I've been drawing comics of some sort for most of my life. I've been drawing them professionally for over 15 years now. My first character that I created was Herman the Psychotic Chicken and I came up with him by accident in 1984. In those early days I basically had what few books on cartooning I could find in the local library and in the early 90's there was a monthly magazine about making comics showing how the professionals did them for syndicates and got into newspapers. My that sentence ran on for a minute. My local comic book shop introduced me to the magazine and for the life of me I can not remember the name of the publication. But thank you Rob Snell for showing it to me before we had the interwebs to look things up on. I learned the sizes to draw the comic strips and the sizes to draw the Sunday ones. It was 4 inches by 13 inches and then double that. I found all sorts of useful information like that. As time went on I discovered I was better off self publishing. After doing that for a while I realized that I could make the rules. Over the years I have tweeked and changed and I'm still doing it. You will see examples next to the article and you can click on them to enlarge the pics. First I started to enlarging my comic size until I finally took up the entire 11 x 17 inches of the page whether it was one panel or six. I was drawing on the page horizontally also. The bottom two pics show the earliest versions and the finished comic in the center shows the more recent. Even style changes can be seen in that one. The other pics show a new way I'm beginning. It has two 8.5 x 11 pages that I line up vertically for a full comic page. I figure the panels using this format. Mainly it allows me to scan half the page without having to go somewhere to reduce the original to fit my scanner. If I want a 3 tier page then I just draw a 5 1/4 inch tall panel on 3 separate pages. After I scan them I can just drop them on the page to make the full page. There's an example of this in the line of pics. The cool thing about this is this format will lend itself better to the comic book format when I print it. In the next segment I will talk about making the BWC MONTHLY SUNDAY FUNNIES. Have a Bubbatastic day yall. |