The part that people rarely talk about is the After: what happens when the book is handed in, what happens when it comes out. Here’s some thoughts on that! Most of this is relevant specifically to working with a publisher.

Handing it in

When you’re done with a graphic novel, you’ll send the publisher all your finished files. They might have a specific way the files should be organized—I’ve spent many days at the end of books combing through layers and making it all easy to navigate. This is something your art director should convey to you, hopefully at the start of the project.

Once the art is the hands of your publisher, there’s a period of waiting while the print file is put together. You’ll be given a chance to proofread it before it goes to print, and a chance to consult about the book layout. You have the power here to weigh in; if they chose an image for the spine of the book or a font for the cover that you don’t like, speak up!

I wrote about the cover process in this post. Some publishers like covers designed early in the process for a book announcement, others wait ‘til the book is wrapping up. I always prefer to design my covers near the end because I feel like I can summarize the book and draw the characters best at the end.

ARCs

Many publishers prepare Advanced Reader Copies of their upcoming books. These are paperbacks that can be distributed to reviewers and people in charge of ordering books for stores, schools, and libraries. They are also sent to other authors who can provide blurbs, or ‘pull quotes’ (these are the bits that say “this book is great and the author is a beautiful genius! signed, a somewhat famous author” on the back of books).

Arcs are often unfinished and unedited, and are printed on cheaper paper than the final book. You might have gotten some for free if you’ve ever gone to a publishing convention. A prose ARC is pretty simple: it’s the text of the novel, usually needing proofreading. If there are meant to be illustrations, they’re normally not included.

A graphic novel ARC is a little different. Since printing in color is too expensive for free promotional items, they’ll usually be black and white with 16 pages of color in the beginning. Because of this, once your lineart is finished, the publisher can get to work putting together the ARC. They want it to come out a significant amount of time before the book itself, to drum up excitement.

It can be a little nerve-wracking to have an unfinished version of your graphic novel out in the world! I know one author who got frustrated because reviewers always commented on their ‘simple’ lineart art style, not realizing the graphic novel would be fully rendered in the color stage. Once, I received another ARC that had chosen their favorite, most dramatically colored pages to showcase in the beginning (rather than pages 1-16, which is standard). If you have an idea of how best to present your work, talk to your art director and editor about it!

My ARCs always end up with some mistakes—missing text bubbles, unedited art, color issues on the cover. This is agonizing, but it’s just part of the process of publishing (also known as the mortifying ordeal of being known).

There will always be mistakes that go to print, and you will always notice them the instant you have the physical ARC in your hands, and not a moment before! I think there’s a certain blindness that sets in when you’ve been working on something for so long; it’s like if someone asked you to proofread the back of your hand.

If you’re a perfectionist who is horrified by the idea of mistakes going to print, try printing out the comic pages before finalizing the ARC. Just changing the medium in which you view it (printed paper rather than on a screen) can help spot mistakes. Your editor will also work with you to carefully proofread the text and fix visual inconsistencies. And the good news is that since this is an ARC, you can fix any mistakes before it goes to print.

Audience Reaction

Having a book come out is…weird. You know it’s a huge day, but sometimes the reaction can feel kind of muted.

The truth is that books are an intimate experience. While a movie or TV debut can be watched in a group, with everyone jumping online to discuss it, books are quieter and slower. The book won’t always be in bookstores on the day it’s supposed to release—or it will be in stores weeks early—and people will pick it up and read in their own time. This can feel like a letdown when you want to know what everyone thinks the second it’s on shelves!

I don’t have a ton of advice for dealing with this letdown feeling; more just letting you know to anticipate it. Getting a few friends and family to read it the day it comes out will ensure you get some of that delicious feedback! Organizing a launch party is also awesome; more on that below.

What has helped me with this, in the long run, has been understanding that reader engagement is an ongoing thing. If you make a TV show, it’s incredibly exciting to have everyone in the world binging your show and talking about it the week it came out…but then the hype is over. Books are more steady and more private, in my experience. People are always discovering them for the first time, and reaching out to authors to share their personal experience.

I can’t tell you not to read reviews, but I can advise you not to seek them out. Your editor will share big reviews with you—articles from Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, etc—and let you know the tone of the review before you dive in. This kind of emotional protection is important, I believe. Authors are generally sensitive people and it sucks to read a sentence in a review that ruins all your good feelings about your book. Be careful with comment sections, searching your name/book title on social media, and Goodreads. Do what you need in order to protect your heart!

This is NOT to say you should ignore critical feedback. If there are integral issues with your book, you will probably hear about them from your readers, from reviews, from your editor. Try not to obsessively seek these out, because the important points will make their way to you. The instinct to rush to fix problems in your book is very strong, but once a book is out in the world, the difficult truth is that you cannot change it (Death of the Author and all that).

If you’ve put something in a book that has hurt people, focus on a simple, material apology with a promise to do better. An apology should avoid lengthy explanations of why you wrote it. We all have blind spots, and having a book in the world is a great way to shine a spotlight onto those blind spots. Once you know about a blind spot, you can educate yourself. I try to use criticism as a way to look to the future and improve as an author so my next book is better.

Publicity

Promoting your book is a whole job in and of itself. There’s a common perception that a publisher will arrange book tours, readings, and events for you. This sometimes happens, but the reality is that a lot of that work is up to you.

From my experience and observation, it seems that publishers choose a few books every quarter to really highlight. Sometimes these will be debuts (the first book an author has published); sometimes they’ll be a book from a highly acclaimed author; I’m sure there’s other determining factors I’m not aware of. If your book is one of those picked to highlight, your publisher will work closely with you to come up with events and put together a book tour. But for most books that come out, you need to take initiative to make this happen.

Get to know the publicity people at your publisher, and let them know what you want to do. Are you interested in doing readings? Visiting classrooms? Doing live drawing demonstrations or workshops for kids? Being on panel discussions? If you’re planning to be at conventions, let the publisher know so that they can pitch you for panels.

When you make comics for young audiences, there’s a whole business of doing school and library visits. I don’t do these often because public speaking isn’t my favorite, but if you’re good at it, this is a great way to make some extra money. School and library visits usually pay a couple hundred dollars or more—this is referred to as an ‘honorarium’. They usually entail a reading, Q&A, maybe a workshop; this can be in-person or virtual. You can let your publisher know if you’re interested in doing these!

If you’re a convention-goer, most publishing contracts allow you to order copies of your book at a steep discount. You can sell these at cons or sell signed copies online. There is something really cool about hand-selling your own books and getting to talk to people about them!

Finally, organize a launch party for yourself! Find a local bookstore (independent ones are so much better than chains, if that’s an option) and ask them if they do events. Often bookstores will be happy to host a local author in exchange for you signing stock, and maybe doing a reading. They’ll probably place a big order of books, which is always great. Sometimes I’ll make a little giveaway—for the Witch Boy I made magnets, for the Girl From the Sea I made bookmarks. Invite everyone you know and give them a chance to celebrate your enormous accomplishment of having a book out!

Royalties

Most book contracts work on an advance system. The publisher will give you a large chunk of money—some on signing the contract, sometimes a second check halfway through the process, and the rest when you hand it in. This is your advance, and is meant to tide you over as you’re making a book (I already grumbled about low advances here).

When the book is out in the world, you might eventually earn royalties. The concept is that you get a certain percentage back on every book sold (amounts vary between publishers, deals, and within the deal for paperback vs hardback vs ebook). These percentages go back to your publisher, until they equal the amount of your initial advance. This is called earning out. Once you’ve earned out, those percentages begin to go to you and are called royalties.

Not everyone earns out, and sometimes it takes quite a long time. It really comes down to quantity of books sold, which has to do with how the book is marketed and distributed. This is one of the ways in which doing school events and bookstore events can help—those venues will place large orders for books. And of course, if you had a large advance, it will take longer to earn out.

Besides royalties, you can also earn money from translation rights. This is exactly what it sounds like: a foreign publisher will pay a couple thousand dollars to buy rights to translate and publish your work. They’ll send you a few copies (my closet is FULL of Witch Boy copies in Spanish, Hebrew, French, Italian, and Swedish) and if you haven’t earned out yet, a portion of translation rights will go towards your advance.

Royalties are great when they start happening. You’ll never know exactly how much they’ll be, but getting a regular check twice a year, or four times a year, is always a good thing. It’s one of the ways that authors can afford to slow down once they have a few books out.

The Blues

I wish that someone had told me about the depression that happens when you finish a big project! When I think back, it makes sense. You’re rushing so hard towards a finish line, pouring everything you have into a story…and then it’s done. You get the rush of dopamine that happens when you complete your task, and then the dopamine fades and leaves you feeling empty.

I know this isn’t everyone’s experience, but it’s mine, and I’ve seen other creators talk about it too. The thing is: making a comic is a really special experience. You’re getting to live in a story. Getting to see it change and expand around you. You and the comic are kind of the same being, in this stage; it’s a part of you that you’re cultivating and growing.

And then suddenly, it’s gone. The metaphorical umbilical cord is cut. It becomes a separate thing, something looked at by other people, something you can no longer alter. It’s still a part of you, but it’s like a photograph from the past. You will continue changing, but the comic will stay the same.

And this hurts! It’s okay to feel it as a kind of loss. It’s okay to grieve the end of a project, to feel like the comic—once a living, changing thing—is now as dead and static as an amputated limb. When you’re working in traditional publishing, there’s a long stretch between finishing the book and having it out in the world, and that stretch can be painful.

The other side of this emotion comes when the comic goes out into the world. It becomes a part of other people. Readers will interpret it in new ways, specific and personal to them, ways that you never could have anticipated. Years after it comes out, a child will come to your signing with a copy of your book, old and battered and pages falling out from how many times it’s been read. And you’ll realize the comic is not dead, even though it’s been separated from you—it’s living and changing in the minds of readers.

That, to my mind, is a kind of magic.

-This is the last post of this series, for now! At some point I’d like to do a color class, and maybe a class about adaptations and tv/film writing, but this has taken us through the process of a graphic novel, so I’m going to give it a rest here.

-I have a big announcement coming up on this newsletter next Thursday, October 28. Which is also my 30th birthday!

