the massive web comic soup of the internet. Most ‘sprite’ comics are created by ripping video game sprites. I will personally say that it is morally wrong to take copywritten work, such as a video game sprite (common ripoffs include megaman, sonic, old final fantasy, etc) that is the likeness of a well known character or character design and use it as your own. It can also cause a lot of legal red tape later if you are found out to be selling items (merchandise) with those characters on it, but that being said some very successful comics, like 8-bit theater used it in the beginning with old final fantasy sprites, and Bob and George ran for years using Megaman sprites. If you do decide to go this route, consider making your own custom sprites and NOT ripping off video game sprites. Examples of original ‘pixel art’ comics include the likes of comics such as Diesel Sweeties and A Modest Destiny.

Option 5 – Team up

If none of these options have appealed to you yet, you may consider the option of teaming up with an artist.  Collaborations can be very rewarding, and there are artists out there (believe it or not) that want to draw a comic, but have no ideas or story writing ability. In terms of team ups, you have a couple of options.

Most writers, and aspiring webcomic creators are poor. Depending on the level of quality you are willing to accept in terms of artistic skill you may be able to find an artist who is willing to team up for you without pay. This is pretty rare however, and of course, artists who possess any decent level of skill are in high demand. You may be able to ‘hire’ an artist for a portion of proceeds from the webcomic itself, if you’ve planned how you are going to make money off of it. An artist may be willing to work for a percentage of donations/sales/ad revenue.

The other option is to save up some money and pay the artist for their work. This is the way you can probably get the best bang for your buck. Most comic artists have a page rate, which can vary from as little as 5$ a page, to 50$ a page or beyond. It is very much dependent on the artist. You can probably bet, the better the artist is, the higher their page rate is. Artists may charge less for pencil and ink vs full color, and if you are willing to learn to do the coloring duties, you may be able to save some money.

If you are looking to team up with an artist, forums and artist hangouts are good option to see if there is anyone out there looking for partnerships. If you aren’t offering anything, you can probably expect to be heckled a bit, as artists do get sick of people trying to sponge talent for nothing, and they get testy. Some artists DO go looking for writers to help them on their own projects, and it may be possible to exchange services, you help them on their project, and they help you on yours. A little backscratching goes a long way. A few places you may go looking for artists:

• Drunkduck Networking & Community Projects forum
• SmackJeeves Creative Collaboration forum
• The Webcomic List ‘Dogpile’ Forum
• Webcomic.net ‘Help Wanted’ Forum
• Comicscommunity forums
• Deviantart forums – two areas of interest: Projects, and Employment opportunities (if you are paying)
• ComicSpace

There are many other places to look, you can even be braisen and email a particular artist you like about the potential of collaboration, but if you do, be sure to come with something in hand to offer the artist. Even if it is simply a business plan and a sample script. Showing an artist that you’ve thought things out and know what your doing does wonders to show that you are serious about working with them.  Many writers make the mistake of writing an artist without taking into consideration the whole picture, and basically asking an artist to slave over hundreds of pages for nothing. Be considerate if you are looking to colaborate, and be prepared to answer the question, “So, what do I get out of it?”. If your only answer is “exposure and my everlasting gratitude”, its not going to be good enough for most artists that are any good. Some artists may want the practice, but those who have been in the game a while need something a little more substantial.

If you aren’t willing to learn to draw, or do one of the other options and have resorted to hiring or collaborating with an artist, remember that they’ve spend hundreds if not thousands of hours perfecting the skill you weren’t willing to learn  yourself. Make sure you reward them for sharing that skill with you in some tangible way.

While it might seem like you need state of the art equipment in order to make a webcomic, its actually pretty far from the truth. Webcomic creation can be highly simple or complex depending on your level of comfort with technology and budget. Here’s a  rundown on some of the most common tools to create webcomics.

One of the key issues with webcomics as opposed to traditional comics is obviously the translation to a digital medium and being able to post them on the web. This need means that you will need to decide if you want to create your comics with traditional mediums like pen and paper and then digitize the work OR if you want to work entirely in the digital realm.

At this point you need to make a decision if you want to use a scanner or invest in a digital tablet.

Scanners

Flatbed Scanners are reasonably cheap these days, ranging from as low as 60$ to much higher for better quality.  A lot of people have access to scanners for free either through a combination scanner/printer at their parent’s home office or school/work, or even for use at the library.

This can make getting your comics online very economical, and for those of us who are very comfortable with the ol’ pen and paper, a quick, easy, and economical way of making webcomics. With a minimal investment, as well as a less steep learning curve, many people find scanning traditionally made artwork a good way to go.

The other option, which has a little more expense and a lot more of a learning curve (particularly to those of us who have been trained traditionally), is the digital tablet.

Tablets

Digital tablets are all the rage these days among artists, and while indeed pretty amazing things, they aren’t the holy grail of webcomics. The advantage of the digital tablet is that it allows you to create 100% digitally, avoiding the transition of pen and ink into digital space. You simply draw in the digital space to start with. This is advantageous in that it saves the translation and clean up time, but it has a significant learning curve for those of us who are used to the feeling of pen and paper.

The first thing one will notice is that the disconnect between looking at the screen and drawing in your lap is a bit disorienting at first and takes a bit of time to master. The second is that, if the tablet isn’t particularly sensitive, one may have to press very hard on the plasticy surface of the tablet to retain control of the pen. This can lead to some wrist trauma in the beginning until you realize that you can’t ‘draw’ on the tablet like one might with a pencil, but rather it is more akin to traditional painting. Soft, light strokes, which again can be frustrating if the tablet isn’t sensitive enough. This seems to be less of an issue for artists learning to draw than those of us who already KNOW how to draw or have been formally trained in traditional mediums such as pencil, graphite, ink, markers, or paint.

