Comic Genesis Forums

Those are sweet.

The 1984 thing was riff-a-licious.

... OMGWTFLOL. I like that one. That is... excellent...

Me too. It's just incredible.

Also, I have finished the first strip of my comic. But I'm not quite sure how to display it. If I post it in a public place like deviantArt, it'll ruin the effect when it's eventually moved to comicgenesis. Any thoughts?

RandomScribe, I just don't know how to describe how much I side with your comic's view on the present day butchering of the English language; all I can think to say is bravo!

Micro_fur - Found an unsecured Wi-Fi and is now connecting at 54Mbs!

Micro, I have but one request based off your last post.

Feel free to use other people's unsecured wifi, but if you ever have problems with it, do NOT call into tech support expecting help, ok?

sorry, growing pet peeve there

Nyamaza wrote:. . . do NOT call into tech support expecting help, ok?

sorry, growing pet peeve there

You and me both; afterall, beggars cant be choosers.

PS I only call on tech support as a total last resort, they're going to put me on death hold anyway. Be nice to the phone slaves!

Micro_fur - Has triangulated the broadcast point and begining to feel guilty.

Oh, one more thing I forgot to ask. I drew the first comic on regular bond paper, putting all six panels on the page. But if there's a better format, I'd like to hear it. Some things I've come up with:

-One panel per page, scanned and put together on Photoshop.
-Bristol Board, which leaves more room to draw in.
-Tossing everything and forming a partnership, having someone else be the artist.

Whatcha think?

Oh, now you done it. Now you've breeched the subject of process, with which I am helplessly obsessed.

So here goes, an anatomy of what I learned and when:

Started on typing paper. Discovered felts for inking. "Sharpie" markers are designed to write on anything, so don't waste money on that ability. Just get something that's got a felt tip and plenty of black ink and yer good.

For Umlaut House, all the panels were of a fixed size, so I printed out "strip blanks" with the four panels and text headers. Penciled and inked two strips per page.

Not a lot of room for detail, as you can tell.

During this time I picked up an Editor, someone to pronounce sentence over comics as to whether they were usable or not. This complicated matters somewhat, but I'll never want to do another comic without at least one person I trust to look at it before it ships. Having a decent editor is a tremendous benefit.

For Unit Zero, I got myself a ream of bristol from Office Depot. That's right, Office Depot. It's only a little thinner than the stuff you get in art supply stores and WAY cheaper. The tough board gave me a lot more leeway for erasures. (On typing paper, I can erase about four times before the paper is destroyed. The limit is much, much higher on bristol.) I inked using a brush for much of UZ, which gives things a wonderfully organic look, but is really hard to control and takes a long time to learn. You've seen other experiments in inking with brush from me, and Unit Zero was by no means my first brush work. A brushful of india ink is an awesome tool, and worth learning, but for my high-volume comics, don't expect to see it a lot.

That stuff about ink bleeding horribly on regular paper and not so much on bristol? As far as I can tell it is an urban myth. There's a knack to getting enough ink but not too much on the brush, and it's as much a pain on bristol as any other kind of paper.

Unit Zero had color work and other post-processing steps done in Photoshop Elements with my trusty, somewhat dusty Waccom Graphire 2. There are lots of experiments contained in Umlaut House concerning tablet use, from the color "OldSchool" storyline to little greyscale tricks to one or two half-drawings completely digitally replaced. I recomment giving the cheaper tablets a try, assuming you've got 90-odd bucks to blow on your hobby. Once you get over the initial revulsion, (I use this strong word because the learning curve, uh, SUCKS on them) they're really handy and fun to use. Oh, and don't forget to put down a rectangle of bristol over the top to make the pen feel like you're actually drawing on something as opposed to the frictionless teflon-on-teflon feel you get as default.

For the "finale" of Umlaut House as well as my Beating a Dead Comic strips, the tablet is the only game in town. All the artwork goes directly into the digitizer and onto the screen. A real mixed bag of advantages and disadvantages, let me tell ya. On the bright side, layers let you revise artwork without harming the stuff around it, you get a ton of cool tools, and a pressure-sensitive tip can act like a mechanical pencil, charcoal, felt pen, or a brush of any size with a few commands. However, you can't flip the paper around, drawing a curve in whatever direction feels most natural and I end up craning my arm around like mad.

