Hi everyone! I know I'm rarely on here, but I've decided to share my process for my webcomic in case it could help anyone.
I've been building my story for many years in my head (it's a paracosm that's been with me basically since I could hold a pencil), and it wasn't until about 2021 that I was finally able to start getting it down, and this is the process that works for me. This process is more aimed at super-lengthy ongoing multiple-arc type things, so those with massive fantasy epics, this is for you!
1) Make an outline for the arc. I make a list of each episode, and the basic events that happen in them. I typically have 11-13 chapters per arc and 2-3 focus-events happen in a chapter, because I try not to have "too much going on". Breaking down the focuses in a list is also useful in that you can gauge the flow of the focus and not have it "jump around" too much, and also balance how much you focus on one character to another, etc.
(As you can see, this is very basic, but keep in mind I've had "the party episode" in my head for years so I didn't need to write out a scene I already knew like the back of my hand in the list)
2) Once the list is done, start writing the episodes in a script-like format. If you're doing your project solo, literally no one has to understand the script but you. Write it how you envision it in a way you can understand. And don't be afraid to stray slightly from the list! Do whatever feels more natural.
3+) After you've scripted the final scripts for each episode, write down ANOTHER list of all the significant things that DO happen, so you can reference back to it in the future to avoid things like plotholes and accidental repeat of events. You could also, instead, edit the original list from step 1; I just personally like to have multiple documents so I can see changes and where they happened.
4) This is where the drawing begins. What I do is make REALLY rough drafts for every page in each episode. Think kinda like thumbnailing for storyboards; I just scribble down the basic events I want happening, the area of the dialogue (with the beginning few words of the line, to keep track) And after that, it's clean(ish) sketches*, lineart, coloring, etc. I typically do all the roughs in order, and then do the same with clean sketches, and then do the rest page-by-page.
(*EDIT: I wan't to elaborate that I highly recommend adding the text in as early as you feasibly can so you don't have to worry about text fitting, as you can work around it)
IMPORTANT NOTE! DO NOT be afraid to stray from ANY of the initial writing! If your script's dialogue is fine but doesn't have enough pages, make more pages! As you can see, I had to split what was originally going to be 1 page. There was even a crucial scene in chapter 3 of my comic that didn't even happen in the scripts, but it needed to. If you feel a change is needed, do it! Don't restrict yourself too much; see the script as more of a guideline.
So yeah, there's my method. I know it was unprompted and all, but for so many years I felt hopelessly lost when trying to get this MASSIVE story down, and my goal of posting this is because if there's the slightest possibility this could help someone, I want it to do that. :) Hopefully this helps someone, but now is my time to say that I'm by no means a professional; I'm self-taught and I've only been making the actual comic for 3-4 years, however I have 5 out of 10+ of the arcs fully scripted :)
If you're interested in my comic, you can read it here! If you check it out, know that that means the world to me ;w;
Have a nice day/night <3
While this WIP isn’t my first webcomic, it is my first original and colored comic. And I want it to be both consistent and pretty. Thus, a serious amount of already-completed work must be done before uploading the first page.
But where to begin? And how many pages do I need to make in advance, anyway?
It was time to make a solid to-do list:
(The above is about half of page 1, out of 3 pages.)
Not everyone is a planner!
For some people, making a list like this would increase stress and anxiety. But for me, the opposite is true; making it was like a huge weight off my chest.
This list was originally an MS Word template for something completely different. Sure, I had to completely destroy it to change it to suit my needs (and that took some time)... but it has a really cute picture of stacked rocks!
(In retrospect, I probably should have done an online search for BLANK templates. Could’ve saved time there.)
Hey 28-year-old-gonna-be-comic-creator, you worried about having missed your window? you worried you missed your prime? too fuckin bad. You have comics to draw don't you. get the fuck drawing cause you're gonna be drawing comics all the way through your 30s too
doesn't stop there, here come your 40s and 50s and 60s. Nothin but comics in your future, and a good fuckin time.