Personally it took me about a year of determined effort to make the transition between traditional art and using a digital tablet. While it may take another person more or less time than myself, I found it to be an issue in patience, and also, an issue in product education.

Selecting and Buying a Tablet

Most people tend to prefer a Wacom brand tablet, although there are other, more affordable options, but the touch sensitivity, driver quality, and responsiveness vary. I personally only have extensive experience with the Wacom tablets, so I will focus on them for the moment.

Wacom Bamboo

Wacom tablets come in basically three flavors. The first is the entry level Bamboo, which is a distinct improvement in some ways over the older Graphire line. It is a little more responsive, durable, although it has a very ‘toy’ plasticy feel. The detachable cords make it more suitable for moving around and its light. The price is also good for an entry level tablet, at just under 100$. The bamboo also supports touch as well as pen, which gives you some more organic options for scrolling and so forth. The only issues is that the physical size of the tablet is very small, and it does not have the pressure or tilt sensitivity of the more professional Intuos line.

Intuos 4

For those who are professionals or demand a higher quality tablet with greater pressure sensitivity, a more velvety feel (the surface resembles a really soft velum) with a superior pen with exchangeable nibs, the Intuos would likely suit you a lot better than the Bamboo. Currently in its 4th incarnation its quite shiny. It has several backlit, digitally displayed short cut buttons and can be oriented for righties or lefties. It also has a nice little scroll wheel which can be used for on the fly zooming or scrolling while drawing. The tablet comes in many sizes, from the small tablet (12.2″ x 8.2″ x 0.5″ with an active drawing area of 6.2″ x 3.9″) to the XL size (24.5″ x 18.2″ x 1.1″ with an active drawing area of 18.2″ x 12.0″), one can decide which size best suits their drawing style and work space. There is also a wireless version for those who dislike wires or move around a lot. The price of these tablets vary, but the small version starts at about $230, and the largest size is about $780. Although the Intuos, while much superior in terms of touch, feel and sensitivity to the Bamboo, still suffers from the ‘can’t look where you are drawing’ problem. The Cintiq is the ultimate solution, and also, with no coincidence, has the biggest price tag.

The Wacom Cintiq

The Cintiq is one of the sweetest things you’ll probably ever have sitting on your desktop if you can cough up the $1000-$2000 to own one. These badboys are not only huge, but are essentially a flatscreen monitor you can draw on, eliminating the problem of having to look away from where you are drawing. A stable of most big pro illustrators and 3d artists, these tablets are quite amazing. These tablets boast the same great tilt and pressure sensitivity as the Intuos, also are designed to be used ambidextrously and have touch strips for hot keys on the side and back. There are only two versions of them, and both are quite large.

As with all tablets, I’d highly advise anyone looking at purchasing one to actively demo one at a store, or try a friend’s before committing to buying one. Some people really dislike them, other people can’t live without them once they’ve tried them. Its a highly individual preference.

Programs for Making webcomics

There is actually a variety of programs that can be used to make comics. A lot of artists think they have to have Adobe Photoshop, but this isn’t really true. While photoshop has a lot of nice features, it actually isn’t as well suited as some other programs for certain comic making tasks. Photoshop also has a pretty hefty pricetag and learning curve, so its not always the best choice for someone just starting out. Here I have listed some programs from free to cheap to down right expensive.

Free Programs

There are quite a few free (or almost free) programs that people have adapted to learn to use for webcomics.

Pixia – A free drawing program, it handles tablet input well and feels a lot like open canvas crossed with an early version of Corel Painter, but more refined. Originally developed for japanese consumption its got a lot of tools that create a soft, watercolorish feel. Getting hard coloring out of this program is a little more difficult than others. You can import images you’ve scanned and color them using layers, and it actually works rather well. You can also draw digitially right into the program. It is more designed for illustration work however, and does not have any real comic layout type tools to speak of.

The Gimp – This is a free, geeky alternative to photoshop. It offers most of photoshop’s functionality, although the interface is different and slightly more… engineering like. For the most part however, almost all of photoshop’s basic features are included. If you can get past the learning curve, this is a good alternative tool for importing and coloring. I’ve never tried it for digital inking, or pure drawing, but I’m willing to bet its similar to Photoshop, not the best, but not the worst either.

Opencanvas 1.1 – Originally developed by Portalgraphics, this program was designed to work with tablets. As such it produces very nice lines, and is simple and paintlike to use. It also has the unique feature of being able to connect with friends and ‘sharing’ a canvas to ‘art jam’. Its is actually possible with this program to have one person drawing, and one person coloring at the same time. But it is a very early version of the latest Opencanvas, so the tools are very simple and not too refined. Its free though, you can still find it for download on the web.

Inkscape – If vector drawing is more your speed, and Adobe Illustrator interests you more than photoshop, Inkscape might be your answer if you are looking for a free open source alternative. Inkscape is a free open source vector drawing program that works reasonably well. Vector programs also work well for layout, creating panels and such, so you may want to investigate it even if you intend to do your primary illustrations in another program.

Cheap Programs

These programs are NOT free, but they aren’t expensive either in comparison to some of the top end options. A consideration if one wants something a bit more specialized, a bit more refined, but doesn’t have a lot of cash.

