The sausage-making of comics
Oct. 18th, 2025 07:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gs_silvaThe grinding process of making a coherent webcomic and then adapting it into a graphic novel. Not always the most exciting thing, but I like to talk about it.
One of the early scenes has Ella, who has just moved into the women-only dorm for her sophomore year at Unnamed University, in a panic because she broke the no-men rule and is about to be caught at it. But nothing bad ever happens to her, so while it was an exciting cliffhanger in the webcomic, it's kind of a lead balloon in the book.
The original scene is very long, with two full pages of Ella on hold with a social worker, and one page of her frantically calling her parents. The RA ends up being sympathetic to Ella's emergency situation, and bends the rules for her.
The first 3 pages of that scene are largely the same, but the 3rd page got the last 2 panels chopped off. I need to replace them with something that basically covers everything I described above.
I opened the file and... ack. It's still the old art. I swear I patched together a workable scene using the old art, but nope! It's a mess. It's unusable. Why did I think it was done? Did I lose something? Was I wrong? Did I leave it a mess, to be dealt with later?
Probably, yeah.
So now I'm sitting on a page that I thought would be just a few easy cleanup tasks and word balloons, and it needs new art, and the new art needs to do some heavy labor. Sometimes I can get a single line of dialogue or a tiny panel of art to do the labor of a whole page or scene, and those are the most wonderful moments. If you're a writer, it's kind of like writing a whole big scene with lots of detail and meaning, that goes on for pages and pages. Then you rewrite it into a drabble, and the magic happens - you accomplish the same thing in 100 words.
If you're being paid by the word, that might not be a worthy goal. I'm not. I want to make this book a little shorter so I can afford the printing costs. If I can afford to print it, maybe I can price it so that customers can afford to buy it.
So I need that magic to happen. A resolution in two panels so the characters can get on with their lives, and so can I. Welcome, my new friends, to the comics creation process! Not too different from other creation processes. Has anything similar happened to you?
One of the early scenes has Ella, who has just moved into the women-only dorm for her sophomore year at Unnamed University, in a panic because she broke the no-men rule and is about to be caught at it. But nothing bad ever happens to her, so while it was an exciting cliffhanger in the webcomic, it's kind of a lead balloon in the book.
The original scene is very long, with two full pages of Ella on hold with a social worker, and one page of her frantically calling her parents. The RA ends up being sympathetic to Ella's emergency situation, and bends the rules for her.
The first 3 pages of that scene are largely the same, but the 3rd page got the last 2 panels chopped off. I need to replace them with something that basically covers everything I described above.
I opened the file and... ack. It's still the old art. I swear I patched together a workable scene using the old art, but nope! It's a mess. It's unusable. Why did I think it was done? Did I lose something? Was I wrong? Did I leave it a mess, to be dealt with later?
Probably, yeah.
So now I'm sitting on a page that I thought would be just a few easy cleanup tasks and word balloons, and it needs new art, and the new art needs to do some heavy labor. Sometimes I can get a single line of dialogue or a tiny panel of art to do the labor of a whole page or scene, and those are the most wonderful moments. If you're a writer, it's kind of like writing a whole big scene with lots of detail and meaning, that goes on for pages and pages. Then you rewrite it into a drabble, and the magic happens - you accomplish the same thing in 100 words.
If you're being paid by the word, that might not be a worthy goal. I'm not. I want to make this book a little shorter so I can afford the printing costs. If I can afford to print it, maybe I can price it so that customers can afford to buy it.
So I need that magic to happen. A resolution in two panels so the characters can get on with their lives, and so can I. Welcome, my new friends, to the comics creation process! Not too different from other creation processes. Has anything similar happened to you?
Yes ...
Date: 2025-10-19 03:47 am (UTC)Beautiful, but challenging to achieve.