Imagine you have finished the perfect artwork for the latest update for your webcomic. You feel so proud about it you want to hang it on your wall. You want to post it immediately! You want everyone to see it! But before you can do that, you need to add dialogue between your characters.
And that’s where you get stuck. No matter where you place the speech balloons, you’re covering too much of your drawing. It all looks badly placed. You accidentally make a speech balloon that goes from side to side of the frame. It’s a major disaster! What did just happen and how can you avoid it? Let’s answer those questions now.
The charm about comics and webcomics is that they’re a combination of text and images. It’s true its main strength is the fact the reader can look at the art depicted, but a webcomic is never complete without dialogue or text.
However, filling your webcomic to the brim with text and dialogue is not how webcomics work. It’s rare to find the exception to these rules, such as Homestuck, and even then it’s only because of the difference in format. It’d be tedious to read a webcomic that has paragraph after paragraph crammed in a single frame!
As if all that wasn’t enough, you also have to remember that if you place the text badly, it’ll make the reader overlook the art you worked so hard on or even get confused, cardinal sins in this type of work. If you strive to be a webcomic author, you must understand how to place dialogue and text properly. That’s what this post is here for! Here are some handy tips that will allow your webcomic’s text shine without sacrificing anything in the process!
GREAT! WHERE DO I START?
Not so fast, enthusiastic creator! Lettering isn’t something you add in the end. You need to plan this carefully from the beginning. Webcomics are a visual medium, and that’s a double-edged sword. You can communicate a lot through art, but there’s not much space for dialogue unless you plan carefully from the very start. You can’t clutter the page with line after line after line!
That’s why, before starting to draw the page, you need to be aware how much dialogue you’ll have this time. Write it somewhere, analyze how much space you will need. Keep in mind the text is a piece of a larger picture, so to say. You can’t let it overshadow the rest of the page.
I’M DONE PLANNING.
Congratulations on completing the first step! Now you may start drawing. Whether you sketch on paper or digitally doesn’t matter, what matters is that you sketch. Why? Because this way you can plan where you’ll place the speech balloons. It’d be a shame if at the end your dialogue covered too much of the art, this can be easily prevented if you sketch. While you draw, imagine where you may be placing the speech balloon, and avoid drawing too much inside that small area. You also may adjust the size of the frames, leaving enough space for the speech balloons without having to sacrifice part of the art.
So you got your art done! Well done, now place the speech balloon. There are many speech balloons you may use, depending on what you want to communicate.
These are more like guidelines, the most used meanings for these type of speech balloons. You as the author of the webcomic have the liberty to adjust speech balloons according to your style and needs. You could modify speech balloons to make them fit a character. Color, shape, font, all that are qualities you can change according to situations. You’re the one who has the last word on the matter!
---Guilded Age
To keep your speech balloons orderly, try to accommodate the words in the shape of a square. Avoid long lines, occupy as little space as possible with the speech balloon. Make sure the tails are pointing at the character who is speaking. It doesn’t have to touch the character; all it needs to do is point in the general direction the character is at.
Angelica Maria, the author of Solstoria, mentioned this as her usual technique on how to accommodate text inside a speech bubble:
I try to keep the text in a speech bubble looking like a "Square", so for example
"Oh no, I'm being
held accountable
for my actions!"
The middle line can be extended slightly depending on the shape of the bubble. This is just something I keep in mind, it's not something you have to follow to a T or anything. I just want to make the lettering look somewhat good.
Wait, but how to position the speech balloons? Generally, it’ll be better to position them in a way that’ll guide the reader’s eyes in a natural direction – left to right, in other words. Take this for example:
---Girl Genius
See? The speech balloons are positioned in a way it’d be easy for the reader’s eyes to move towards the right. The dialogue always starts on the top left corner and moves either in an arch towards the bottom right corner or in the top and bottom parts of each frame. It’s not a requirement to set your speech balloons this way, but it’ll certainly make it easier for the reader to read!