ArtRage
Price: Varies. 22$USD  for the cheapy edition up to 87$ USD for the Studio Pro edition
Publisher: Ambient Design
ArtRage is more of a ‘painting’ program than one specifically for comic making. Originally this program was more designed as  a sort of cheap alternative to Corel’s Painter. It mimics traditional mediums like oil paint, complete with texture of paper and paint. It can do some pretty neat stuff with medium, texture, and there is a demo that can be downloaded. Its very fun and easy to sketch in with a tablet, and the painting aspect of it is quite amusing. However, because it is more of a ‘painting’ program, it assumes you will start via tablet (although it can open jpgs and such to import scanned work), and it has no layout functionality to speak of. Illustrations look pretty though.

MangaStudio Debut
Price: $49.99 USD
Publisher: Smith Micro
This is a good product for digital comic makers, particularly on the drawing side. It has a lot of great features for keeping your lines strait, handling pencil/blue pencil/inking/perspective, importing images and painting over them on layers, even has filters for generating things such as speedlines and half tones. This program also includes a reasonably powerful layout component for creating dynamic layouts for your comics, text bubbles, and inputting text. The only part I felt it fell down on was coloring duties. Originally designed for manga, it was more focused on black and white, halftones, and greys, and works fantastically if that’s what you are trying to go for. However, I’ve still found other programs have superior handling of color. But for the digital inking and drawing tools, it’s been invaluble. Manga studio also allows you to import 3D objects to draw over, and include in your renders. There is a EX version of this software as well.

OpenCanvas 4.5+
Price: About $82.59
Publisher: PortalGraphics
This program feels a lot like Pixia, but more refined in some ways. The tools are a bit more intuitive, it has a lot of similar features to photoshop, but was definitely designed with an artist in mind. It has aspects of painter/artrage in terms of the way it mimics watercolors, felts, and even acrylics to some degree, but has inking/layer/text/transformation/and importing abilities. This program also has the unique ability to record your steps as you work and play them back.  Unlike its earlier incarnation, this program cannot connect to peers, which is kind of a shame. This is the ‘mature’ version of the free opencanvas. If you liked Pixia or the original Opencanvas, you may find you also like this one as well. Like a lot of other illustration programs it doesn’t have layout tools per se, but it does have the ability to make strait lines and work on different layers with different layer effects, so adding textbubbles and layout lines is reasonably easy and clean.

Corel Paintshop Pro
Price: $99.99
Publisher: Corel
Corel’s competing product to Adobe’s Photoshop, it offers a cheap, well developed and mature product that does a lot of stuff Adobe does. Many comic artists have turned to this as a more inexpensive method of coloring or drawing as many of the techniques and tools used in Photoshop can also be used by this program. I’ve never personally used it, but I know several comic artists who have.

Deleter Comicworks
Price: $110.00 USD
Publisher: Deleter
While I’ve not personally used this software, it is basically a competitor to MangaStudio. I understand it has some superior functionality to Mangastudio in terms of handling input and layout, as well as tone generation and speedlines. I haven’t confirmed this however. It is touted as a professional Manga tool, although I know for a fact such tools can be used to produce any sort of comic.  Unfortunately for this product it is lacking english support and their english website is kind of broken.

Expensive Software

This gets into the heavy hitter type software, at this level, we are talking professional. Most of this software is either the pro version of one of the cheap versions or the professional end of digital artistry tools. Keep in mind the prices listed are the base price listed by the manufacturer/publisher. Sometimes you can get a copy for less on a sale, or if you are a student, look into educational pricing.

MangaStudio EX
Current Version: 3
Publisher: Smith Micro
Price: 299.99 USD
The EX version is the pro version of Manga Studio Debut, as such you can upgrade from Debut to EX any time you like and take 50$ off the pricetag. EX has some vector capabilities that Debut lacks, as well as a tremendous library of resources (3D models, half tones, Backgrounds, brushes etc) that you can use with the program.  It also has a few other layout, layer, and useful tools debut lacks. For a complete comparison between the debut and ex versions, click here.

Corel Painter
Current Version: 11
Publisher: Corel
Price: 399.99 USD
The original standard in digital painting software, Corel Painter is a beautiful program for doing coloring and digital artworks. It has capabilities of mimicking traditional mediums in such a way to make it almost impossible to tell that the artwork was done digitally. This adds interest and depth to illustration work. It also behaves a bit more like the real deal, and as such is nearly useless without a decent digital tablet. It can import works to use as under-paintings, but you really REALLY need a tablet to take full advantage of this program. Because this program is geared towards illustration and not layout, many comic artists who use it end up doing their artwork in this program and then exporting it to another program to layout into comic format.

Adobe Photoshop
Current Version: CS5
Publisher: Adobe
Price: $699 USD for the standard version, $999 USD for the Extended
This is often lauded as the holy grail of comic-dom, but honestly, it isn’t. While photoshop works very very well for some applications, it actually isn’t the best or most comfortable program to draw in. It works very well as an intermediate program, importing and fixing up line art that has been scanned or digitally painted elsewhere, and is quite powerful when it comes to color handling. Vector capabilities in photoshop make it easy to digitally ink via vectors, or create very professional looking digital coloring. The program is complex however, and takes quite a lot time and dedication to master. Originally the program is designed for photo manipulation, and as an art tool secondary, and many of the ways photoshop does things reflects this. It is however an industry standard, and a lot of artists feel that learning this program is important to improving their work.But if you do choose to go this way, I highly suggest investing in not just the software, but some kind of class or tutorials as well. Its very easy to get lost in the program and many find it very counter intuitive at first, particularly if they’ve never used Adobe tools before. The sheer volume of ‘stuff’ is just overwhelming. I suggest if you are just getting into the comics world to try some of the other free or cheap programs before running to photoshop, get your feet wet, and then decide if you want to invest the time and money into learning this powerful program.

