Tag: webcomics

My debut nov­el, GOLIATH FALLEN, has gone through sev­er­al phas­es dur­ing its long, long devel­op­ment his­to­ry. Per­haps the most promi­nent one was the time I ditched the book out­right and tried mak­ing a graph­ic nov­el instead. What trig­gered such a dras­tic mea­sure? Hon­est­ly, burnout was a big part of it. Writ­ing became a lone­ly and slow endeav­or, and I was grow­ing more and more des­per­ate to final­ly get the book published.

This fatigue appar­ent­ly led me to be open to new ideas. The idea of a graph­ic nov­el actu­al­ly stemmed from exter­nal feed­back. A com­mon refrain from my cri­tique part­ners was that my nar­ra­tive style was very “visu­al.” That was the true catalyst.

The idea was sim­ple: if my nar­ra­tive style is so visu­al, it should eas­i­ly trans­late to a graph­ic nov­el. Cre­at­ing it should also be eas­i­er, quick­er, and more seri­al­iz­able than an actu­al nov­el. Truth­ful­ly, I’m still strug­gling to com­pre­hend how such an idea sound­ed even remote­ly rea­son­able at some point.

Need­less to say, it failed spec­tac­u­lar­ly. I lacked the expe­ri­ence, man­pow­er, dis­ci­pline, and willpow­er to see it through. Sure, I did­n’t have to write thou­sands of words per chap­ter (I could just illus­trate things). But, I still had to write a script and assume oth­er roles like draw­ing, let­ter­ing, and for­mat­ting. I gave up on the endeav­or about two issues and six­ty pages in.

It was a long and wind­ing road of rub­ble I walked bare­foot through until final­ly real­iz­ing that the work­load would end up killing me. And that’s no joke—my health notably declined due to lack of sleep, poor nutri­tion, and a hor­ri­ble work-life bal­ance. If any­thing, this expe­ri­ence only cement­ed my respect for pro­fes­sion­al com­ic book artists. It amazes me that some­one can deliv­er 30-page issues (or even 120-page tomes in the case of man­ga) in the span of a mere month.

While gru­el­ing, the project wasn’t fruit­less. I learned a ton dur­ing that year, and I think some of my insights are worth shar­ing. So, here I bring you my top five lessons learned from try­ing (and fail­ing) at mak­ing a graph­ic novel.

1. Ensure the script is finished

Graph­ic nov­els (and com­ic books) fol­low a script. We don’t just sit down to draw pan­els with­out a clear guide of what’s going to hap­pen. Impro­vis­ing a graph­ic nov­el is buy­ing our­selves a tick­et to Pain City at a dis­count. And that’s if we’re work­ing alone. If we have an artist, they’ll prob­a­bly laugh in our face.

Like it or not, every good graph­ic nov­el starts with a fin­ished writ­ten script. And when I say “fin­ished,” I mean fin­ished. That includes edit­ing, revis­ing, proof­read­ing, and every­thing else involved in pub­lish­ing an actu­al book. This is crit­i­cal because if changes are made lat­er on, that means we’ll have to redraw entire pages. If we’re sev­er­al pages in, a change at the begin­ning of the script means we’ll have to throw the entire issue in the garbage and start over.

Trust me—you don’t want to be in that position.

I was but a rook­ie the first time I marked my script “ready to go.” In real­i­ty, it was far from it. Redraw­ing 30 pages is no joke. Plan to spend a rea­son­able amount of time on the script so that it’s air­tight once the draw­ing starts. I know this is espe­cial­ly hard as writ­ers tend to get stuck in edit­ing and rewrit­ing. Take your time, but just remem­ber: the draw­ing starts when the writ­ing stops. In terms of bud­get­ing, redraw­ing pages our­selves will only cost us time (and years off our life expectan­cy). If we’re work­ing with an artist for hire, how­ev­er, redraws will drain our bud­get in a snap.

2. Keep the art style simple

Whether we’re self-pub­lish­ing or work­ing with a tra­di­tion­al house, we’ll always be on a sched­ule. We might even be under a con­tract to meet cer­tain dead­lines. As for me, I was self-pub­lish­ing my nov­el as a web­com­ic and releas­ing pages twice a week.