I’ve talked a lot about preparing books for a publisher, but I—and pretty much every cartoonist I know—got started with some form of self-publishing. Self-published zines are an important part of the history of Western comics, especially for work that fell outside the mainstream and work by women, people of color, and queer folk. So when you self-publish, you’re part of a rich tradition!

Digital comics

To my mind, a big part of the graphic novel boom right now is thanks to longform narrative comics that started being published on the web in the early 2000s onward (shoutout to Gunnerkrigg Court, the first webcomic I ever read). People could experiment with styles and make work that wasn’t being published; and in doing so, prove that those kinds of comics had an audience.

There are a lot of different ways to host a comic online, and I’m guessing you’re familiar with enough of them that I don’t need to go into detail. But a quick primer:

Sites like Twitter and Instagram seem to be best suited to newspaper-strip style comics. There’s a lot of slice-of-life and personal work among these comics, and each piece generally is meant to stand alone. The work of Aminder Dhaliwal, who publishes entire graphic novels on Instagram, is a notable exception!

For a longform narrative that’s meant to be read in order…well, when I made in a webcomic way back in 2011, I made my own website, and it was also common for people to use Tumblr. Now I know that Webtoons is hugely popular and…there are probably sites I don’t even know about because I’m old!

I’ve also loved seeing more and more people sharing and selling their comics on sites like gumroad and itch.io (which is mostly a games publishing site). These sites present the comic as a file download, rather than hosting the actual pages on the website. By publishing a comic in that way, you get to control the release, format, and spread of it more than you would on a website like Twitter. The downside is that you don’t get the specific kind of audience build and participation that happens from posting a comic one page at a time.

When I published How the Best Hunter in the Village Met Her Death, I knew I wanted it to read as a long scroll, inspired by the 2010s work of Emily Carroll (this one in particular blew my mind when I was in art school). By putting a .pdf on Gumroad, I could ensure readers read it the way I wanted, rather than chopping it up and putting it into a twitter thread.

Physical comics

HOWEVER, there is something magical about a physical comic! I was the kind of kid who always fantasized about having books with my name on it (to the point that I would use up loads of printer ink making books with fake publication information in the front, which is…SO nerdy). When I started publishing the webcomic Strong Female Protagonist with Brennan Lee Mulligan back in 2011, our goal was to eventually collect it into bound volumes.

Crowdfunding

In 2014, the best way to do that was through Kickstarter. (Let me know in the comments if there’s a more relevant crowdfunding site these days!) Kickstarter basically let us collect preorders from the webcomic readers, plus extra merch for dedicated fans. I arrived at our funding number after a ton of research into printing and shipping.

This research meant contacting printers for quotes, sourcing options, and asking a ton of more experienced cartoonists for their recommendations. There are a lot of hidden fees that go into a Kickstarter: shipping the books, storing the books, all the envelopes and postage (international postage is a nightmare) and time that goes into labelling and shipping, plus every other piece of merch you decide to do, PLUS the inevitable back strain when you find yourself carrying two tons of books up a New York City walkup:

Which is NOT to say it’s a bad idea. But it was the kind of thing that was much more possible when I was a 22-year-old trash baby and had boundless enthusiasm. If you’re going into a crowdfunding campaign, make sure to read a lot of different accounts and tips, and do your research! The planning stage is very important.

There are plenty of places that will help with fulfillment for crowdfunding campaigns, if you DON’T feel like filling the inside of your very small apartment with book boxes. We worked with Topatoco’s Make That Thing for SFP’s second Kickstarter, and it involved significantly less back strain.

Printing

Regardless of how you fund it, you have to put the book together before going to print. This will be easiest with an Adobe program called InDesign, which has a ton of features for book publishing. To be honest, I don’t have a great handle on this program, but there are a ton of online tutorials that helped me get my books ready for print (you can also hire someone to help you). InDesign handles issues of trim size and bleed that I talked about in the page template class, and I believe it’s the industry standard for preparing documents to print.

I made a diagram of common binding types below. If you are printing an entire book (~40 pages or up), it will need to be perfect bound. If you’re printing a minicomic, it can be saddle stitched. Thread binding is the kind of work you’d see on fancy hardcovers, and requires a very big order to make it worth the cost:

I printed SFP through a company called PrintNinja, and they have some helpful resources on their site. (EDIT: since I used PrintNinja there’s been a lot of discussion about it being a shitty company. Here’s a thread on that, which is full of suggestions of other, better places to print)

However! Not everything you publish will be a full book. As I said up top, minicomics and zines are the backbone of indie comics. You can get a printer to print and saddle stitch minicomics for you; two that I’ve had good experiences working with are Keness and RA Comics Direct.

But you can also do this yourself! And if you’re just getting started and want the absolute cheapest option, hand binding minicomics is a rite of passage in comics. There are a lot of ways to do this (here’s an exhaustive resource). You’ll generally need a printer, photocopier, paper cutter, and longarm or saddle stitch stapler. I made a LOT of minicomics at my college’s library. Sometimes public libraries will have these materials; if not, ask at a local FedEx, Kinko’s, or Staples.

Making minicomics is a wonderful way to better understand the whole process of bookmaking! And then you can take them to conventions to sell and share. If you’re getting started in comics and have a short story you want to share in physical form, I really recommend this route.

Self Publishing

The obvious downfall to self publishing is that you have to come up with the money to print your work in the first place. Another downfall is that distribution to bookstores is difficult; publishers have distribution networks in place that a self-publisher generally can’t access. Assume that you’ll be selling most of your self-published books yourself, via online orders and conventions, when you’re planning if you want to go this route or not.

But there are a lot of upsides. You retain all the rights to your book, and you get to tell exactly the story you want without restrictions. If you’re doing digital work, you can explore format and push boundaries in a way that traditional book publishing doesn’t allow. And there are many examples of self-published work getting picked up by a publisher once it’s been out in the world!

Even making a very small comic is a powerful act. You’re bringing to life something that didn’t exist before! You got to create something, from the beginning to the end of the process, and the next time you do it you’ll have more information and ideas.

Comics are, at their heart, a punk-rock medium. Any person with access to mark-making tools can tell a full story, something that shows their unique view on the world. That’s more than can be said for pretty much any other visual storytelling medium; film and animation require expensive tools and are difficult to make without a team, which become barriers to making even the simplest work. But comics are accessible. And self-published comics are the heart of that. That’s why the stories you’ll find at indie comic shows are a hundred times more original, fresh, and exciting than whatever’s at the top of the box office (in my opinion—shade fully intended to the mainstream feature film industry).

To make a comic, all you need is an idea and the will to follow through.

I’m wrapping up this series, so please let me know if you have any questions or topics you’d like to see covered!

News: I have a comic in the upcoming anthology THIS IS OUR RAINBOW, which is a collection of short middle-grade stories exploring the many prisms of queerness. We just got a star in Publisher’s Weekly!

Also, speaking of self publishing…I have a new graphic novel that I’ll be publishing via this newsletter! It’s getting close to a point where I can share pages. Look for an announcement soon!

You’ve scripted and thumbnailed your entire book. That was all prep work, in a way, to make this step as easy as possible. Now it’s time to buckle down into the labor-intensive, time-consuming stage of DRAWING THE DANG THING.

How long does it take?

I get asked this question a lot, and I’m never quite sure how to answer. Sometimes writing a script takes years of bouncing it around and setting it aside. But once I’ve finished the script and I sit down to draw the book, it’s (usually) a very linear process.

The deadlines I’ve received from publishers have given me, on average, a year + several months to draw a book. This has worked for me, but it doesn’t work for everyone. I took freelance jobs during these times, but I didn’t have full time in-person work, which allowed me to spend the majority of my workday drawing the comic. Again, this is an issue of privilege and life circumstances. I don’t have kids, I can physically spend long workdays at my desk, and I don’t have a mental illness that makes focusing difficult (nervously shoves ‘compensating for low self-esteem by externalizing my self-worth onto my work’ out of sight). I always want to call this stuff out as contributing to my work output!

If you have circumstances that will make it harder to complete a book in a year, make sure to communicate that to your publisher as early as possible! And if you’re not working with a publisher yet, be gentle and realistic with yourself and your schedule.

I’ve learned, from trial and error, that I can’t do other full-time work while drawing a book. I also work in animation, and I’ve taken advantage of the long ‘hiatuses’ built into shows between seasons (or the gaps between one show ending and finding the next animation job) to draw my books in those times. Animation pays better in the short term, but prioritizing my own projects has always been the right choice in the long term.

Staying organized

I like to track my progress, because it helps the project feel less overwhelming and interminable. It also helps me keep track of my average page count per day. This changes, of course, based on the content of the pages; but figuring out a rough average is really helpful for planning, anticipating when you’ll be done, and calculating what pace you need to set to meet deadlines.

If you’re a bullet journal person (I am, but not the aesthetic kind, it’s a total mess), here’s a way to track your progress. You have a quick visual estimate of how much work you’ve done, and a record of what you did each day and how long it’s taking you. Also, it’s satisfying to draw the little lines in the little boxes.

You could also do a digital version of this, or find whatever makes sense. There could be stickers involved. The point is that it’s satisfying to watch it slowly fill up, and can remind you that you’re actually getting work done.

Staying motivated

There will probably always be parts that feel like a slog! It takes a long time to draw a graphic novel. Here are some tips to stay motivated.

This is more of a wider script note, but write things that you want to draw! There’s always a few scenes that I’m particularly excited about (Ariel being kidnapped by her aunt, or Morgan kissing Keltie goodbye). For me, they’re usually emotionally intense scenes without a ton of complex action or set pieces. Knowing you’re working towards those scenes is a really good way to get through the more boring scenes (and DON’T just skip to the fun scenes, because you’ll never draw the boring scenes then).

And…if you find there's stuff that you really hate to draw, remember that for the next book you write! There are ways to write around what you find hard or boring. There are even ways to draw around it. If you’ve set a scene at at party but you hate drawing crowds, remember the value of an establishing shot. One big panel showing the crowd works wonders to set the scene, and you can spend the rest of your pages focusing on specific interactions between people. Be strategic!