Adobe Illustrator
Current Version: CS5
Publisher: Adobe
Price: $599 USD
This is Adobe’s vector drawing solution, and if you like the painting/drawing of most of the other programs, this particular program might come as a bit of a shock in terms of how it works. Because this program deals with vector drawing, everything is done by ‘points’, which draw lines between each other. One must have a pretty good sense of vectors if they just want to pick this program up and learn it, otherwise it can have a steeper learning curve than even Photoshop. Once you figure it out however, there are a lot of advantages to vector drawings, and the LiveTrace functionality is a godsend to inking scanned images quickly and efficiently. If you are thinking of going this route, try Inkscape first, and if you like it, you’ll probably get along with Illustrator.

Adobe Flash
Current Version: CS5
Publisher: Adobe
Price: $699 USD
I’m not sure why, but a lot of comic artists like flash as a drawing tool. Again, completely unsure why, I found it highly clunky compared to other methods, but because of the prevalence, I thought I’d mention it. Like Illustrator it works in vectors, but has a sort of more intuitive set of drawing tools that behave more like photoshop’s tools. Although this program is more meant for animation than illustration, some people have gotten interesting results combining the two aspects of this program.

Traditional Tools

If you’ve gotten through all of this and still are all ‘but I just wanna draw with what I have…’, don’t worry. You’ll still need a scanner to get things online, but there isn’t a limit on what tools you can use to actually make your comic.  You may want to keep a few things in mind however.

1 – Most flatbed scanners are only 8.5 x 11. That’s a standard letter size sheet of paper. You might want to consider working at that size or maybe 9×12 if you like to put a border around things, simply because of the difficulty involved in scanning anything larger.

2- Use paper that is white, unlined, and absorbant. I used to draw on good quality photocoping paper all the time, but you can get a nice ink or bristol pad that works well. You want something fairly smooth, especially if you intend to ink directly on your pencils.

3 – Get a Non-repro blue pencil. These are typically a light blue pencil or pencil lead that doesn’t scan well. This works to your advantage, as you don’t have to erase your pencil lines once you’ve done your inks and this reduces smudging and lightening of the inks.

4 – invest in a good set of inking pens (microns, copic liners.. etc) or use a dip pen and brush. Professional quality inking will carry your drawings far, and look much better when scanned. If you try to use the dip pen and brush, make sure your paper is of a type that’s good for inking like Bristol, otherwise you can smear it all over with your palm or it will ‘bleed’ too much into the paper.

5 – Use a brush to wipe your shavings away from erasing, or you might end up smearing too much ink or pencil and make a mess of your page. If you blow, you might end up spitting slightly on your drawing and cause the ink to run, or a ‘speckling’ effect on large areas of black.

6 – Use proper erasers. A white eraser, a kneeded eraser, and a mechanical eraser are all great investments. Don’t use those lame pink ones they gave you at school. Those just ruin the paper.

7 – Get rulers and Triangles and for the love of god USE THEM. Especially when you are drawing your layouts. There is no excuse for not getting a strait line. There’s also these things called ‘french curves’ to get nice round lines.

8 – Unless you intend to learn how to do so properly, do NOT hand letter. The reason for this is readability. Lettering is actually an artform, it has rules. The computer can normally handle it better than you can do it, its often best to do it on the computer. That way you can maximize readability on the computer screen. And please, don’t ever use Comic Sans. Go and get a decent font from somewhere like Blambot.

9 – Wait until your ink/paint/felt is dry before you scan, and give it a brush. Yes you might be excited, but make sure you give your artwork time to finish drying before plunking it on the scanner bed, and make sure you get those eraser filings off or you’ll end up with weird speckles all over your art when you scan and possibly get your artwork stuck to the scanner bed.

10 – Improve your technique with every page. Experiment. Keep improving. This will make you a great comic artist in the long run. Don’t believe me? Look at some long running webcomics, and look at their first page vs their last. You’ll see how much they improved and you can improve that much too if you keep at it. Just keep going, and you’ll get there.

Now, get out there and make some webcomics.

The best way is to tackle this problem from multiple angles with a sort of ‘master plan’ in the worlds. Webcomics are a field of innovation, but there is also some etiquette involved, especially when it comes to flogging your wares. But lets look at this in order.

Step 1: Make sure you are ready

Before you start trying to draw readers in, make sure you are ready for them. A lot of beginning webcomic artists get really excited that they have their first few pages on the web and are desperate for feedback and so promote themselves prematurely. Remember: THERE IS NEVER A SECOND CHANCE TO MAKE A FIRST IMPRESSION. Don’t let your enthusiasm ruin your chance to make a splash with readers!

In order to BE ready, you should have the following done. Feel free to use this as a sort of checklist:

1) Have a functioning website. This means that your graphics are all in place, there are no ‘under construction’ pages, any extras like shoutboxes or forums are ready and tested, your archives work, character pages are up, and if you have one gallery and tipjars are operational and populated. Make sure your site isn’t blank! Ideally everything is all spit and polished, tested and retested to make sure that when a visitor arrives, its easy for them to find the comic, the archives, and the way to other parts of your site. If you have any doubts, recruit a handful of friends to help you test it all.

2) Have an archive of AT LEAST 10 pages. This is one a lot of people get lazy about and trip up on. Ideally for a long form comic you want at least one full chapter in the archive before any sort of heavy promotion. Why? so that you have something to really hook readers with. Most longform chapters are 15-20 pages, but I’d say about 10 pages min for story or short comics to give the reader something to anchor to.  Comic s with archives hook better than comics without archives. Getting readers invested is what keeps them coming back. Don’t get lazy on this step! You don’t have to have 10 comics when you put up your page, but wait until you have ten before you proceed to the ‘marketing’ phase of this list.

