Art & Story – Your Comic From The Ground Up, Pt 1

[private]With this episode we begin a multi-part series called Your Comic From The Ground Up, through which we hope to more formally document all of the cartooning strategies we’ve used thus far when developing our comics from concept to completion.

In this first part we concern ourselves with previsualization–starting from scratch. We break our discussion into a section on the theoretical concerns, followed by a section on practical techniques.

Theory

Beginning with a character or characters:

• Aspiration & Terror as character motivations
• Finding surprises within characters
• Discovering whether or not the character(s) will achieve their goals
• Character and story themes
• Sensible endings

Beginning with a concept:

• Meaning/themes
• The twist
• Merging genres
• Tonal exploration

Practical

Character-based
development strategies:

• Collecting actors
• Gesture studies
• Ink studies/style studies
• Turnaround/full character design
• The one-sentence description

Concept-based development strategies:

• Visualize key scenes
• Rough outline

Links mentioned this episode:

• Closing Doors
• Say It In Slugs
• John Oxbow: Man Out of Time
• Mulligan’s Run
• Equalizers of the Divide
• Switch Runners
• The Front

Items/books mentioned in this episode:

Assignment for this episode:
Complete 50-100 pages of random sketches:

• Character designs
• One-sentence descriptions of your characters
• A character relationship chart (this is how character A feels about character B, this is how character B feels about character A, etc)
• “Big moments” in your story
• Exploration of your story’s theme
• Your story’s chapters outlined in one-paragraph descriptions

The Art & Story Theme is written and performed by
Mike Gilmore & Mike Johnston of The Northwoods Improvisors.

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