You know this already, but you’re allowed to listen to music, podcasts, and even movies as you work. You can call up friends and have long conversations. I’m listing these on a scale of least to most distracting (for me); music is the least, conversations are the most. It’s only when I’m doing pretty basic work such as inking a tightly pencilled page (or something really dreary such as that big crowd scene) that I’ll put on a movie. My best work is done listening to long-form true crime podcasts, which has the added weirdness of remembering exactly what murder I was learning about whenever I look at a finished page.

When it comes to music, it’s always really fun to make a playlist for your story, and add songs as you think of them. Listening to my playlists always gets me in the zone!

Set milestones, and celebrate them. These can be finishing certain scenes, or getting to 50 pages, or finishing half the book; set these milestones and give yourself a treat when you reach them.

If you are on social media, sharing snippets of drawings that you like is a good way to get people excited about the story. And just having other eyes on your work can make it feel more real! If that’s not your speed, having a group of peers to share with is great too. You’re running a marathon and it feels great to have people cheering you on at the sidelines!

There’s a kind of deep flow that I don’t know how to access reliably, but it usually happens about halfway through a book. I get so wrapped up in the story, the world, and the characters. It’s a kind of escapism that I used to feel reading fantasy books as a kid; there’s something absorbing and freeing, where drawing the story feels almost like living in it. Trying to get to this part, and remembering how good it feels when it happens, is a big reason why I draw comics.

Drawing is physical labor!

Take care of your body! It is possible to draw comics without incurring wrist and arm injuries, but they’re so common in this field.

Here’s a great book that gets in-depth about drawing pain and how to draw more healthily:

I’m by no means an expert in this, but here are a few things that help me draw healthily:

• A chair with good back support. You can also use a pillow or some kind of lumbar support add-on to upgrade a basic office chair.

• A footrest under my desk. I have a tendency to crouch like a gargoyle and do weird cross-legged poses that inevitably kill my back and neck. A footrest combined with back support makes me sit up straight and feel supported.

• A cushioned elbow rest. I usually use a soft notebook to rest my elbow on. Resting your elbow on the hard table can cause nerve damage!

• A wrist brace. You can wear it anytime : while drawing, while not working, while sleeping. It will help keep your wrist straight, and if you’re experiencing wrist pain the brace will help alleviate it. You can also get wrist braces with cooling packs that you keep in the freezer; they’re too bulky to wear while drawing, but after drawing the cold is a really good way to help with pain and inflamed muscles.

• Breaks to stretch and move around are very important! Hand and wrist stretches are vital, but drawing is a full body activity. Often neck pain is resolved by stretching out your legs and lower back. If you do yoga, this is a good 11-minute practice that helps with drawing pain. If you’re finding yourself getting locked into four-hour drawing sessions, set a 30-minute timer to remind yourself to get up and move.

• A pen grip. It’s easier to hold something large rather than pinching your fingers around a small pen. I use this grip for my Cintiq pen. Before I had this, I was a trash baby who used used a sock tied around my pen with a hair tie, and honestly, it worked.

• Don’t work all day. Even if you’re in a good place and you’re feeling good, this is a marathon and not a sprint! Instead of burning through a bunch of pages in a 12-hour day and then being exhausted for the next week, do 6-hour days, or whatever is right for you. This is a long process and you need to care for yourself during it!

• Take days off. Give yourself at least one day a week to not draw. Let your muscles relax.

• Avoid other activities that are strenuous on your hands and wrists! And if you do them, wear a wrist brace and take it slow.

Burnout

There’s a dynamic that happens between older and younger artists. Once you have a few projects under your belt, you know what leads to burnout. You see younger artists working in these ways, and you try to warn them. “Don’t stay up all night! Don’t kill yourself to meet a deadline! Physical injuries from drawing can be avoided and you certainly shouldn’t be getting them at 22!” we call out, like the mythical Cassandra, who can see the future but is never believed.

The thing is, burnout sucks. It’s painful and exhausting and traumatizing in ways that are very hard to articulate. We always want to save people from experiencing it, but it’s something that everyone, ultimately, has to figure out for themselves. Everyone has different ways of working, and different thresholds for burnout. The best case scenario is that you see your threshold before you go hurtling over it. It’s good to have people checking on you, and it’s good to tell other people when you see them teetering at that threshold; but ultimately, no one can stop you from burning out except yourself.

(Burnout looks different in collaborative mediums like animation. This is specifically about the burnout that occurs in the often-lonely job of drawing comics.)

Here are some signs that you’re on the threshold of burnout and you need to step back, now:

• It’s emotionally agonizing to sit down at your desk and start drawing. It always feels to me like a raw nerve, like anything I do will trigger an outsized level of pain, like even the idea of sitting down to work makes me want to cry.

• You hate what you’re doing. Hating your job is normalized in our capitalist hellscape. But I really, really don’t think it’s worth drawing comics that you hate. It’s simply too much labor for too little pay. Especially when it’s your own story, there should be a base level of enjoyment or at least interest. Burnout compounds when you find yourself really hating what you’re doing, and hating yourself for doing it. When you are an artist, your love of the work is worth protecting.

• You find yourself doing anything to avoid working. This is actually good; it’s your subconscious recognizing that you can’t keep up this pace. Listen to yourself and your body when you can’t make yourself get in the drawing chair.

How to step back

Meeting a deadline is never worth burning out. Even if you’re being paid for your work and you feel you’re under an obligation to meet it! Remember that burnout takes a long, outsized, unfair amount of time to recover from—and it’s very hard to work during that time. Is your publisher paying you for the time you spend recovering? No, they’re not. They’re paying for the book you are drawing, and nothing more.

I’ve heard stories of editors being shitty when their artist can’t meet a deadline. I’m lucky to have never experienced it. I have missed deadlines before, for various reasons, and been met with empathy and understanding. It’s courteous to always let the editor know as soon as possible that you’re not going to be able to hit it (this is where having a tracker pays off). It is their job to figure out workarounds, and you’re giving them information to do their job! They will figure it out, and that is okay.

If you’re locked into the capitalist mindset that tells you worth equals productivity (and if you’re not, please tell me your secret), remember that you will be MORE productive in the long term if you don’t burn out.

• If you feel like you’re really up on the threshold, take a few days off. You can do anything, although be gentle with your hands and wrists during this time (this is why I’ve never gotten into video games, or felting). For me, I find that I feel the most refreshed when I get out of my house (which is also my office) and do something. Go with friends to a new restaurant, or smoke weed and go on a hike, or read a book in a park, or drive around and play music really loud and scream the lyrics. You don’t have to plan anything big. You don’t have to see anyone else if that’s stressful. But changing your physical space will help. Having those outside experiences will help you recognize that time has actually passed between the pain of working and your present moment.

• When you get back to work, be gentle with yourself. So much of burnout comes from a Pavlovian kind of association: you look at your drawing desk, you think about comics, and you remember a feeling of pain and misery. So as soon as you start to feel miserable, take a break. Refuse to sit in that misery. I sometimes imagine the part of myself that has to do the work as a small, overemotional child. I need to show her that it’s safe to do this work, that she will be listened to, that there are boundaries that will protect her from getting hurt.

• Seek context. When you are in the thick of a book, it can be hard to see the whole thing (forest for the trees, etc). It can be helpful to go back to the early stages, those fun sparkly ideas that made you want to do this in the first place. Re-read your script, if you haven’t done that in a while. Share it with someone you trust and get some compliments (we are all doing this for compliments and it’s okay to admit that). Remember that you’re making something personal, something you care about, something you want to see in the world. Try to fall back in love with the project, whatever that means to you.

Recovering from burnout

But burnout still happens! Maybe you’re in the middle of it right now. Burnout is a form of trauma, and you need to be as kind to yourself as if you were recovering from a different form of emotional or physical trauma. The thought process of “it’s just a comic, it’s not like I’m a professional athlete or a doctor or a hobbit climbing a mountain, therefore I should be fine” is not helpful.

I was in a state of extreme burnout at the beginning of the pandemic. I felt worthless, unconfident, and unsure if anything I was doing mattered or if I wanted to keep doing it. I’ve had burnout before on a more physical level, but this was a really emotional, devastating feeling.

Reader, I came out of it by writing and drawing Lord of the Rings fanfiction. The pandemic was raging, I couldn’t see my friends or family, I was stuck at home, I’d quit a job that made me feel useless, and I didn’t want to do any other work. So I dove fully into someone else’s fantasy world, into a very specific story and a relationship that had always given me a lot of feelings. To this day I feel so incredibly lucky to have found that. It felt like my torch had gone out, and I managed to re-light it by borrowing a spark from another creator.

The lesson that I took out of this is that no source of fuel for your creative torch is wrong. When you feel so badly burned by making art for your job, go back to the beginning, to the things that made you want to draw and tell stories as a very small child. Go back to what made your heart do backflips when you were a teen.

When you associate drawing with trauma, it can feel like the way to heal is to stop drawing altogether. If this is what you need, then do that. But I encourage you to try and redefine your relationship to drawing. This could mean drawing your OTP kissing in fifty different configurations (🙋 guilty), or it could mean life drawing, or it could mean looking at a lot of other people’s art and remembering why you like drawing in the first place.

Draw something sexy, or silly, or ugly on purpose. Let yourself play. Let yourself indulge. Don’t worry about making something that is smart, or good, or groundbreaking. You don’t have to share it and no one else has to like it (although if you’re enjoying it, there’s a good chance other people will too).

Go back to other things you’ve made, and try to find that love. Get affirmations from people you know. It is absolutely okay to go to a friend and say “I’m suffering from burnout, can you tell me what’s good about my work/what I’m good at as an artist?” Sometimes when I get a really kind tweet or email about my work, I’ll screenshot it and save it to a folder. Seeing that kind of impact reminds me why I make comics; for me, ultimately, they’re about connecting with other people on a deep level.

And here is one more affirmation for you. It will get better. You will heal, because our bodies and minds are remarkable things. And you will have learned lessons about your threshold, about how to see it coming and how to step back and how to protect your spark and yourself. You will be a better advocate for yourself and others, and a better artist.

I promise.