3) Decide on an update schedule. This is VERY VERY VERY important and will have the most direct impact on your readership and if you gain or lose readers. It is vitally important that you decide on a schedule you can keep. If you can only do one page a week, only commit to one page a week. If you can do three, great, do three, but make sure you can keep it. In the beginning stages of your comic, test how many you can do as you build your archive but BEFORE you update. Try to do as many as you can. Depending on the complexity of your comic and your personal speed, you’ll come up with a number.  The general rule of thumb regarding updates is the more the better, but even more vial is to choose a number that you a) can keep up with, and b) won’t burn you out. A point also to keep in mind is quality control. Don’t put out shit just to make numbers. Its better to produce less, high quality pages, than a lot of shitty pages. Why? Because quality counts. People will come back even over long spans for awesome webcomics, but they won’t do that for crummy ones. That, and you will probably end up restarting/redrawing your comic at some point. No one likes to repeat, and nothing kills readership faster than reboots. Trust me on this.

A lot of you might wonder which are the best update schedules. The ideal is 3xs a week, the most ideal days being Monday/Wednesday/Friday. Its one of the most popular and one that’s proven to work very well. If you can update more often, you can decide if you want to update 5xs a week (many dailies do), or only twice or even once a week. The best days to update are usually Mondays and Fridays. Avoiding weekends as a primary update day is good, as a lot of people are offline on weekends and tend to check comics when they get to school/work on monday morning, or on friday afternoons when they are bored from the week. If you have particular days you can or can’t work, you may want to schedule your updates around your own personal life, which is fine, but if you work in advance, you can do both. Work on the days you can, and update on a ‘prime’ day. Keep in mind however, the more you wait inbetween updates, the less chance people will remember to check back at your comic. And if you miss promised updates, people get VERY pissed off. Do it repeatedly, and they will stop visiting your comic. This is why you need to pick a schedule you can keep.

4) Based on your chosen update schedule, build a backlog of at least 2-3 months and work in advance. If you’ve decided to update once a week, you need a total of 8-12 pages in your backlog before you move onto the marketing phase. If you choose 3 times a week to update, you’ll need 24 -36 pages in backlog. You might be wondering ‘why the hell do I need to work that far in advance?’, and here’s the answer. When you move on to marketing yourself, you may find that your comicing time is slightly reduced because you are busy keeping up with social media, posting on websites, doing fan art for other popular comics, and following the marketing section. To keep fans coming back it is vitally important that you don’t miss updates. It also takes some time to build trust, and get readers in the habit of checking your comics on the update days, and making sure that there is always an update waiting, reliably and on time will keep them coming back. Three months is a good solid amount of time to start building positive buzz around a comic, and if you are prepared you’ll never miss an update in that time.

4) Do splash art. You will need a good deal of it for the website, for your ads (that you will create) and to use in avatars and signatures on the web. Its important to have a stash of it handy also for things like merch later. Make sure however, that the splash art you do is extremely similar to what you are offering in your comic. If your splash art is too much nicer than your comic, when people visit your comic expecting to see quality artwork that you advertised with and they see something crappy. If you plan on using comic panels, make sure you keep some of your finished art without lettering to use as splash art.

Some guidelines for what you should have ready: Individual shots of main characters, some composites of up to three main characters, a few action shots with decent backgrounds.

Step 2: Marketing

This is the step that most people like to jump to right away, because its sexy and people are impatient. But if you haven’t done the “getting ready steps” you’ll have to go back and do them anyway to make this section work. Why? because you need to have prepared to do this section. So make sure you’ve completed everything from step 1. To make the most of this section you cannot miss a single update.

While your comic is updating regularly, and with an archive set up to hook readers, you can now start to put the word out to people that you exist. There are several ways to do this, and it keeps changing and evolving as time goes on. Given that most people also don’t have a lot of cash, doing stuff on the cheap is really important.

Strategy 1: Social networking

In today’s internet, this is pretty important. Everyone looks to social networks to provide recommendations of content and get updates about what’s going on in the world that matters to them (basically, what’s up with friends). Getting a facebook page for your comic and adding a join button on your site, is pretty top priority, with facebook being the #1 social networking site in use today. Twitter is also pretty popular with webcomic people and readers, and make sure you have an RSS feed for your comic. Other social networking sites you may want to join can include Myspace, comicspace, bebo, digg, Stumbleupon, del.icio.us, etc. If you want to go all out, there are many more that aren’t as commonly used, but I suggest looking at a tool such as Ping.fm to manage posting to a lot of social networks at once.

Just being on these social isn’t enough either. You have to contribute to them and build relationships with readers. Literally, you have to make friends and alliances. Usually this means friending other, influential people, posting relevant useful information (articles, tutorials, videos) and generally being a nice person. Getting involved is key to making these sites work for you. You can’t sit on your laurels and expect people to come and see you. You have to engage. This is why its important to have all your comic work taken care of, so you can focus on updating a lot on these networks. You can’t really just flog your comic, but your comic has to be ready to be flogged, so when you people visit your page, or listen to your tweets, or read your latest blog about art, or webcomics, or whatever, when you DO say you’ve updated your comic, people are motivated to go and read it. They also constantly see you on their radar, they put more stock in what you have to say. These days, its not just good enough to put out comics, but you have to build a positive reputation and quazi friendship with your fan base.

