HOW TO SPEND TIME MAKING YOUR OWN COMICS!
Making Comics, Part One
Making Comics, Part Two
Making Comics, Part Three
Making Comics, Part Four
Making Comics, Part Five: Motion Comics
Practice is over; it's time to answer the call and to start making comics for myself. I'd love to have had another ten years or so to keep on copying masterworks, but I have a rendezvous with death, and I must thrash out my own way while the sun has yet to set.
In the section "Making Comics" I'll be talking about the comic it'll be taking me several years to complete. My initial estimate was two years, but I reserve the right to change this. So far I'm hitting a stride of about one completed page a week, if things go well; that includes pencilling, inking, dialog, and color. I hope to learn shortcuts to make the work quicker; I'm working a full-time job as I do this.
Panel Detail
What'll be in "Making Comics"? I understand some people with websites about their comics put up an entire page each week. Well, this isn't a web comic I'm making. I'm designing this comic book to be printed & to take advantage of all this swell 21st century printing technology. With 100 bucks I can do in a day what it took a print shop $1000 to do in a week back in the 50s.
I want you nice people out there to buy my comics, of course, so I won't be putting up one page a week. Instead, I'll be putting up single panels as I go along, or examples of same. My goals here are two-fold:
Why do most comics and movies suck so bad? or
Why is what I write so great?
First off: Comics for Grownups is about delivering a quality experience, and advancing the art of comics. Kim Deitch pointed out that comics and movies got started at about the same time, but one of these art forms has budgets in the hundreds of millions and the other one is lucky if they get a print run of 6,000. Why is this? I'd guess probably because the majority of comics are crappy. The professional comics industry has worked hard for a reputation as the go-to art form for little kids and the socially inept. If they make little money it's because the market, by and large, doesn't want this product.
Then again, comics are a place where you can do a lot of different things that would be impossible in other mediums, and no one will stop you because people think comics are for kids and idiots. Not only that, many people think comics are incapable of expressing thoughts that kids and idiots can't understand. This way you can get comics like Fukitor
So what makes comics so great? How can we make comics even greater than they are now? Perhaps by illustrating different problems I can learn more about what makes comics work.
Life ain't free
Second, I want to convince you to buy my comics. If I posted a complete page every week, you'd scan it and put the whole thing on animea.net, and I wouldn't see a dime of your money. So instead, by posting single unrelated panels, I will pique your interest and "hook" you, making it impossible for you to live another second without buying my comics.
A nagging question I have is, is it viable to live by making comics? Perhaps the tools we have in the 21st century make this more viable than ever before, but then again, a lot depends on how much disposable income people have. I'll talk about what makes comics sell, or how I can sell my comic.
NEXT: Go read Making Comic Books Part One or Visit the Home Page!
