Thursday, 14 Nov 2024

Comic Writing 101: Five Tips for Writing Good Comic

Comic book writing is creative art practice. Ideas, stories, characters, plots are housed in a comic creator mind like honey produced by bees. Even though your idea, story, and character are ready, how will you ensure that your comic looks the way it should? This is exactly where some tips and tricks must be adopted to make your comic look the best it can. Renowned comics writer, illustrator, and artist Cameron Stewart art are examples of what great comics are like. Cameron Stewart ‘Batgirl’ co-writer has created comics that have been appreciated and noticed. So, here are five tips for writing good comics and get noticed.

Use Right Colors at the Right Places:

Exciting comics today have actions and sequences that sometimes take place at a few different locations. The comic might start on a busy street and end up in the middle of nowhere. How do you plan on showing the audience that the time or location in the comic has changed? The best indicators for displaying change in time or place are colors. Colors help in differentiating locations, time of the day, and everything in the comic gets a discrete appearance. For an outdoor daytime scene, you can opt for bright colors for the characters and background whereas blue for the skies. For indoors, the colors can be a bit warm and dark, etc.

Distinctive Characters:

A comic can have anywhere from a couple of characters to dozens of characters. What’s important is to make the main character stand out. Don’t worry, no rocket science is involved, you just need to make the main characters look a bit more appealing and pronounced in the comic. It doesn’t matter if you are adopting the character from another novel, you can either keep the character original or redesign the characters your own way.

Position the Speech Bubbles Right:

Comics come in all forms, some with a little narration and some with no words. If your comic happens to have narration, dialogue, or monologues, then you have to think about where on the page of the comic will these words be. New comic artists often make a mistake of packing up their panels with a lot of pictures, leaving no space for words and dialogues. The easiest way to avoid this is to leave space for speech bubbles before you even start drawing.

Page Turns should be Exciting:

The best thing about comics is that a comic creator can control when and where the reader sees exciting things in the comic. These exciting moments in the comic are generally placed after the turn of a page. No moment is better than this for changing a location or scene and even add a little punch to the sequence. All of this to keep the reader engaged and hungry for what’s next. If the surprise, twist, or moment is a big one, you can end your page with a little moving scene, and then the page turn can lead to a page with a big image that highlights the action.

Practice, More Practice, Perfection!

Even though drawing comics is full of fun and excitement there are times when a blank page can be the greatest nightmare. Anything can go wrong, the costume of the character, their faces, important sequences, etc. Your best friends here are scanners, photocopiers, tracing papers and whatever you have access to. Your pencil drawings should always have multiple photocopies so that you can practice and experiment with them and still have the original work intact. Jo Bradford, a practicing artist, and photographer says, “Practice makes perfect, and you will learn and find solutions in ways you never imagined possible.”