Strategy 2: Getting Listed

While the above helps you generate interest, you need to make sure your comic is listed in places where webcomic readers go. Also, people often use specific trackers to see when their webcomics update, and its a good way to remind them to come and visit. Certain webcomic toplists are also a place that people will go to cruise for new comics. Don’t underestimate going to where the readers are. There are a number of these lists around, and make sure you are submitting to them. Search engines are also important so make sure your site is properly optimized for search engines (SEO). Some examples of lists sites include: The Webcomics List, Onlinecomics.net, The Belfry, Piperka, and WebcomicZ. There are a more out there, but some come and go with the wind. Some lists to consider would be Topwebcomics.com or Webcomics Super 100 list. Comic Rank is also an interesting toplist as it helps you track your readership more reliably than stats alone. It also functions as a toplist. You may decide to submit to all or only a few of the above lists. As a new site listing your site in many places can increase your link backs and page rank, but if you are an older comic looking just to rebuild or increase readership, I tend to suggest only picking the larger of these sites.

Strategy 3: Get Involved with the webcomic community

As with social networking, this one requires interaction on your part, and I don’t mean just posting links to your comic. But there is a HUGE community out there of webcomic readers and authors on various forums and through community sites that create hotbeds of potential readers. A lot of these are on forums, and through webcomic communities such as Drunkduck, Comicgenesis, Spiderforest, and SmackJeeves, but a lot are independent such as Webcomics Community or webcomic.net.

There are a ton of them out there, and getting involved in some of the choicer ones that you feel your comic fits well as a part of will not only garner you visibility with other authors and fans, but allows you to cultivate relationships between your comic and others. This is important to the next strategy.

Strategy 4: Get Linked with other comics

Ultimately, the best way to get traffic is from other, like comics to your own. If you aren’t sure what I mean, its pretty simple. If your comic is about asskicking demons, you’d probably get more traffic from comic with other asskicking supernatural characters than say, a romance comic. Basically try to find people who write in a similar genre as yourself and find a way to trade links with them. Sometimes it can be as simple as listing their site in your links section and dropping them a note to request they do the same (but don’t require it, that’s kind of rude).  This tends to work well with smaller comics, but larger ones tend to get requests all the time, so you have to be a bit more creative. Its still possible, but requires more effort.

The best way to get linked back is often doing fanart or a fan story for a comic you really admire and think fits well with your genre and comic. When you send them the artwork, make sure you include your comic’s URL as a part of your signature of your email. A lot of fan art is put up in a site gallery and the artist is linked back as a ‘thank you’. Doing a fan comic or one shot is also a good way of promoting yourself and your skills to a new audience. Most webcomic authors use fan filler at some point, and its a perfect opportunity to gain exposure on a bigger comic without paying for advertising.

Strategy 4: Advertising

A lot of people still think that advertising is a dirty word, but today, through services such as Project Wonderful, its really easy and cost effective to get advertising on many comics one might otherwise never get exposure on.  Also, in getting involved you can also start generating a bit of revenue for yourself to either sustain your comic’s hosting, or reinvest into advertising on more expensive comics without having the money actually come out of your pocket.

Generally when advertising, its best to only advertise on days you update. This ensures that whenever people click through the ad, its a fresh new page they will be seeing. Don’t advertise if you haven’t updated in a long time, or if you only update once a week, try to advertise on only the few days after you update. Bid on comics that fit your comic’s genre and demographic, and make sure your ads reflect the actual comic art, not just the splash art.

Project wonderful isn’t the only place you can advertise, but its one of the most highly aimed at webcomics specifically. However places such as facebook, where highly targeted advertising tools are present, make good places to fish for new readers.

Step 3: Create additional content on the site to hold readers

Marketing will help bring new eyes to your site, and while the comic is good to keep people coming back, people don’t generally STAY on the website unless there is more to keep them interested. Content is king on the internet, and the more you have, the better your site will do in keeping people coming back, even on the days your comic isn’t updating. This helps keep your views up for ad boxes (revenue generation), as well as provides additional ways to interact with readers.

Adding a blog, art gallery, character bios, twitter feed, forums, games, etc. All add value. Keeping people coming back even when there isn’t a new comic helps create opportunities to continue interacting with your readers, entertaining them even when nothing is going on.

Step 4: Update. On time. Everytime.

This is the most critical point. While people might love your additional content, always remember, they are there for the comic. If you say you are going to update every wed night, then update every wed night. Nothing kills comics faster than missed updates, long term hiatuses, and erratic schedules. Believe me, I know first hand. If there is one piece of advice I could give any aspiring webcomic creator that is iron clad, it is this one.  This also happens to be the single hardest task in making and maintaining a webcomic. Keep this up, and your audience will grow steadily.

That all being said… a caveat to readers:

While all this will definitely help you bring in readers, it will not necessarily drive them to you in droves and guarantee instant popularity. There are many factors in making a comic ‘popular’, and marketing is only a means of getting the word out that your comic exists. You will gain readers over a period of time. Most audiences are built over the course of several years. You need to make sure you give yourself time and don’t become discouraged when you aren’t instantly popular. The world of webcomics is always changing, always evolving, and you need to keep rolling with the punches.

Good luck!

It has often been argued in webcomic circles, which is more important; writing or art? If a webcomic was a house, the art is really the curb appeal and exterior of the house. Its the decorative touches and facade. It gives the house beauty and character. But the foundation, the heart and soul of a comic is in its story, and thus in the writing. A comic with good writing can gain a following with so-so art, but a beautiful comic with a crappy, incoherent story won’t really limp anywhere for long. Both ultimately are important, but the writing, in long or short format,  is what ultimately keeps readers coming back week after week.