Build­ing a sus­tained read­er­ship and attract­ing organ­ic traf­fic to a web­com­ic is a lot of work. And those eye­balls can be gone in a flash if the sched­ule isn’t close­ly fol­lowed. Inter­net read­ers in par­tic­u­lar take this very seri­ous­ly. If you’re not suf­fi­cient­ly feed­ing their con­tent diet when they expect it, they’ll move on to one of the thou­sands of oth­er web­comics. In the tra­di­tion­al world, miss­ing dead­lines could be even more con­se­quen­tial (and may even result in a breach of contract).

Com­plex, intri­cate art takes time. To opti­mize effi­cien­cy and meet dead­lines (self-imposed or oth­er­wise), it’s best to stick with a sim­ple art style. The style I employed in the graph­ic nov­el ver­sion of Goliath Fall­en was inspired by Dave Gib­bon’s Watch­men illus­tra­tions (and clas­sic Amer­i­can com­ic books in gen­er­al). And while I loved Gibbon’s style, I had­n’t count­ed on it doom­ing my project.

It was sim­ply too elab­o­rate, and my out­put was at most two six-to-eight-pan­el pages a week. Two pages a week! And it heav­i­ly depend­ed on the com­plex­i­ty of the scenes and back­grounds. Even if I released the pages as com­ic strips, I was still churn­ing out too lit­tle con­tent for a whole sev­en days. At that rate, I’d be lucky to fin­ish by my sev­en­ti­eth birth­day (not real­ly, but you get the idea).

Remem­ber, it does­n’t mat­ter if it takes a week to draw a page. No mat­ter how much detail or effort is put into it, it will be read in sec­onds by readers.

The truth of the mat­ter is that the art style of our graph­ic nov­el isn’t even that impor­tant. One Punch Man’s orig­i­nal web­com­ic looked like doo­dles on a nap­kin, and yet it still launched into the stratos­phere and gar­nered a seis­mic fol­low­ing. It was lat­er remas­tered into the man­ga we know and love today. The art style did­n’t have to be a mas­ter­piece of con­tem­po­rary art; it only had to be good enough to trans­mit the sto­ry effec­tive­ly. Mean­while, the graph­ic nov­el ver­sion of Goliath Fall­en had a kick­ass art style (if I do say so myself), but it was so hard to pro­duce that I could­n’t keep up. I was work­ing prac­ti­cal­ly 24/7 to pro­duce just two pages a week, which was sim­ply absurd. 

After I quit the project, I read Scott McCloud’s Mak­ing Comics (an essen­tial read), in which he cov­ers this exact issue in depth. If I had a time machine, I would go back and read that book before I even con­sid­ered the idea of a graph­ic nov­el in the first place.

3. Prepare a content buffer

Pos­si­bly the biggest mis­take I made when mak­ing a graph­ic nov­el was not hav­ing a con­tent buffer. I pub­lished pages as I fin­ished them. But, I was aver­ag­ing one or two pages a week, so that should be fine, right? Most def­i­nite­ly not. If life got in the way (and it always does), that meant that I did­n’t have any­thing to post, and I’d miss my upload days. Tak­ing a few days off when I was start­ing to feel burned out was com­plete­ly out of the ques­tion. My read­ers were count­ing on me, and they want­ed to know what was next in the story.

After miss­ing a dead­line, the only way to catch up is to sim­ply find the time and work the nights away. If we don’t make time, work will accu­mu­late until we don’t have a life any­more. We’ll remain pris­on­ers of our own cre­ation (as dra­mat­ic as that might sound).

The key take­away here is to always be ahead of sched­ule. Retain three months of con­tent as a  buffer if pos­si­ble. With that much of a buffer, we should be able to con­sis­tent­ly meet our update days even when life gets in the way. The amount of pre­pared con­tent we’ll need will always depend on the type of graph­ic nov­el we’re mak­ing. Just make sure you have enough con­tent to keep your sched­ule steady should the apoc­a­lypse come tomorrow.

4. Don’t go solo; work with a team

The graph­ic nov­el ver­sion of Goliath Fall­en was pro­duced by a team of one. I spent an entire year work­ing all by myself out­lin­ing, script­ing, pen­cil­ing, ink­ing, let­ter­ing, for­mat­ting, and who knows what else. It was an insur­mount­able amount of work, and, admit­ted­ly, I should­n’t have gone at it alone. This was the sec­ond key mis­take (along with my rather intri­cate art style) that end­ed up doom­ing my graph­ic novel.