To put it in a nutshell: as a rule of thumb, remember to direct the balloons placement in a way that leads from left to right or from top to bottom.
Another thing you have to remember and keep in mind if what font you’ll use for your lettering. What kind of font would be the best for your dialogue? Any font that’s legible at small sizes will be good. Maybe Comic Sans would be your first thought because, just as its name says, it was created for comics, and that is because Comic Sans is meant to be readable at small sizes. That doesn’t mean you have to limit yourself to using Comic Sans. There are many other fonts that could be useful to you!
I recommend you take a look at this website. It has many fonts that can be used in the comic book industry, and most of them would be good for your webcomic, no matter the genre. Some are paid fonts, but there are many fonts that are free to use and can be useful to you.
Here, take a look at some fonts you could use! Compare and decide!
Personally, I like how the Back Issues font and the Kid Kosmic font look!
Generally, it’s recommended you use all-caps in the webcomic, as it’ll be easier to read. Most of the fonts you’ll find for comics often only have capital letters, so most of the time you just will have to type without worrying about activating the all-caps function.
I HAVE THE FONT AND THE IMAGE. NOW WHAT?
Open your sketch or finished image in your software of choice. For the purpose of this post, I’ll suppose you have Photoshop. Most software you can use for these purposes have the same basic functions, so it doesn’t really matter.
Create a new layer above your image. This layer will hold the speech bubble itself – the writing will go in a different layer. Don’t start drawing ellipses or circles yet! Instead, write the text you want to use, and place it where you want it to be, and the size you want it to be. If the text tool didn’t automatically create a layer when you used it, manually make a new layer and place the text there. It’s a good idea to have one layer for each speech bubble, don’t lump all speech bubbles in the same layer.
Once you have the text written, you can make the speech bubbles themselves! The quick option would be to use the ellipsis tool and fill it with white color, but the result will end being rather generic. How about you try to draw the speech balloon by yourself? Use a tablet or, if you don’t have one, use the pen tool. It may take some practice, but this should give your webcomic a more professional look.
You don’t have to make the balloons perfectly round. As long as it’s decently round and doesn’t look like something splattered all over your image, you’ll be okay.
Remember to leave some space around your text, though! Constricting your dialogue into a speech balloon smaller than it is not a good idea.
See?
Also, there’s a technique that could make this easier for you. In Photoshop, there’s a special layer effect called ‘stroke’. If you configure it correctly, everything you draw on that layer will be surrounded by an outline. Make sure to configure it so there’s a black border, of two or three pixels wide, and that it’ll be placed externally. Use a brush with a white color to make the speech bubbles, it’ll immediately be outlined, with no additional effort on your part! If you want to recreate these characteristics in new layers without having to open the window again, all you have to do is duplicate the layer while it’s empty. That’ll give the same characteristics to the copied layers!
Those are the basics of speech balloons.
Dialogue isn’t the only text you may use in a webcomic, though. There’s also expository dialogue, like a monologue, thoughts or notes you’re adding to the page, for one reason or another. What to do, then?
---Between Failures
Usually, these are done in these rectangular boxes. These could be considered similar to speech balloons in many ways, and follow many of the tips and rules speech balloons have. When asked, the author of Between Failures said this:
I've only done this two or three times in the entire run of the comic. It's not talking because it would make the character look insane if he monologued out loud to himself for a couple of pages. This is basically just expository narration to set up the premise of the comic in a single page.
How much expository narration is necessary for a webcomic? It’s not like there’s a definite answer to such question or a guideline you need to follow, but it may be worth remembering that webcomics are a visual medium. Sticking to the ‘show, don’t tell’ may be a good choice, since illustrating some of the exposition may help get it across better than text would, with the risk of breaking the pacing a bit. It all depends on the situation, so trust your intuition, ask yourself what you’d like to see!
I UNDERSTAND!
