Working Process: Comic
For everyone who has ever wondered how those comic strips of mine come to be.. This is a storyboard (the sketch-stadium of a comic) of one qiucheng strip I scribbled after the 19 days picnic arc mudslide disaster chapter but have not realized into a comic (and probably never will). So it’s at least useful for showing a bit of my work process, I figured (this one’s a messy example, tho).
For story ideas with more dialogue I normally start off with a script. I left it out here, because it contains barely any words - but for better understanding, here’s an accompanying script, like I usually do it:
P stands for page, p stands for panel.
Working Title:___
P1
p1: Qiu sitting in the car, open door, messing with phone
p2: Close-Up of Q’s head (smiling slightly, while looking at phone)
p3 and p4: Close-Ups of silly snap-shot pictures of the dog (Q is flicking through the phone’s photo gallery with his thumb)
p5: Close-Up thumb, swishing movement to next pic (blurred, movement focus)
P2
p1: Detail Close-Up. Q’s thumb pausing on picture, panel shows only excerpt of dog held in arm of person with expensive coat and wrist watch.
p2: Close-Up on Q’s face. Q: ....
p3: Close-Up on phone pic, panning in on face of person who holds dog - it’s He Cheng - the dogs puppy eyes stand in contrast to his seemingly accusing glare (resting b*tch face)
p4: pan out on Q. Q: ... (he’s looking down at the phone, pondering)
P3
p1: Close-Up phone UI, Q’s finger clicking on messenger app.
p2: Close-Up App. chat window with HC. Q’s typed out a text message: “the dog would love it here.”
p3: Close-Up on Q’s face, frontal, with a somewhat smug/complacent smile
p4: Cracking sound from outside (thunderstorm). Panning in on Q’s eyes, looking alarmed in direction of noise.
P4
p1: Zoomed out: forest and mountain range, a big thundercloud on the sky, thunder rolling with a “boom”. Q got out of car and stares at sky, backview.
p2: Pan in on Q looking up at sky, frontal. Q: .................... Why do I feel like this thundercloud is coming personally for me? (nervously)
Now here’s what the first draft of the storyboard looks like on the right of the page (Din5 notebook, 5 square mm checkered) On the upper left side I sketched some of the phone pic panels in bigger scale. During the process, I rearranged some panels, then drew tiny layout sketches with the final order on the corner left downside.
(I attached a close-up version of the correctly arranged panels/pages in the second pic below)