Being primarily an artist, writing has always been a challenge. I’ve got lots of great ideas, great pictures in my head, but when it comes to getting them down in a coherent fashion, it was always a huge stumbling block for me.  I tend to write long form comics, the sort one might find as a multi volume graphic novel series. But even for short form comics, writing is a big determining factor of who rises and who falls in the webcomics world.

But its certainly not an easy task. Writing well, like doing anything well, takes knowledge and practice.  In order to become a good writer not only do you have to be knowledgeable about the actual mechanics of writing, but you have to educate yourself on some of the finer points like plot, structure, characterization, and dialogue. And if that wasn’t hard enough you also have to be a brutal editor, and then figure out how you are going to actually visually realize your story, since comics are visual medium not a wordy one. In fact, for comics, less words in a page is good. You have to become very aware of how to use the fewest words to the most impact and use the images to fill in the other missing 1000 words. Writing a comic isn’t like writing a novel, but you do have to have a good grasp of the basic concepts of writing.

In the short form of comics, you are doing mostly gag writing or something witty in sequence. Most of the short form comics focus on the delivery of humor. There is a set number of panels in which a joke is delivered. Comics may or may not have storylines in this genre with re-occurring characters or gags, many do, but the focus tends to be more on the funny than the development of the characters.

With long form comics (graphic novels and the like), the development of the character is a very real focus, with the incidences of the plot carrying the main character(s) forward to the ultimate revelation (climax) and then wrapping up the story. These stories tend to have a definite beginning, middle, and end. The rest of the article is going to focus specifically on the basics of writing for long form comics.

Story Statement

Beginning with a story statement is a good way to stay focused, and so it is also a good place to start. When you write comics, being such a very compressed medium, its easy to stray into the ‘too much to say, too little space to say it in’ territory. its also easy to lose focus when a person gets into all the cool fun of thinking up characters and world information, so having one of these handy to keep you on track is very useful. Its also a good place to begin because it makes you think clearly about what you are writing about.

A story statement is a short, 1  sentence description of your story. Its also good to state your story ‘theme’ if you have one, which is taking your story statement and distilling it even further. A story statement should not contain any names of characters, or specific places. It should be described in as generic terms as possible.

Example:

This is a story statement for my comic Brymstone:

Story Statement: The story of a immortal evil wizard trapped in a young monk boy undergoing spiritual rehabilitation.

Story theme: Redemption

This is a story statement for my comic Shifters:

Story Statement: In the not so distant future a young girl discovers she is a monster; one with the power to destroy a world or save it.

Story Theme: Choice vs Fate

These statements are difficult at first, distilling your ideas down to its bare bones isn’t easy, but very important in order to focus on what’s important about your story and not wandering around all over the place. It also helps you begin to focus on the next leg of building the skeleton of your story.

Basic story construct for long form comics

There is a basic format for stories which you might find familiar. They do still teach this in english class, but it might not have been very important to you until now, so I’ll refresh your memory and give you a handy dandy little work structure. Following are the ‘parts’ of a story:

Introduction -> This is the ‘beginning’. Here you introduce your main character and supporting characters. The ‘heroes’. You also establish the world and their situation before the story starts so the audience knows who the heroes are, where the story is taking place, when the events are happening, what the situation before things start is, and why the characters are where they are. In a comic this is is done with an opening shot or two, plus a few pages to show a bit of the main character’s daily life, introduce and establish a few people that are relevant to that main character, and give some sense as to what they are doing before the ‘inciting incident’ hits.  As a rule, try not to introduce more than three protagonist (good guy) characters at the beginning. One ‘main’ character, and two ‘supporting characters. If there are more characters you absolutely HAVE to introduce, try to keep it brief, making them more ‘background’ or ‘one-liner’ characters. Often it is better to wait until after the inciting incident to get into more characters.

Inciting Incident -> The ‘inciting incident’ is the event that starts the story, or the ‘life changing’ event that begins the character’s quest to… whatever they are going to do. Its the first domino that’s going to topple all the others. It may or may not seem directly related to the central plot, but it is pivotal that it is related somehow. This should happen just at the end of the intoduction to get the ball rolling in the story.

Crisis -> A ‘crisis’, sometimes called a ‘twist’, or ‘complication’ is essentially a problem that occurs within the story that tests a character’s resolve. There can be varying degrees of crisis depending on the point of the story. The crisis, as a rule, should get more and more serious as the story moves towards the climax, this is called ‘building tension’. The protagonist may or may not succeed in a crisis, but it is important that the protagonist be profoundly affected by them for good or bad. Remember, ultimately the protagonist has to grow and change to be able to make their ‘ultimate choice/change’ at the climax.

Climax -> The very last and ultimate crisis, the ultimate end point for if the protagonist of the story succeeds or fails. Everything should build towards this one moment. Often the outcome of the Climax determines if a story is ‘happy’, ‘sad’, or ‘bittersweet’, or just ‘eh’. This is often a decision you want to make at the very beginning of attempting to write the story. If you want to write a sad story, this is where the peek of that sadness is going to be, and of course everything is going to lead up to it. It might seem counter intuitive, but knowing the ending before beginning writing the story is highly recommended.

Denouement -> This is the actual ‘ending’ where all the loose ends are sort of summed up and a sort of ‘epilogue’ is created for the story, neatly folding everything up and giving people a sort of wrap on the story to feel complete and satisfied. Like a song fading at the end, it is the fading of the story’s end.

The above format is very popularly used in the ‘3 act story‘ model, which is a good model for people just starting out writing to use. The structure is clear and easy to follow. You want to begin without being very specific about your characters. Don’t use names just use descriptors, so you don’t get caught in the details. This helps get you a sort of skeleton of your story.

Example:

Story statement: A modern witch girl discovers her true love, just as she’s drawn into a centuries old conflict between witch clans, of which her lover is on the other side.