Some news: my wonderful partner has started a Substack too, and it’s going to be amazing.

I’m wrapping up this series, and am curious if there’s any more topics related to graphic novels that people are interested in? Let me know in the comments!

Today I’m going to talk about how to start the process of drawing a graphic novel by building a page template; it’s going to be a pretty technical post!

A note on programs: For graphic novels, I draw on Photoshop (CS6) on a Mac, and use a Cintiq. I know a growing number of people are using Clip Studio Paint to draw comics, as it has more comic-specific features.

I’ve also drawn smaller comics on my iPad, using Procreate.

Page Template

You’ll want to build a page spread template that you can duplicate for every new spread. Draw a simple guide so you can easily duplicate that first file and draw your page on top of it.

Exact dimensions vary depending on publisher and demographic. If you’re working with a publisher, ask them in advance for page specs. If you’re starting work with the intent to eventually pitch, here are some common dimensions for the trim area of your books:

Graphic novels can be 6.5 x 8.5 inches, 5.5 x 8.25 inches, 5.75 x 8.25 inches, 6 x 8.5 inches, or larger. Classic floppy comic books are 6.625 by 10.25 inches.

Trim area: where the page will literally be trimmed. Marked with the black line in the diagram. Everything important MUST be within this area. The common dimensions I mentioned above refer to the trim area; you can extrapolate the bleed and live area from that number.

Live area: where you will draw the panels. Marked with the dark green line and area in the diagram. Usually 0.5 inches within the trim area. The edge of the live area will be the outer edges of your panels, unless you’re breaking panel borders with a lineless panel or a bleed panel.

Bleed area: 1/8th inch (or 0.125 inches) on every side of the book that will be trimmed. Marked with the red line and area in the diagram. This is here because printing and trimming can have slight variations—if you want your art to extend off the page, it will need to fill the bleed. DO NOT include anything important in the bleed, as it will most likely be cut off.

Interior trim size: the space between the left and right page, usually 1.25 inches, or 0.625 on either side of the center crease. Marked with the purple area on the diagram. Because of the way a bound book works, you’ll need to give your art extra space around the crease. If you’re doing a big page spread, never put important art or text in the central crease because it will be lost! (Example below!)

Resolution

When you build your page template, the DPI (dots per inch), or resolution, should be AT LEAST 350. This ensures that your art will not be pixelated or blurry when it prints. I usually draw my books at 450 DPI, because that lets me take smaller drawings and enlarge them, without pixelation.

This will make your pages look huge if you zoom into them 100%! We do this because print has a higher resolution than computers. An image that looks sharp on a website only has to be 72 DPI—but when you print, it will be blurry.

Color Mode

CMYK Color (which stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key/Black) is a setting that you should always turn on in whichever program you’re drawing in. This will ensure the program only shows you colors that can print accurately.

RGB Color is the standard setting that we view images online with (it stands for Red, Green, Blue, although in my head it’s always Ruth Gader Binsburg). Images on a screen are made of light, so you can achieve much brighter colors. Images in a book are made out of ink printed on paper. The different processes mean RGB has a greater range of colors.

When coloring books, I’ve found that colors on my screen always come out a bit darker when they print. It’s also harder to achieve certain effects, such as neon colors. CMYK is also weak at showing light greens, teals, blues, and yellows.

This is something that will be more important to discuss when we get into coloring comics; but even if you’re making a book that is only black, white, and grey tones, remember that your grey tones will come out darker than they appear on the screen.

Layers

File organization can be really hard to do, and I’ll admit that I usually just do whatever is easiest in the moment and then organize my layers once it’s time to submit my files! But…if you’re an organized person, here’s the format publishers like to receive art in.

Isolate all the text in its own group of layers. It shouldn’t be merged to any pieces of art.

One reason for this is that if your book is translated into another language, they can easily access the text-only file. Another reason is that book printing uses something called rich black. It’s a mixture of colors in the CMYK spectrum that make the darkest possible black, and it’s a way to get very clear text. Anything in the text group will be printed in rich black, so keep that in mind if you want to have a piece of text that’s colored.

Here’s how to get rich black on Photoshop; your publisher might have a specific blend of colors they’d prefer, so it’s worth asking. And with all of this nitty-gritty advice, it’s worth asking the art director at your publisher about this stuff! I’m only speaking from my own experience and every publisher has their own preferences.

The other layer group should have all the art.

All speech bubbles should be on a layer separate from the art. Lineart should also be kept separate from the art; sometimes a publisher will want to print the lineart using rich black as well. If you have mostly black lines, with a few colored lines, put them on separate layers. Panel borders should be in a separate subgroup for this reason as well.

Note: Make sure to draw behind the speech bubbles! It seems unnecessary—the art’s getting covered, right? But again, if the book is translated, the shape of the speech bubbles will change, and you don’t want there to be a blank spot behind it.

At this point, you have your page template set up and ready to go! It should look something like this.

Brushes

At this stage you can choose a few more things. What brushes will you be using? I use a specific Kyle T. Webster brush, Mr. Natural, which I believe is available only through Adobe CC. I’ve used it to draw all my graphic novels, from thumbnails to final. One of the things I love about it is that I rarely have to adjust the brush size; it responds well to pen pressure and can easily give me thick or thin lines.

There are so many great brush packs available online. Play around with brushes, but keep in mind that simpler = better! If you find one that works for your entire book, that will make everything easier.

Using the Template

Now that you have your page template, you can paste your thumbnail directly into the template and resize it.

Here is when I draw my panel borders. I draw the speech bubbles (in a random color so they don’t get lost in the white background) and text at this point as well, so the art leaves room for them.

Lettering is an art in itself. I use a font that my publisher made from my handwriting; before that, I used open-source fonts that matched my line quality. For shorter comics, I will hand-letter, but that is really strenuous for a full graphic novel. Some comics will bring in professional letterers to hand-letter the whole book or to arrange the text and draw the special sound effect text. It really comes down to personal preference!

Don’t pack your speech bubbles! I rarely have more than one sentence in a speech bubble, and sometimes even break up a sentence into several bubbles. This lets the conversation flow and gives it a sense of pacing, rather than hitting the reader with all the text at once.

Your goal is for the text and speech bubbles to feel like a part of the art, not like they were pasted on at the last minute. Play with their size, their shape, their placement. I like to keep my bubbles lineless because (1) it’s easier to adjust size, and (2) I like how they look on the page—they don’t distract from the line-heavy art, and their being lineless indicates that they’re not a physical object in the scene. This is, again, a matter of personal preference!

Once you’re at this point, you’re ready to sit down and start drawing your pages! This was a very technical post, so next week I’ll talk about the more ~emotional~ side of doing a long project: how to stay motivated, organized, and excited about your work.

Thumbnailing is an arduous but vital process. You’re taking the script—a thing made of words—and beginning the transformation into a story told in visuals.

Here’s what my thumbnails and my working script look like. Hyphens designate individual panels, and bold text designates dialogue. This is the format that makes the most sense to me, and the publishers I’ve worked with haven’t seemed to have any problems reading it.

I’m prioritizing the page layout over the actual, individual panel art. Figures are extremely simple, just a way to work out rough overall composition. Make sure to note where the text will go as well—that’s a part of the page composition! Your reader’s eye will always go to faces and text first, and will follow a character’s gaze—that is how our brains work! Think about how that will move a reader around the page.

Example of page flow using text and faces to move the reader around (using finished art so it’s clearer):

It can be tempting to start drawing your book without thumbnailing the whole thing out. I always go a little crazy during thumbnails because I’m doing so much mental work but it just looks like scribbles! It can be frustrating. BUT, I really recommend doing this work up top. You will have a stronger idea of the structure and pacing of your book, and how long it will be, if you’ve laid it all out.

Page Spreads

A page spread refers to the pages that lie side-by-side when you open a book. If you’re making a graphic novel for print, this is the world you’re living in; it’s the format to which you will fit your story. I encourage you to draw your thumbnails as spreads rather than individual pages. The reader will be opening the book and seeing all the art at once, so you need to make sure it works together. (Of course, online comics are a whole other story and allow you to break this format in exciting ways! This is specifically about comics that will be printed in books.)

Here’s a sample page spread. Exact dimensions and size will vary depending on your publisher (for example, middle grade and YA are usually different sizes). Some of the things listed below—trim line, bleed—will be more relevant as you begin pencilling and inking, but it’s good to consider them as you’re thumbnailing.

The First Page

Like many things, the first few pages are the hardest, so here’s some information to ground you:

It is industry standard to begin on the right hand page. This is because (1) they’ll put publishing info on the left hand page. But also, (2) you don’t want to overwhelm your reader with information they don’t have context for. A full page spread of panels for a story you don’t yet know about is daunting; a single page is more enticing. You want to lure your reader into the story, to make it easy to turn the page.

I often start with a big landscape shot, because having an idea of the setting will help guide someone into the world of the story. I like having a bit of dialogue to pull the reader in as well. (I will often start new scenes this way too!)

For The Girl From the Sea, I started with a text message conversation, which felt like another way to pull the reader directly into the story. Since The Girl From the Sea is a more internal story, starting with a text-only conversation was a way to provide context for the main character’s mindset.

Page Turns

Another consideration is the page turn and the relationship between the last panel of a spread and the first panel of the following spread. Your goal here is twofold: clarity, and motivating the reader to turn the page.

I almost always start a new scene on a new page spread (so, the scene begins on the left hand page). It makes it easy for the reader to realize that we’re in a different place or that time has passed. A lot of this advice comes down to clarity for the reader; maybe it’s because I make comics for kids, but I think making a book easy to read is vital to pulling the reader in!

If I am continuing a scene from one spread to the next, I like to end spread 1 in a way that makes the reader want to turn to spread 2 right away. Here’s a few ways to do this, although there are SO MANY OPTIONS:

• Pose a question at the end of spread 1/answer the question on spread 2:

• The character reacts to something unseen at the end of spread 1/show what they’re reacting to on spread 2:

You can also end a page spread with a reveal, or start a page spread with a reaction or change of heart.

Don’t feel like you have to build a cliffhanger into EVERY SINGLE PAGE TURN, but give consideration to how (and with what) you start and end your spreads. It affects the way your comic will be read!

