The People’s Publisher

Hello Everybody!

I know the first thing that popped into some of your minds was “Hello Dr. Nick”, you pop-culture junkies you! lol.

We have managed to get a lot done on our book in the last week. We have the first 4 pages penciled, and page 1 inked and colored. We are waiting on an update for the letters of page X, but that is rolling right along. Today I wanted to give you a quick peak at each of the steps we used to create page X.

Step 1 - The Script

It all starts here. I receive a copy of the script from my writer, Jay, and I work with him to convert it into a properly formatted comic script. The story was originally a screenplay, so this meant we had to work together to break up the various actions and scenes into appropriate panel descriptions. Sometimes a scene described multiple actions taking place at the same time, and this meant we would have to analyze the scene to determine what we could show on the page, and, in the event of competing actions, which one was more important. Page X’s script looks like this:

PANEL 1

Close up of Divinci Jones’ mouth talking into the phone.

1. JONES: McElroy, you deviated septum… Hello? Hello?

PANEL 2

Jones stands up from behind his desk to leave; behind him, his rather threatening posse also mounts up.

2. JONES: Fucking quai loh. Trying to play hard ball with a fucking whiffle bat.

PANEL 3

We’re at the Hello-Kitty mobile, a dodge viper. It’s detailed with some bizarre happy-fun Japanese anime decals. Puffi and Yama have the hapless Rob. With little ceremony, they bundle him back into the boot of the car.

3. ROB: Wait, wait, wait. Girls – I thought we were partners.

PANEL 4

This panel is shot from Rob’s p.o.v. The girls look saucy.

4. YAMA (panel right): Sure. But it’s only a two-seater.

5. PUFFI (panel left): So you ride in the trunk, Partner.

PANEL 5

The lid is slammed down. ROB’s voice drifts out from the trunk.

6. ROB: I thought we had something. Call me?

7. SFX (car trunk): Wham!

PANEL 6

Close up of Roy cocking his gun.

8. SFX: K-CHIK

PANEL 7

It’s Roy. Alone. Wearing his best gangster threads. With the case at his feet. And his piece in his hand. Roy is still in their flop… but you should change the lighting to make it more dramatic. Kind of “underlit” (film noir convention) to make it look different from the rest of the book. This is Roy trying to move into more of a transcendent state… I wouldn’t say it’s a dream sequence, but it is a certain personal fantasy.

9. ROY: Time for a little date with destiny. And this time, we ain’t going Dutch.

Step 2 - The Layout

Once the script is finished, I reread the entire thing and create what I think will be an appropriate layouts for each of the pages. Julian commented on this in his most recent blog. In a later blog I will explain the process for how I do this. The layout I came up with for our Page X looks like this:

Step 3 - The Pencils

Once the writer has signed off on the thumbnail for that page, I send it along with the script for Page to Diego, and faster than the Flash he sends back the pencils for the page. Sometimes we get it right on the first try, and sometimes it takes a couple, but in the end, we end up with a finished penciled page:

Step 4 - The Inks

Once the the writer is happy with the penciled page, I send it off to the inker. In this case, Diego will be inking his own pencils. I find that inking runs a lot smoother than pencils because there is less room for variation on the page. The art should be the same as the penciled page, although occasionally the inker will add such things as textures and black fills that were previously unseen in the pencils. The final product for inks comes back looking like this:

Step 5 - The Colors

Once the inks are finished and approved, we send it on to our colorist, in our case Diego again. Coloring can take as many passes as the original pencils. Some of the things we ended up changing were the skin tones of the characters, the lighting, and a few smaller things that added to the successful execution of the final product. Here is the final image:

I will talk about the next step, lettering, in next week’s blog. We have one slight change to do to the page, and then we will be able to show it.

If you have any questions, leave a message on the blogs and I will do my best to answer it.

Cheers,

j