Excellent, I’m glad to hear that.
Oh, right, there’s one thing more you may want to hear about: can you stylize your speech balloons? Give them your own touch? By all means, go ahead! If you feel it’s appropriate for your webcomic and you think it looks good, then experiment all you want. Gauge how the speech balloons look in your webcomic, maybe ask for a few opinions...do everything you can so the end result is something you’re happy with.
It doesn’t have to be anything complicated. Simple measures such as a shadow or a border around your speech balloon can be quite effective to make your webcomic have a distinctive mark to make it stand out from the many, many webcomics available on the Internet.
---Solstoria
I started adding them because I removed the black outline on the bubbles and felt they looked better with a drop shadow and now concrete outline. I also removed the outline of the comic panels of Solstoria in general around that time too! I just did it because I wanted to try something different and I liked how it looked. I know Solstoria isn't highly structured, but I enjoy experimenting with it.
As you can see, speech balloons aren’t something done spontaneously if you want professional results, but the effort will be worth it!
---
I hope everything discussed in this post is of some use to you. Good luck to all your endeavors in the field of webcomics!
Some comic creators can choose a story and just run with it. It... didn’t quite work that way for the WIP comic:
Nov. 2018: My brother gives me a unintentionally super back-handed compliment about my comic skills. It sparks the idea of focusing more on comic creation rather than indie fiction.
Nov. 2018 - June 2019: Sifting through ideas.
June/July 2019: Inspiration strikes for the WIP (’bout time!) and plotting begins.
Sometime during July 2019: Didn’t track where my most up-to-date OneNote doc with all the story notes is being saved. For a horrible hour or so, TWO WEEKS of plotting and drafting were apparently lost. (Don’t do this to yourself, future me! Keep track of EVERYTHING.)
August 2019 - Present: Working on prepping the comic for real!
I do consider the 9-month sifting-ideas stage to be part of this WIP’s process. The things learned during that time heavily informed what the WIP is (and is not) like.
Since that 9-month step took so gosh darn long, there will be a separate post on why that happened (so hopefully that step will be a lot shorter in the future!)
Fellow writers: Does it take you this long to choose an idea to focus on? Or are you able to just pick out any idea and make it work for you?
Guess I’ll Draw: Easily Choosing a Story? What Sorcery is That?
In the last post, it was noted that it took 9 months to sift through ideas before inspiration struck for the WIP comic. Why did it take so long to get an idea that actually stuck?
Many ideas were TOO BIG. Would it be cool to do a long and epic comic one day? Yes. Is my very first original comic the one to do that with? Nope!
Some lacked a main cast of lovable goofballs. If the main cast’s interaction and relationships aren’t both interesting and potentially hilarious, then I just can’t fall in love with them.
Some had inspiration that was too weak. The inspirational spark made me go “Ooh cool!” rather than “OH GOSH THAT’S SO COOL!!” A weak spark often resulted in problem 2.
So in the future, to avoid taking 9 months working on ideas that ultimately won’t work, I need to take into account:
Scope
Heart
IMPACT
Ironically, I now realize these three things are often big factors in my fiction writing as well. But I forget (and thus why this record is necessary!)
Writers: Are there things that you must take into account when developing a story you love? Or can you just go with the flow and write and love any kind of story?
Here’s a question: why don’t more webcomic artists keep logs of their process in creating and publishing their comics?
There’s probably a lot of good reasons for not doing so.
Regardless, I will be keeping a process log of an original, colored webcomic that is in the works. The purpose of this log is threefold:
I will be able to use the log for future projects (replicating what worked, avoiding what didn’t work).
Others might also learn from my fails! And there will be many fails.
If other creators are kind enough to comment on my logs in any way, I’ll definitely learn a thing or two from them.
These posts will be both short and not too frequent.
That aside, are you familiar with any webcomic process logs of any kind? I’ve found very few (the best so far being Brick by Brick), which is kind of a shame, because there’s so much to learn from them.