I do not currently draw things with small enough details to necessitate using multiple pages for one comic. In fact, the daily strips of UH2 are drawn two-per-page, and scanned in at 300 dpi black and white.

Okay, back to your original points, Doink.

-Big artwork is good, but bear in mind that your final resolution is likely to be pretty dinky. If I draw a line with my 0.3mm Coptic, scan it, then shrink a page with that line on it down to the size of one of my panels (about 200x300 pixels), it will show up as significantly less than one pixel wide, meaning it'll anti-alias into a light grey, one-pixel line. If you want that level of detail, more power to you, but do some "try before you buy" work on the style.

-Bristol helps a lot, but get it from Office Depot and save. This will be especially important if you want to make lots and lots of comics.

-Don't give up on your own artwork just because it isn't good enough yet. Some of the most endearing styles are done by people who learned how to draw by doing a webcomic. Schlock Mercenary is one hell of an example. However, if you've got an artist who has the chops and likes your premise, I'd really like to hear from more collaborative artist/writer pairs in the biz.

... You just applied a 100Mbps data stream to my 56k art understanding line...

Gengar003 wrote:... You just applied a 100Mbps data stream to my 56k art understanding line...

Heh, heh, heh, buffer over-run!

Micro_fur - What? I thought it was funny.

Yeah, you do make a point. My Digital Arts teacher was kind enough to give me a tablet, so at least that's taken care of. But when I first used it, it looked like crap. So I'm going to wait and see if I can find some bristol board or something.

In other news, the first comic is ready, and I would like to send it directly to you, Allan. Unfortunately, I don't know your email address. So, if you would, either please give me your address or suggest an alternate method of sending it.

Finally, about having an editor, if you're not available for that purpose, could you recommend someone?

I'm probably too busy to be a terribly helpful editor, besides which I think you'd be better off with someone you could actually show unscanned artwork to: someone who lives in roughly the same geographic location as you.

But if you can find someone you can show your work to, it will definitely help in the long run. (I can't say for certain whether it's a good idea for the first few months; my first editor joined on after about six months.)

As to the tablet, I would at least recommend trying it for a good while before giving up on direct creation on it, although my main use of the tablet is for re-touching already scanned artwork. (Another tip: scan in actual black-and-white as opposed to greyscale. When you get it into the image processing utility it won't have anti-aliased edges where the lines end, and your fill tool will be able to spread all the way onto the black, as opposed to stopping a few pixels shy.)

My $0.02...

<$0.02>

With my comic (currently on indefinite hiatus with occational updates), the biggest challenge for me was figuring out the technical details. My first efforts were ALL hand done and scanned in with only a bit of digital touch-up. The end results were these monsterous RAW files that very, very quickly consumed my available webspace. My options were to get more space (which I couldn't afford at the time) or take down some of my "archive" comics.

Obviously, those weren't really my only two options, but at the time it sure seemed like it. Now, it was about this time that I landed on a discussion (somewhere) about the virtues of PNG over JPEG or GIF for saving files and how the PNG compression scheme was better than either of the others. So I go and download Irfanview, load them up and WHOAH those were monster files. The scan came in at a monsterous 3000+ pixels across for each strip, and the software I was using at the time (what came with the POS parrallel-port scanner I had borrowed from my dad) was supposed to save it as B&W, but had saved it as thousands of colors.

A bit of tweaking and I got each strip down to around 4-6 colors (depending on how many color effects I could filter out and keep it from looking like newspaper), and made each strip 700px wide (100px less than the at-the-time standard desktop resolution).

Now-a-days, I'll sketch out on a paper, ink over that, scan the result, use The GIMP to clean it up, add any effects necessary that were too time consuming to do on paper, add it to the strip digitally, add the speach bubbles (digitally), and add the text. There will probably be a point when I do the whole thing digitally with no paper or pencil or ink at all, but that will most likely only come with the purchase of a drawing tablet.