Finally, if you have a big visual reveal, remember that as soon as the reader turns the page they WILL see it. The tension must be built on spread 1, if you’re going to show the reveal on spread 2. This doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to be the first panel on spread 2, but consider this when you’re planning that big reveal.

Pacing

Pacing is one of the keys to good, engaging graphic novels. It’s a weird, unique, ephemeral art that I’m very interested in—I hope this following section makes sense! Again, a lot of my thinking on this was influenced by Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.

To understand comic pacing, we have to look at other mediums:

Illustration is static. You look at a single image and absorb it with a glance. You can look at it quickly or for a long time. It’s nonlinear; you will absorb more information as you look at it, but not necessarily in the order the artist wanted you to. And there is not a temporal element; an illustration captures a single moment. (This comes with a ton of exceptions, but bear with me.)

Prose is temporal. You are reading word-by-word. The story goes by as quickly or slowly as you choose to read it, and it moves in a linear direction—although you can go back and forward as you like. It has no visual element; there is no narrative information outside of the words on the page.

Film/TV is temporal, and has a visual element. The story is happening to you. It goes by in a linear fashion, at the exact speed that the creator intended. You look at images for as long as the creator intended; no more and no less. You receive narrative information from a bunch of sources: the dialogue, the visuals, the music, the editing.

Comics are a combination of all three. Like illustration, you look at the entire page spread and get an idea of the contents; if there’s something really dramatic happening in the bottom right corner, the reader’s eye will probably go right to it. But like prose, to you read it in a linear fashion, panel-by-panel, to understand the story. You also choose the speed with which you read the story. But like film, it’s a visual medium, and there are many ways to provide narrative information.

How does this apply to pacing? When laying out your page, think about illustration, and how it represents a moment in time. An individual panel also represents a moment in time. How quickly or slowly the reader ‘reads’ the panel is up to how much detail/narrative information you put in the panel. A simple panel is absorbed in the time it would take to read a single word; but a complex, detailed illustration will make the reader to linger as they decipher it. You can’t guarantee that your readers will take the time to ‘read’ the image…unless you specifically guide them through it, using tools like composition, direction, etc.

Text is temporal. It CANNOT be absorbed in a glance; a reader NEEDS to take time to read the words. So when we add text to images, we are adding time itself! You CAN put a whole conversation in a single panel, but then you’re just reading a wall of text and that’s boring. It always works best when you use these tools together. Here’s an example of how to apply this thinking to a comic page:

A “silent” panel has just as much power as a panel with text. Use them for reactions, for details, or for pauses in the conversation.

Composition

I’m not going to talk about the general concept of composition because it’s a massive topic…but here are some ways to apply it to a comic spread.

A page is both a static image, and a collection of temporal moments. How can you immerse the reader? A trick I love to do is to use the gutters: the space in between the panels. For night-time scenes, I’ll have the gutters be all black to indicate that there’s darkness. It’s a quick way to orient the reader:

Also it looks cool when it’s printed and you can literally see the night scenes on the side of the pages:

I also love to incorporate one big, open panel that bleeds across both pages, forming the background for the other panels. This is like a ‘setting’ panel; it’s usually a timeless moment, a place where the viewer is meant to linger, while the panels on top of it are specific moments.

In the example below, the big, dramatic kiss panel is the last panel on the page, but it extends all the way to the start of the spread because it is a drawn out, magical moment that shapes the moments before it.

A lineless panel can add a feeling of time passing to the story. Other times, it can be a way to show an action breaking out of the panels. Experiment with lineless panels and open panels and figure out what works for you!

You can have panels that have very little art in them. That adds a sense of breath and space—something that you find a lot in manga and manga-influenced comics. These panels indicate time passing, without needing to clutter the page.

The size of the figures is something to consider too. I try to have a clear difference between character sizes from panel to panel; either they are the same size, or the “camera” is notably closer or farther away. Have a mix of full figures, close-up shots of faces/hands/body acting, and mid-shots. This adds visual interest and prevents confusion.

Here’s an example (I colored in the heads so you can see how the size changes): Since the action of this page is Morgan and Keltie sharing a romantic moment—and almost kissing—I have the heads get bigger and bigger as the moment gets more intimate (almost like a camera zooming in)…until Morgan pulls back, returning to the size she was before.

Of course, there are a lot of comics that achieve interesting effects by keeping characters the same size. My point (always) is not that this is a rule but that it is a choice! Choices are tools, and so they’re worth thinking about.

That’s all for now because I’m out of space. Do you have any questions specifically about page layout? Let me know in the comments and I’ll answer them next week!

Taking a post away from the nitty-gritty of making the graphic novel, to talk about…

Making a graphic novel pitch

NOTE: this post is about pitching to publishers. I’ll talk about self-publishing in another post since that is its own beast!

Drawing comics is very hard, so if you can find someone to pay you up front to draw a comic, that is generally a good thing! This someone will usually be a publisher. I’m writing this post at this point in the graphic novel class because you should start thinking about pitching once you have a finished script. If you’ve never made a comic before, I recommend having a script—but you also can start pitching once you have a solid outline. I pitched The Witch Boy with a script; all my subsequent books have just had outlines.

I do NOT recommend drawing the entire comic before taking it to a publisher. Editors like to weigh in, and changing words is exponentially easier than changing art. (“Let’s set this in a strip mall instead of a roller rink” requires the changing of a few descriptive words in a script vs. redrawing pages and pages of comics.)

I DO recommend having some sample art. This should include character designs and a few sample pages (look at the discussion in class 3 about what designs to prepare for your story). A publisher may ask for more samples—I pitched The Witch Boy with three fully colored pages, and Scholastic came back with a request for 24 more fully colored pages. It was my first big book and they wanted to make sure I could actually make comics. With my agent, we negotiated a testing fee and talked them down to 24 pencilled pages, and I did the work.

Format

In class 2, I talked about making an elevator pitch—a few sentences, a paragraph at most, that sum up the story. This should go right at the top of your pitch.

You should also include a sentence about the format of the book (is it a graphic novel? a story collection? the first in a series?), the age range, and the genre. For The Witch Boy, I said it was a ‘middle-grade graphic novel about magic and friendship’. For The Girl From the Sea, it was a ‘young adult graphic novel about a supernatural summer romance’. These are the kind of crunchy, book-industry things that publishers like to hear so they can imagine what kind of book you’re making. If you’re not versed in those terms, that is super okay! Think of five books that feel like they would be on the shelf next to yours. See how they’re described in press releases and reviews. For age ranges, a loose rule of thumb: middle-grade is for ages 8-12, young adult is for 12-18.

You can also include comps, which means comparing it to other pieces of media. Think: “Lord of the Rings meets the Breakfast Club” or “Smile meets The Great British Bake-Off.” In the film world, this is expected—an easy way to describe a story to executives. Personally, I don’t do this with comics, for a few reasons. One, I can rarely think of good comps. Two, I can’t guarantee that I see an already existing story in the same way as the person to whom I’m pitching. If you find comps helpful, go for it, but I don’t think they’re necessary for comics pitches.

Below your pitch is a summary. This should be a few pages long at most. If your outline is nice and tight, use that! If you got ramble-y, prune it down until you have something succinct. It should tell all the major story arcs, but it doesn’t need to include every scene. For example, say something like, “As Morgan spends more time with Keltie, she drifts away from her friends”, rather than listing every activity and conversation this entails.

Finally, it’s time to share the art. For my books, the most important pieces are character designs and drawings of characters interacting (check the discussion in class 3 around designing for your story). You can also draw key moments from the book. Lastly, sample pages are super helpful to show the style you’re imagining.

Here’s the art I sent in when pitching The Girl From the Sea:

I chose this scene in particular mostly because, well, it’s cute and funny and I wanted to draw it. But more importantly: it shows the stakes, the interaction between the girls, and what the fun of the story will be. It establishes Morgan’s internal voice and Keltie’s bubbly personality, and shows the setting.

So that’s your graphic novel pitch. Short description, a mention of genre and age range, summary, character designs, sample pages. If you have a script, put that in last or in a separate document. You can make the first, text-heavy part more visually engaging by peppering in illustrations.

Finding representation

There are a few ways to get a pitch in front of the right people. Agents are the most common way.

Agents represent you, along with a ‘stable’ of other, usually similar artists/writers. They cultivate relationships with editors and publishers. They keep an eye on the book market, knowing what’s in and what’s not, knowing what seasons are better for pitching and when it is a fallow period. They know the intricacies of publishing and contracts.

Your agent can read your script and pitch, and give feedback. They can help you figure out what genre to pitch it as, and what age range. They will figure out what publishers are a good fit, and will get you in touch with them. If the deal closes, they will negotiate your contract. For all this, they take a cut of whatever money you make, usually 10-15%. In my experience this is super worth it—they only get paid when you do! (If you ever hear from an agent who is asking for payment just to represent you, before they’ve closed any deals for you—that is a scam. You will probably never pay your agent; they will get the checks, take their cut, and then pay you.)

If this sounds good and you want to find an agent, it will require some research. Here are some databases, although be aware that they skew towards prose. In my experience the easiest way to find a comics agent is to connect with other cartoonists and ask about their representation. Ask if they like their agent, and—if you know each other—ask if they could introduce you. This is something many established cartoonists will be happy to share so don’t feel intimidated about reaching out to people with this specific question!

I don’t recommend reaching out to an agent until you have a pitch OR an offer from a publisher. Here is a post about how to write a query letter to a potential agent. I got my agent because First Second reached out to me about illustrating a book. Once we were connected and she’d negotiated that deal, I started developing the Witch Boy pitch with her.

Ah, I imagine you’re saying, but how did you get an offer from First Second without an agent? That came about from…

Meeting Editors

I started making inroads in comics in two ways. I published a webcomic and updated it consistently, showing that I could stick to a project and that I actually knew how to make comics. I also made mini-comics both of the webcomic and other projects, and sold them at comic festivals. Whenever I met an editor (and there are usually editors at comic festivals!) I would give them my mini-comics.