If resources allow, nev­er go solo. While I can draw, I should’ve teamed up with an artist to do that part for me. That would’ve giv­en me col­lec­tive months of my time back to allow me to focus more on writ­ing. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. While that’s very cliché advice, it’s nonethe­less true.

For nat­ur­al-born illus­tra­tors, relin­quish­ing con­trol over the design process can be tough. There’s a cer­tain pride in see­ing our illus­tra­tions in the graph­ic nov­el that car­ries our name. So while out­sourc­ing may mean that we might not get the glo­ry all to our­selves, it at least gives us the con­fi­dence to know that we have the time to get the work done and fin­ish our graph­ic nov­el. The glo­ry will only come if the project is actu­al­ly fin­ished and released to the world.

Even just hav­ing anoth­er indi­vid­ual to pass ideas by is itself supreme­ly valu­able. We’re more like­ly to wind up with a bet­ter end prod­uct just by receiv­ing this feed­back ear­ly on in the process of writ­ing a graph­ic nov­el. My stub­born­ness, unfor­tu­nate­ly, got the best of me, and I just did every­thing myself. Don’t make the same mis­take I did.

If bud­get is a con­cern, there are some alter­na­tive approach­es you can try. Some graph­ic nov­el authors have found suc­cess in offer­ing to bring on illus­tra­tors as co-authors and share roy­al­ties if it ends up being a hit. Many com­ic book projects work this way. You could also just hire some­one to take your sketch­es and col­orize them (instead of pay­ing them to illus­trate from start to fin­ish). At the very least, a sol­id team should be com­prised of both a writer and an artist.

5. Master your tools

The tools we use to cre­ate our graph­ic nov­el (writ­ing, draw­ing, let­ter­ing, etc.) should be exact­ly that—tools. They’re meant to make our lives eas­i­er, not the oth­er way around. Sure, we can buy expen­sive pro­grams such as Adobe Cre­ative Cloud at a whop­ping $30–50 per month, but if we don’t know how to use them, they’ll only serve to hin­der our graph­ic nov­el process. It’s essen­tial that by the time we com­mit to a plan, we know our tools well. It’s worth­while to spend time learn­ing them.

I’m not say­ing that it’s imper­a­tive to know every sin­gle short­cut there is. That’s not rea­son­able. Aim for a skillset where you at least feel com­fort­able and in con­trol. Less time spent try­ing to con­fig­ure dig­i­tal inks means more time avail­able to actu­al­ly work on our graph­ic novels. 

Before div­ing into online tuto­ri­als and cheat sheets, start by mak­ing a list of the tools you’ll need. These can include pro­grams for draw­ing, let­ter­ing, and pub­lish­ing. In my case, it was Clip Stu­dio Paint (draw­ing), Adobe Illus­tra­tor (let­ter­ing), and InDe­sign (pub­lish­ing). Once we have our suite estab­lished, then we can start the learn­ing process. There are a num­ber of use­ful pro­grams out there, includ­ing Skill­share and YouTube videos that are sur­pris­ing­ly com­pre­hen­sive. Don’t wait until you’re on a tight dead­line to start read­ing through forums on how to blur col­ors or resize an art­board (like I did). 

Final thoughts

My own year-long graph­ic nov­el jour­ney was one of the most frus­trat­ing peri­ods of my pro­fes­sion­al life. Over that time, I learned there’s a true art in mak­ing a graph­ic novel—and I’m not just refer­ring to the draw­ings inside. Draft­ing a script ahead of time, select­ing the right art style, prepar­ing a con­tent buffer, work­ing with a team, and mas­ter­ing the tools of the trade are just a few con­sid­er­a­tions to ensure a more seam­less and suc­cess­ful project.

Although the graph­ic nov­el ver­sion of Goliath Fall­en doesn’t exist in its entire­ty today, the process was insight­ful and reward­ing. It also forced me to reck­on with my per­son­al weak­ness­es as an author and illus­tra­tor. It is my hope that my unfil­tered per­spec­tive here does­n’t dis­cour­age you. I just want you to avoid the same mis­takes I did and start off your own graph­ic nov­el jour­ney on the right foot. I can attest to the joy of see­ing the fin­ished pages of my own graph­ic nov­el come together.

Giv­en that this project account­ed for a whole year of inten­sive work, I have quite a bit to talk about. I’m con­sid­er­ing writ­ing more about the expe­ri­ence. Let me know what you think. Would you like to hear the whole story?

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