Grim- Designing a Page and my Process: Part 1

So I just finished the black and white and first page of my web-comic, and I thought it would be a good idea to document my process and approach. In comics  I feel a picture should tell a thousand words, and one thing that I am striving for in this comic book project is to make each page have a strong visual impact, where the story could be told with as few words as possible.

Before getting started I did a rough scene break down of the pages, having written my story ahead of time, I already know whats going to happen so my next step is figuring out how to tell this story visually and in as few words as possible, comics are a visual medium and unlike books we have to show, not tell. Below is a breakdown of the first four pages. 

Something I've learned from movies is that you need to capture the audiences attention within the first 10 minutes or they will lose interest, action tends to work best. The Lord of the Rings trilogy does a great job of this with the war scene in the first movie, Gandalf fighting the Balrog in the second film, and Smeagol murdering his hobbit pal for the ring in the third movie. The first 10 minutes in a movie equate to about the first 5 pages in a comic book, so those first 5 pages have to be epic.

My first page is a medieval war scene with blood and action on every panel. It establishes the time frame and sets the overall mood of the story. The words don't really matter to me on this page the primary focus is the visual impact of each panel. For the page I did a series of rough thumbnails of each panel developing a composition within the panel while also thinking how each panel will develop the overall composition of the page. (I will discuss that a little bit later.) 

Once I have a plan developed I then go to work doing hand drawings of each of my panels. I love to draw so this is by far my favorite step in the process. I draw out each panel in my sketchbook very large and focus heavily on my facial expressions and dynamic poses. While the humans are drawn to be a little more realistic and serious than my animal characters, I still keep a somewhat cartoon like stylization to them because it is a story with talking animals and fairy tale subject matter, and to make them too realistic would cause them feel out of place in the universe. I did a lot of concept work before this stage so drawing in this style feels pretty natural to me at this point so all of these detailed drawings probably take about a day to complete.

 After finishing my drawings I then get them ready to compose on a page. From my thumbnails and roughs I already know how my page is going to work compositionally and I've drawn each panel to help that overall composition. Each panel is designed to encourage you to move your eye around the page and if you follow the arrows on the image below you'll see those deliberate decisions in action.

So following the arrows from top to bottom.

The sweep of the blade killing the first soldier pushes the eye towards the left, to look the soldier to the far right. The soldier on the right is looking at a downward angle towards the second panel. 

The blade with the soldiers reflection  on the second panel has a slight curve that draws the eye to the third panel of the soldier getting his face cut. The soldier turns his face to the right drawing the eye to the fourth panel of the soldier getting impaled.

The soldiers drops his blade and it's angle draws the eye to the fifth panel where both the dead hand and the blade are pointing towards the fifth panel. The soldiers slack dead eyes in the fifth panel are looking up towards the next body shot with arrows and the man impaled by arrows is looking towards the dead body to the right. 

Finishing the page.

Being a huge fan of comic books, I put a lot of thought in just how I would go about telling a story, and it's always satisfying as your hard work starts to take shape. My next post will be discussing color and painting techniques. 

-Matt