You can do similar networking online, but the in-person nature of a comic festival is really powerful, from meeting peers to being inspired by panels to finding new work; and if you have the ability and we ever make it out of this godforsaken plague, I recommend them highly! A few of my favorites are MoCCA Fest, the Small Press Expo, and TCAF. (These are primarily located in the North American east coast area ONLY because that’s where I lived when I was getting started—let me know your faves in the comments!) They’re generally smaller, art- and book-focused festivals (rather than big, franchise-focused events like San Diego Comic Con) and it’s an amazing chance to form connections with editors.

So, I met editors from First Second at MoCCA Fest and gave them my library-xeroxed, hand-stapled mini-comics. The comics were nowhere near perfect but they showed that I had a perspective, could finish a project, and had a storytelling sense. I kept in touch (you aren’t being annoying; editors are used to this) and eventually they had a project for me.

Here’s the caveat that I share whenever I talk about my career journey: I am white, able-bodied, cisgender, and middle class. I lived in a place with comic festivals. I could afford art school and afford to make work on the side. It made me anxious to meet these editors and give them my comics, but I could overcome that anxiety.

It’s difficult to track the specific ways privilege affects our paths, but like the gravitational pull of a black hole, I know it’s there and it’s something I always want to bring up. Not with the intention of being discouraging, but to let you know that everyone has their own set of privileges and oppressions, and you should never compare your career journey and milestones to anyone else’s.

Editors and pitching

So let’s say you know some editors. You have an agent, or maybe not, but you definitely have a pitch. Getting it in front of an editor is the next step.

The editor is an expert on what their publisher is looking for. They can help inform what the story will be. When I pitched The Witch Boy, my agent and I went to a ton of comic publishers, basically just sending them the pitch packet with a brief cover letter from my agent.

One of them offered to publish it as a series of four 22-page comics. Since I wanted to do a graphic novel, that wasn’t a good fit. Another offered more money I was offered from Scholastic (my dream publisher) but wanted me to draw someone else’s book as well. We took that larger number, showed it to Scholastic, and they increased their offer a bit.

At Scholastic, we pitched to my amazing editor Amanda Maciel. She had a few pieces of advice for me. I went in thinking it was a Young Adult book, and she said it felt more Middle Grade, and so I should age down the characters (Aster went from 16 to 13). She asked for me to come up with an idea for a sequel so she could sell it as a series, since Scholastic publishes a lot of series (for the record, I just wrote a few sentences that ended up having NOTHING to do with the actual sequel, but it was a way to demonstrate that this story could expand). Once I’d made these changes to the pitch, she took it to the wider publisher and pitched it to them. She basically became my book’s advocate in a place I could not go: the Scholastic Acquisitions boardroom.

Once the book was ‘acquired’, or sold, there was a period of contract negotiations that my agent mostly handled. It’s standard to be offered an advance—a paycheck upon signing, and another upon completion. These can vary wildly in amount, depending on the size of the publisher and your status as an author. This is not the only time you’ll make money from your book—I’ll talk about royalties and film rights in another post—but it is meant to be a paycheck to tide you through the creation process. You can find some data on this in the Comic Page Rates Database here.

It is not always enough to live on, which is one of the deep frustrations of this industry and something we need to see change on in the future. Low advances prioritize people who can afford not to take another job while drawing their book, thereby creating a system divided into those who can afford to make books and those who can’t. I wish I had something fun to say here but I don’t, it really pisses me off!

Editors and writing

ANYWAY. A good editor is a powerful resource. They can give you feedback on your story, talk through thorny plot points, give opinions, and hype you up. If you sell a book, I encourage you to form a relationship with your editor. Feel free to talk to them about the book as much as you need. It is, quite literally, their job to help you make the best book you can!

Keep in mind that the perspective of anyone working at a publisher will always come from a place of wanting to sell books. They’ll look at what’s popular, currently and generally, and draw on that experience to give input. This can be really helpful—it’s insider information you probably don’t have access to—but trust your instincts, too!

An example: blue book covers were “in” when I was finishing The Witch Boy, but I knew I wanted a moody purple cover. Once it was published, I felt like the cover made it stand out and was glad I’d stuck to my guns. Figuring out what to fight for and what to listen to is an ongoing dance whenever you’re making art that’s tied (in some way) to a company. Hold onto your vision, enter conversations with good faith, and learn what you can.

This was a long one, and I know it’s a topic with a lot of nuance! Drop any questions or comments below and I’ll do my best to answer!

Comics are about flow and pacing, about a selection of images that carry you through a story. My drawing style is pretty simple - each book is made up of hundreds or thousands of drawings, so I need to be efficient. I don’t want the reader to get hung up on visual details - I want to carry them as easily through the story as if they were reading prose. (This isn’t a hard rule for comics, by the way, just my personal preference.)

Covers are illustrations. They’re a single image that is meant to entice readers and accurately communicate the story. There are all sorts of considerations, like how it will look as a postage-stamp sized thumbnail on a website. They involve things I only halfway understand, like composition and color theory and typography (yes, comics involve this too, but it’s *different*). An anatomy mistake in a comic panel is easily ignored; an anatomy mistake in a cover will haunt you forever.

Starting out, I just knew I wanted to feature the two characters, and some aspect of the setting. These are the initial sketches I send my editor (Amanda Maciel) and art director (Phil Falco):

I actually really like A. There’s drama and a sense of place. But A looks more like the cover of an adventure book; you’d expect that main figure to be going on a journey, maybe searching for pirate treasure, while the looming face in the sky feels rather ominous. Since The Girl From the Sea is a sweet summer romance, we decided to focus in on sketches that prioritized the girls. C and D had an intimacy that felt appropriate, so I expanded them into color.

This is a fun part. I don’t know much about formal color theory, but I love how digital art lets me play around, using hue/saturation sliders and blending modes to find palettes I wouldn’t have thought of originally. I usually start with basic, expected colors (A1) and then start pushing them into more and more dramatic takes.

My editors liked B2 and C1 the most, for the summery palette. I was drawn to the romance of B1 (I will never ever be tired of how pink, purple, and teal look together!). We agreed to meet somewhere in the middle - bright, sunshiny colors with a flush of pink.

This is where I took the sketch, and then the inks. It looks quite simple, but I knew the color treatment on the water, rocks, and sky would add extra detail.

A fun fact - I was trying to find reference for this pose, and ended up basing it on a painting of Narcissus by John William Waterhouse. I wish I had something smart to say about this correlation (the narcissism of young love? the queerness of greek myth? idk) but honestly, it was just a helpful pose.

I also used a reference photo (this was mid 2020 so my hair was doing its own thing.)

As I was sketching, a Scholastic designer - the wildly talented Shivana Sookdeo - was working on title text. Typography is a mysterious beast and it was great to have a professional do this work! All I asked for was something flow-y and brush-y, and she knocked it out of the park.

There were some more tweaks to Morgan’s pose along the way, and the coloring process deserves its own eventual post - but I’m pleased with where the cover ended up.

The other fun thing we got to do was bring in a spot gloss for the title and for the water. This basically makes part of cover shiny, where the rest is matte.

Do you think we chose the right sketch? Do you have any thoughts about how you make comic covers, or your favorite comic covers? Let me know!

Also, a big welcome to DAISY GAETA! She will be moderating and editing this newsletter 🎉 thank you, Daisy!

So! You have an exciting idea. You have an outline. You have ideas for your art style and you’re starting to draw concept designs. It’s time to…

Write the script!

The scripting process is the work of fleshing out every moment within your story. You can be as descriptive as you like in this stage - with your outline as a road map, you can let the script really dig into how you want the scenes to feel, describe little details that feel visually important, and let the conversation between your characters flow.

There are various official formats for scripts. Movie and TV scripts are expected to look a certain way - but truthfully, there’s nothing I love more than writing comic scripts, because I can format them however I want.

I write my comics like novellas. I script without worrying about page count or how I’m going to lay it out on the page - unless I have an exciting idea for a dynamic page spread or a panel, in which case I’ll note it in the script. I usually write in present tense because it feels the most natural to me, you don’t have to. I try my best to describe the pictures in my head, and when I can’t imagine how a certain sequence will look, I’ll at least describe everything that I know has to go there.

Here are examples of my scripts, and the pages they turn into. Both examples are from The Girl From the Sea - the first is a conversation-oriented page spread, the second a visuals-oriented spread. (A page spread refers to the two pages that lie side-by-side when reading a book, fyi!)

Length and Narrative Space

I will talk about thumbnailing - the process of breaking down a script into page layouts - in a post soon. I write my story without breaking it into pages first, which I know isn’t standard for everyone. Diving into the story without knowing exactly how long it will be can be nerve-wracking. What if you end up with way too much story, or way too little?

In order to make sure my graphic novel scripts don’t end up being too long or too short, I consider how much story can fit in a graphic novel. At this point it’s an instinct, but before I developed that instinct I would literally take my favorite graphic novels and break down how many scenes there were, and how many pages per scene. This is obviously a very rough science, but it gave me an idea of how much story can fit in a graphic novel. The Girl From the Sea has about twenty disparate scenes (I’m counting any significant location change or time jump as a scene change), which is a LOT less than a prose novel of the same genre.

I’ve found that graphic novels have much less narrative space than a prose novel. An example - I do these fan comics based on text from the Lord of the Rings. The one below is based on half a page from the Return of the King. That translates into three comic pages. If I do some clumsy math, then faithfully translating all of Lord of the Rings (1,086 pages) into comics (assuming a rate of 3 comic pages per 1/2 page of prose) would make…a 6,516 page long graphic novel. Which, I think we can all agree, is a bit much even for me.

This doesn’t mean a graphic novel is lesser than prose - it’s just a different medium. You probably can’t include as many separate scenes as a novel can. BUT, the visuals and drawing style, and the combination of words and text, create subtlety and depth in a way that’s wholly unique to comics. Recognize the kinds of stories that work in graphic novels, versus prose, versus film, versus TV. Each medium shines in its own way!

My graphic novel scripts end up being between 10,000 and 15,000 words, so maybe that is helpful figure to know! For me, that translates to 200 - 250 pages of comics.