So, if you're doing a comic and you're ready to post it after scanning, I HIGHLY recommend processing it through Irfanview (for Windows), GraphicConverter X (for Mac, comes on most systems preinstalled), or your favorite graphics viewing/quickmanip tool for Linux. DON'T trust your scanning software on this, and if you use Frontpage, SWITCH...AWAY...NOW! Use Dreamweaver, use Quanta, use Notepad, just get away from Frontpage! (I could rant on this, but I'll save your poor, virgin ears)

</$0.02>

HomerNet wrote:My $0.02...if you use Frontpage, SWITCH...AWAY...NOW!. . .(I could rant on this, but I'll save your poor, virgin ears)

You should look me up in LJ, I typed out a dissertation on how Wintel (windows/intel) structures are evile, I didn't look at it until after posting and found it filling 1 1/2 screens on my monitor at 1208x1024 which is about 5 pages typed.

Micro_fur - Still learning all the neat functions linux lets me do I never knew I needed.

I allow my means to justify my ends in the world of hardware and software - whatever works. You should apply the same to yourself - whatever works for you and gets the job done, use it.

LOL *CHOMP* Where I work the ends justify the means:
Work it harder, make it better, move it faster, make it stronger; hour after hour our work is never over.

Micro_fur - We are all slaves to The Machine.

Well, in other news, I've found an artist to work with: Kittah from the DMFA forum. As much as I'm apprehensive about communication and all, I'm convinced that having an experienced artist help me with the comic will ultimately lead to a better product.

Gengar003 wrote:I allow my means to justify my ends in the world of hardware and software - whatever works. You should apply the same to yourself - whatever works for you and gets the job done, use it.

I'd agree with you on just about any other aspect to comic creation but the Frontpage issue. Heck, I even use Windows from time to time just 'cause it's got a tool or widget I need that isn't available on Linux or Mac. (I prefer Mac, btw)

Basically, the problem is this:

Frontpage breaks things. Back when I was using FP, I could design a web page in minutes using the same skills that I used to write a book (or four) in Word, it would look fine in IE, but in any other browser odd spelling errors and artifacts would show up. When I would try to fix things in the code then go back to graphical editing, FP would bork the code up again. And the images? If you're new to the whole process, Frontpage makes it look like it's handling all the image stuff for you, when all it does is handle the presentation of the image. ON TOP OF THAT, in the directory structure that FP creates for ONE SINGLE PAGE there can be as many as six duplicates of each image on the page. When one hasn't figured out scaling of images, color stripping, etc., this can scale a single page into the MEGAbytes if you're not careful.

Damnit, you got me ranting again!

I'd say that if the ends are that you have lousy compatibility and horrific file bloat, they aren't terribly effective at justifying the means, whatever they might be.

Yeah, FrontPage blows.

UH2 is aaaaaaaalll on notepad, baby!

HomerNet wrote:

Gengar003 wrote:I allow my means to justify my ends in the world of hardware and software - whatever works. You should apply the same to yourself - whatever works for you and gets the job done, use it.

I'd agree with you on just about any other aspect to comic creation but the Frontpage issue. Heck, I even use Windows from time to time just 'cause it's got a tool or widget I need that isn't available on Linux or Mac. (I prefer Mac, btw)

Basically, the problem is this:

Frontpage breaks things. Back when I was using FP, I could design a web page in minutes using the same skills that I used to write a book (or four) in Word, it would look fine in IE, but in any other browser odd spelling errors and artifacts would show up. When I would try to fix things in the code then go back to graphical editing, FP would bork the code up again. And the images? If you're new to the whole process, Frontpage makes it look like it's handling all the image stuff for you, when all it does is handle the presentation of the image. ON TOP OF THAT, in the directory structure that FP creates for ONE SINGLE PAGE there can be as many as six duplicates of each image on the page. When one hasn't figured out scaling of images, color stripping, etc., this can scale a single page into the MEGAbytes if you're not careful.

Damnit, you got me ranting again!

..... So don't USE frontpage for doing images...

For me, I learnt HTML with notepad first, and used that for a looong time... then I started using frontpage b/c I could type the HTML in and tab over to see what it looked like. As what I wanted to do got more and more complex, I just started using the WYSIWYG mode. Because I know what the HTML's doing, I can (and frequently do) manually prune out FP's extras when they're causing problems. It might not be the best program out there, but as it's what I've got, and I don't have money to buy new software like dreamweaver, I make it work.

But yeah. Heaven help the newbie.