Story Theme: True love wins

Introduction: Introduce main character going to her school, and her best friend, show romantic relationship with true love. Introduce her Auntie and familar, show normal life.

Inciting incident: While on a date with her true love, they are attacked by a deadly magic spell.

Crisis one: True love’s family thinks that girl’s family attacked their son, while girl’s family think’s true love’s family attacked them. Families begin feuding with lovers pulled away to each side.

Crisis two: True love and girl try to see each other, but true love is attacked by someone who looks just like girl! He is convinced she has turned her back on him.

Crisis three: After the families find out, thanks to the lovers, that neither side is responsible, it is discovered there is a traitor in one of the families trying to destroy them both.

Climax:Traitor is revealed and the battle to defeat him begins.He is defeated, although Auntie is killed.

Denouement: Lovers are married later after high school, and they have a child.

Casting the characters of a story

Once you have the basics of the plot figured out you can begin to ‘cast’ the roles. The reason that you want to wait until after you’ve got a plot to cast them is because if you have a bunch of characters first off you will want to try to put them all in. This is neither advisable, nor always possible. The reason being that too many characters can unfocus the story. People only really can focus on a handful of characters at one time. Too many characters too fast tends to leave people grasping at who’s doing what, when, and how. It also often arises that there are too many characters to explore all of them properly, or to do so takes an obscenely long time.

The characters you need to cast are as follows:

Protagonist: This is the ‘hero’ or more likely ‘main character’ of the story. Not all protagonists are heroes, but all of them are main characters. This is the focal character of the story, the one that the story is about. This is the most important character in the story. In the above example, this is the girl witch.

Antagonist: This is the person who opposes the protagonist. Often known as the ‘bad guy’ or villain. Although many antagonists are not always bad, they simply oppose the main character’s goals. There might be many antagonists over the course of a story, but there should always be one primary one that is the ‘uberbaddie’ that the main character has to oppose till the very end. The antangonist in the above story is the Traitor.

Supporting characters: There are usually two ‘main’ supporting characters. These are often right hand men/women, best friends, companions and other people who are the most helpful and close to the main character. Having more than two ‘main’ supporting characters tends to get cluttered. The model most often followed is a boy and a girl. List the two primary supporting characters. In the above example, the two main supporting characters are the best friend and the love interest.

Mascot: This is a term sort of from manga style stories but there is often an animal companion, familiar, or sort of cute fuzzy thing that might be a pet or annoyance, often for comic relief. Not all stories might have one, but a lot do. The above story idea has a familiar for the witch protagonist. The mascot might be cynical or stupid, but they are often around.

Supporting cast: These are characters that come and go, and provide ‘background’ but are not necessarily that important. They may have a line here and there, or be particularly important in a single storyline. Often these are characters that become lesser antagonists or supporting characters to the protagonist as they work against the antagonist or as the antagonist works against the protagonist. For the above story example, the two families, such as the Auntie, or a mother and father, or a brother or sister, or classmates may be ‘supporting cast’. Normally these people are not particularly focused on and we don’t know much about them unless they become somehow important to the story at some point. Cast characters should never usurp the main character’s focus, if they do, you can bet you’ve probably gone off on a tangent and you might have to reign yourself in.

Once you’ve actually ‘cast’ the roles, created characters to fit the vague descriptors as above, you can set about to fleshing them out as you wish. But casting using the needs of the story as a guideline, you can be sure you only make what you need and can spend the most time putting your efforts where they are the most useful. If you are writing with a group of characters in mind, you may find you have to ditch some of the characters or put some in very low priority to fit the needs of the story. The story needs come first, characters that don’t fit have to be put out. Save them for a later story.

Fleshing out the story

Now you’ve got a basic framework of the story, and now comes the time to start fleshing things out in terms of details. This is a lot of answering the ‘who, what, where, when and , why” questions of writing over and over. Fleshing out the details between key events is a good place to start. Begin by stating events in simple terms like you did in the basic story outline into ‘sub crisis’, these are lesser problems or events that lead up to the big one. Done right, its like inflating a bubble until it pops, with the biggest pop at the climax. The protagonist shouldn’t always succeed, and there should be plenty of misunderstandings, back stepping, hurt feelings, regret, and failure in these sub plots in addition to whatever successes and winning might happen. Their outcomes aren’t as critical, but they must lead up to the main crisis point where the protagonist has a major success or failure. Good stories are often told through the author torturing a character mercilessly. Don’t be afraid to show your character’s flaws. Character design is an art unto itself, but I’ll cover that in another blog. As a rule of thumb, work in threes. At least three sub crisis to every major crisis. You can add more if you feel you need them, just remember, you have to constantly build up to the major crisis. The more plots you put in, the bigger the build up should be.

Once you’ve done most of your fleshing out, you can start the process of scripting. Most comics are written so they kind of look like a movie or TV script, but instead of dictating just scenes, they dictate how the page should flow, as well as what each panel should contain and a description of what to draw, what sort of ‘shot’, as well as dialogue or sound effects. Not all scripts are written like this. Some are written more prose like. Either one can be effective. This page has a very good set of examples from professional writers.

Having a good story plan is definitely an important first step, and is a good place to get you started and keep you focused through your entire project. If you are a scatterbrained artist like me, its essential to keep on track through a long project, and if you are a wordy writer, its essential to keep focused on what is needed without getting all purple and flowery. Its very important however to keep learning and teaching yourself about good writing practices, plot, flow, pacing, and dialogue. This is only one example of how to start, I highly encourage you to seek out writing resources and soak in as much as you can to improve.