Dialogue

What I like the most about script writing is figuring out the flow of conversations! I suggest always writing more than you’ll need, because often you’ll find you can cut lines as you get into visuals.

Some people love writing dialogue! If you’re not one of those people, here’s a few tips:

Come into the conversation with a narrative goal. The characters should start in one place and end in a different one - whether they have learned more information, revealed something, agreed to something, had their mind changed, etc. Also be open to this goal changing! Sometimes once my characters get chatting they take it in directions I wasn’t expecting. This is generally a good thing to pay attention to - if you’re having trouble getting your character to say what you want them to, maybe the plot needs changing.

Be aware of where the characters are speaking from - are they upset? Curious? Sleep-deprived? Bored? What just happened to them before this conversation that is shaping their mood? What are they anticipating? How do they feel about the person they’re talking to? What do they want to get from the person, and what do they want to convey? Are they saying one thing but feeling another?

I had a teacher in college suggest going out into the world and writing down strangers’ conversations. This feels a bit invasive to me, but I get the idea. The next time you’re in a group setting or on a group zoom, pay attention to the flow and the way people go back and forth. Even chatty podcasts or reality style TV shows are a good source of this (like the discussion on drawing from life vs drawing from art, you’ll learn more from listening to real conversations rather than scripted conversations). There’s a pattern that emerges, almost a melody, that you’re trying to capture in writing!

Remember that the visuals will add context. Anything that you can show with an expression or body language will add depth to the dialogue. This conversation between Morgan and Keltie (below) would read one way as simple text, but with the added clues of Keltie’s expression in the third and fourth panels, we can see that she’s unhappy with the plan even as she agrees to it.

Finally, I suggest reading dialogue aloud as you go (with the caveat that I am a former drama kid so I find this kind of thing fun). This will help you discover if you’re repeating a word too many times, let you play with alternate phrasing, and help you figure out the most natural flow of conversation.

Narration and Point of View

I was not a fan of narration in comics for a long time. It felt like a shortcut - having a caption that said what the character was thinking, feeling, and seeing, rather than showing it in the art. Then…I decided to write a romance book. My goal with The Girl From the Sea was to make the reader feel like they were in Morgan’s shoes, with all the baggage and anxiety she brings into the story. I wanted them to feel like they were falling in love with Keltie alongside Morgan. And I realized I was totally wrong about narration - it’s a very powerful tool for putting the reader directly in a character’s head.

Point of view is an interesting topic in comics. Your reader is not seeing the world through a character’s eyes in the same way as a first-person prose novel. Even if there is a main character narrating, the reader is still looking at the character and their world in a semi-objective way. In first person prose, the narrator tells you everything you know; in comics, your own eyes give you a lot of information. I just read We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (prose novel) and loved how the reader knows very little about the identity of the narrator, including her age and appearance, until the end of the story…something that would be really tricky to do in comics. If you want a strong point of view, narration can help achieve it!

I don’t have narration in The Witch Boy series. I wanted them to feel like magical adventures with a group of defined characters who all get to have moments in the spotlight, who all have story arcs. When a story is told from a specific point of view, it can feel strange to show scenes the POV character isn’t present in (when the reader has information the POV character does not, it distances them from the character), and I wanted to be able to jump around. If The Witch Boy books were prose, they would be written in third person.

The Girl From the Sea is a much more internal story. There’s not really a villain outside of Morgan’s anxiety and fear of coming out. The story’s arc focuses on the change happening within her mind and heart, rather than an exterior change in the world. Almost every scene is from her perspective. There’s a few scenes where she’s not present, but they’re rare and even then the characters hold information back from the reader. If The Girl From the Sea was prose it would be written in first person.

My spouse makes autobiographical comics that are often in second person, which is a way to connect directly with the reader and make the comic feel really personal and intimate.

Like everything in your story, it’s a choice! Think about how you want your reader to experience the story when you’re considering whether to give your main character narration, or not.

Description

The other component of a script is description. This varies hugely depending on the project.

I was REALLY descriptive with The Witch Boy script. It was my first book, and I was working with an editor who I wanted to be able to see it as clearly as I did. As I continued to make the series, the description got more and more sparse. I included enough for my editor and any other early readers to be able to understand, but I knew that I would be the one drawing the art, so I didn’t need to get too wordy. Also, I had established the vibe of the story and many of the recurring settings and characters, so I didn’t need to keep describing them.

I’m writing a graphic novel for an artist for the first time right now. It’s interesting preparing the script for them - I don’t want to be so descriptive that I slow down their reading, and I don’t want to impose my visual ideas when someone else is going to be drawing them. But I also want to give them material, rather than leaving all the visual research and brainstorming to them. A lot of times I’ll give a list of things in the setting/things about the character, and include the ~vibes~.

I feel okay sharing this scene since it’s from an old draft:

Reference

This is also a good time to talk about reference! Finding visuals will always give you more ideas. I start pulling visual reference as soon as I start on a project. As you’re writing the script, it can be helpful to make a folder of really specific things included in the script. I found SO MANY photos of boats and boat dashboards for The Girl From the Sea. Once you’re in the drawing zone, having a folder to look through for quick reference can keep you on track, rather than having to stop drawing to dive into the depths of Google Images.

This goes for writing if someone else is illustrating! If you aren’t a visual artist at all, it’s still very helpful to share pictures of anything you are specifically imagining.

When is it done?

Writing will always be weird to me, because I started as an artist. If you spend six hours working on a piece of visual art, you will have done six hours worth of work. You will have put down marks on the canvas and made tangible progress - drawn two comics pages, inked an illustration, whatever.

Spending six hours writing is more like…you sit down to write, and if your brain is working right off the bat you get a few ideas on the page. Then you realize you need to research and lose an hour down a Wikipedia hole. Then you spend another hour trying to pick the perfect name for a background character, even though you TELL YOURSELF that you can rename them later you know you never will, and by the end of the hour you’re wondering if you’ve ever heard anyone’s name at all, ever, and isn’t the concept of names kind of bizarre to begin with. Finally your second coffee hits and you ACTUALLY write a whole scene, except for the place where you wrote ‘joke goes here’ that you promise yourself to return to. And inevitably, five hours and forty-five minutes in, you realize that you have a better idea for this scene and you need to scrap all your work for that day.

It’s frustrating! Oh my god is it frustrating! But on days like that, even though it feels like you didn’t make any progress:

YOU DID.

If finding a story is finding your way through a labyrinth, then you just went down a bunch of corridors and found dead ends. Now you know they are dead ends, which is helpful information! But not only that, you found things along the way: a name for a character, a bit of research that expands your view of the story. Days like that are your brain working through the basic ways the story could go, so that you can move on to a better version the next day.

Put a lot of text down - put anything down - even when it’s stupid or scary to write, just put SOMETHING down. Like climbing rungs on a ladder and getting to see more and more of the world around you, the act of writing itself will give you ideas! And then you get to edit out the bad stuff and keep the good stuff! (I am writing this to remind myself because I forget this constantly)

I re-read my work a lot. Usually when I sit down at the start of my work day I’ll re-read everything to orient myself. I find little dialogue tweaks, get ideas about how to make it flow better - every time I re-read, I make changes. When I’m really stuck, I’ll take a few days off and come back with fresh eyes. If you don’t have a few days, a walk or a yoga session or breaking to do chores can help. Talking to someone else can help immensely too - just describing the story out loud will clarify it in your head.

Writing for a visual medium is interesting because the finished script won’t be seen by anyone except you and your editor, maybe agent, people in your writing group, etc. It’s not the final place this story will end up - it’s still a step on the way. Some things that will work in a script won’t work in visuals, and you won’t figure out until you get there. But in order to do a good job, you need to let yourself live in the stage it’s in. Focus on writing a good script while you’re there.

Sensitivity Readers

Script phase is a great time to bring in sensitivity readers. These are people from identities that you are representing in your story, who can read your story for authenticity, check for any stereotypes and tropes, and give suggestions to make characters feel more genuine.

It can be tricky to find a professional reader - a lot of large scale databases have shut down because of trolls. Here’s a database that’s still up. If you’re working with a publisher, they will have their own internal connections, and will usually cover the cost. You can also reach out to people you know and trust.

This webinar is an excellent resource to talk about working with readers. The program in general, Writing the Other, has lots of great, thorough, and informative courses on these topics.

When you’re working with a reader, it can help to have specific questions - “What would someone from a traditional Korean background make for family dinner?” “If a trans guy was starting on T, how would he take it?” “What’s a casual way to refer to a boyfriend in Spanish?”

If you’re worried that something in your piece could be upsetting, I recommend flagging it for the reader up top. And since you’re making a visual piece, ask for photo reference and things to read and watch. If you can, bring the reader back in to look at the art - and definitely show them the character at at script stage. But if you can only work with them for one session, do it with the script. It is infinitely easier to edit text, and it shows that you’re open to them proposing big changes. Collaborating with a reader is a huge privilege and a wonderful resource, so be respectful and thoughtful of their time and work!

That’s it for today! As always, drop questions down below and I’ll try to answer :)

Taking about writing is easier than talking about art, for me, but I’m going to give it my best shot to talk about…

Finding your art style

Art style is one of those weird, slippery, hard-to-define things. I had one in high school (inspired by the illustrations in A Series of Unfortunate Events books, New Yorker cartoons, and Ghibli) and lost it when I went to art school. I tried a lot of different styles, took what I liked from each of them, and learned what I didn’t like. I also learned what was easy and hard for me to draw. This is all information that helps to inform your style! Ten years into making comics I feel pretty solid about my art style, but it’s been a constant evolution and I know it will continue to change.

This is general drawing advice, more than graphic novel advice - but learn the fundamentals. It can feel easier to just copy a cartoon - to see how someone else has stylized real life, and borrow their shortcuts. But in my option, drawing from life and photographs will help you form your own, unique style. Art is the world processed through our minds, and every mind is unique. If you’re just copying the world processed through someone else’s mind, you’re accepting all the stylistic choices they made. It can be a good way to learn about those choices, but it’s not a replacement for drawing from life.

The diagram below illustrates it as best I can. The point isn’t that either drawing of a rose is better. The point is that the one drawn from life is more interesting and more unique to the artist.

Note: sometimes it is easier to copy from a cartoon! Sometimes there’s a car in one scene of your book and it’s not important and you don’t want to spend the time figuring out how to draw a car in your style, you just want it to read as a car. I think you CAN go to other artists and see how they stylized cars - copy their homework, so to speak. But for the subjects that you are interested in - people, animals, whatever the focus of your comic is - I really recommend working to develop your own way of drawing them. Once you have those fundamentals, you can and should look at other artists’ work and take inspiration from their individual styles.

Style takes a long time to develop, and is always changing. And the reason it’s so relevant to graphic novels is that style informs the story.

Examples

All art belongs to the respective creators and is only used as an example.

XKCD by Randall Munroe is a webcomic about, well, lots of things, but there are a ton of math and science jokes. The style looks like a diagram your high school physics teacher would scribble on the whiteboard to explain a concept. Each comic stands alone, rather than having ongoing narrative, so distinguishing the characters isn’t high priority. This allows the figures to be highly simple and iconic. The art is a vessel for the more complicated words.

Check, Please by Ngozi Ukazu is a longform narrative with romance, friendship, action, and jokes. The characters are easy to distinguish from one another. They have fairly realistic proportions, which lends itself to the sports-action side of the comic and the romance. They have big eyes and simple, expressive faces, which lends itself to the emotions and drama. The whole style is bouncy, fun, and character-focused.

Delicious in Dungeon, or Dungeon Meshi, by Ryoko Kui is a manga about a D&D-esque adventuring party exploring a dungeon and eating monsters. The characters are fun, but the comic is focused on the interesting world they’re exploring. Ryoko Kui gets very into the mechanics of magic in this world, and to do that well, you need a world that feels SOLID. She renders the monsters and settings with a lot of care (while understanding that when it’s a character-focused scene, the setting can drop out, since too much information in one panel is distracting). The comic is food-focused, so rendering delicious looking food is also important. The characters have pretty simple faces, except when it’s a character-focused scene, and then we see them rendered in more detail.

Mœbius was a French cartoonist with an interest in surreal fantasy and science fiction. He devoted his energy and time to rendering elaborate backgrounds, to making worlds that pull the reader in. His work is not as interested in making a character or story that you deeply relate to - he has a cool idea, and wants you to bask in the lushness of his art. His books are highly conceptual, but the art style draws on realism enough to make the surreal visuals immediately understandable.

I could go on about this forever but those are just a few examples!

Finding the style for your book

So ask yourself…what are the most important parts of your book? What are you the most interested in conveying as an artist?

When thinking about the characters, ask yourself -

• Do you want them to feel aspirational and cool, or deeply relatable?

• Do you want the reader to feel like they’re watching the story unfold, or like they are in the story?

• Are you telling a dramatic romance, or a comedy, or a realistic, emotionally incisive story, or an action adventure, or an autobiography, etc?

The answers to these will help you figure out your style. This diagram by Scott McCloud from Understanding Comics, below, is a GREAT breakdown of realism vs abstraction (I highly recommend this book). He explores the idea of a spectrum with text on one end, and photorealistic art on the other end. Think about where your comic fits!

When thinking about the world of the story, ask yourself -

• Do I want the reader to feel transported to the places I’m drawing?

• Do I want them to understand the mechanics of a fantasy or sci-fi world?

• Do I want this to look like it’s grounded in reality, even if it’s not our world, or do I want it to feel surreal, like the rules of physics don’t apply here?

• Is it an action story? Does the environment need to be a place the character can move through in dynamic action scenes?

Of course, you probably already have an art style, and things that you are interested (and not interested!) in drawing. So you can ask these questions backwards, too - what kind of story does your art style suggest?

Designing

The above should inform what to design for your graphic novel. I’ll talk about page layouts and panels in another post since that is its own giant topic!

My stories are character focused. I tell fantasy stories with magic, but the rules of the magic is always less important than the emotions of the character. The comics are set in beautiful, escapist worlds, but again the characters take narrative priority over the world they’re in. I want my main characters to feel relatable, while still conveying their own personalities. I want my reader to understand and feel the character’s emotions by their faces alone, no words needed.

So I always design characters first. Finding the characters visually is a vital part to figuring out stories for me. When I was brainstorming for The Girl From the Sea, I knew I wanted to tell a romance and a story about being closeted. I wasn’t sure what the characters’ personalities would be yet. But as I started drawing them, I found that Morgan - the closeted, socially anxious teen - was rigid and stiff. Keltie - her wild love interest who brings chaos along with romance - is curvy, freckled, with uncontrollable wild hair. The visual difference in these characters went on to be the central dynamic of the book, and it wasn’t something I could have discovered without drawing them.

I let myself draw them a lot, playing with different proportions and faces and fashions. Figuring out how to make them as expressive as possible, because this is a story about feelings. And because it is a romance, their interactions are central to the story, so I drew little moments of them interacting to figure out that dynamic.

I looked up references, trying to find actors or random Pinterest people who looked like the characters. I also did a deep dive into fashion, since that’s another theme of the book, and another way to express the characters. Morgan is carefully put together; Keltie doesn’t care. I drew a bunch of clothing options for them so that, once I was in drawing-the-book mode, I didn’t have to pause between scenes and switch to design mode. (clothing inspiration from Pinterest, Teen Vogue, and stores like Forever 21 and Shein)

So that’s development art for a teen romance book. Let’s say you’re making a book about giant mechas fighting monsters. You’re really amped to draw these big action scenes, more interested in those scenes than in the people piloting the mechas. That means your development art will, naturally, be more about mechas and monsters. You’ll want to think about how they move, what they can do, and develop designs that will shine in action scenes. Your world should feel real to lend weight to these sci fi concepts, and to be a stage for your dynamic action.

I know that my stories will always come down to human interaction and emotion, so that is what I’ve focused on learning. Knowing what kind of stories you want to tell will guide your artistic development.

Evolving style

I get asked pretty regularly how I maintain a consistent style through my book. And the answer is that I don’t. Here’s a comparison of pages from the beginning and end of The Witch Boy. The difference is noticeable, but you can still recognize the characters, and that’s what matters.

Feeling like you need to have a consistent style can hold you back from starting. I’ve known artists who begin books, and during the first few chapters they have the inevitable jump in skill that always happens when you’re working on a big project. They feel like it’s so obvious that they’ve grown, it’s time to go back and redraw the beginning. Of course, by the time they’ve redrawn chapter one, chapter two ALSO needs to be redrawn, and it ends up becoming an ouroboros of perfectionism.

So, if you need some affirmations: Your style will change as you go, and that is good. You will figure out how to draw the characters more simply. You will become faster and better and discover more of those visual shortcuts I talked about up top. This is always what happens when you work at something - this is learning by doing. But I promise, that change is a thousand times more obvious to you than to anyone else! Resist the urge to go back to the beginning, at *least* until you’ve finished the whole book. There are so many panels and pages that drive me crazy when I flip through any of my books…but on the whole, I’m glad I finished them and put them out in the world, even if I could draw them better now.

Have you ever noticed that a cartoon character will change looks in between seasons of an animated TV show? This is because character models get locked at the beginning of the season - the character is designed and the animators have to stick to that exact design pretty strictly (this changes depending on show style of course). But then a team of artists and animators draw the characters tens of thousands of times. That process naturally discovers all the parts of the design that don’t work as well, are harder to animated, don’t look good from a certain angle, etc - things you can only find out from drawing a character that many times. But! Instead of changing the character model as they go, they can only update it at the start of a new season.

We’re making comics and so there’s a lot more wiggle room (and a lot fewer people working on it; and a lot less money). So don’t hold yourself to a the animation standard of staying on-model. If you need to change something mid-story, go for it.

Finally

As always, this is intended to give you things to think about, NOT hard rules. Contrasting an art style with a narrative style is a choice, and one that can result in really cool work! You can use a Looney-Toons style to tell an emotional story about heartbreak. You can render the suburban landscape of a stoner comedy with all the intricacy of Mœbius’s fantasy worlds. You can draw a mecha story in a scratchy, realistic autobio style. The contrast says something, in and of itself.

Your style does not limit the kind of stories you can tell, but it does inform them. Art style is not neutral - it is as unique as your fingerprint, and exploring it will help you become a better artist and storyteller.

In my last post, I talked about brainstorming. This week, how to pull those ideas together into…

Writing an outline

There are a few helpful terms that apply across comics, film, and tv. An elevator pitch or blurb is a few sentences - a paragraph at most - that sum up the story. An outline explores the story beat-by-beat, figuring out how the plot fits together and what scenes happen when. Sometimes an outline is preceded by a beat sheet (this is more a film & TV term) that lays out the story in simple bullet points. Finally, a script is all the dialogue, all the descriptions, the pacing, every moment laid out in text before it gets translated to visuals.

When I put together the Witch Boy, this is what I used for the elevator pitch (below). It tells us the world, the main character, the conflict, and the stakes. It doesn’t tell us the whole story, or even mention all the main characters.

Figuring this out - even if it changes as you continue writing - is helpful because this will act as a guidepost. When you get into the weeds of your outline, when the details bog you down and the plot holes multiply every direction you look - you can check your summary and remember the story you’re telling.

Outline format

An outline can look like a lot of different things. If you’re outlining a serialized webcomic you’ll be drawing on your own, it might be pretty vague. If you’re putting together a pitch for your first graphic novel, and you want the editor to know what’s going to happen, it will be more specific - likewise if you’re a writer putting together the story for an artist.

Simple, clear language is good (“X character is motivated to do Y by Z happening”). Clarity should be prioritized over drama…this is about putting down a map to follow. You don’t need to describe every detail of a fight scene or emotional conversation - figure out where the characters are at when the scene starts, and where they’re at when it ends. Sometimes figuring out those details can be enticing - to just get into the meat of the story! - but I’ve found it helpful to have a simple, short, easily readable outline when I’m in the thick of scripting. If I get too excited about planning the beats of an emotional conversation, I’ll let myself write it out, and then save it in an alternate document for when I start scripting.

Writing the dang thing

An outline is the messiest, most agonizing part for me. You’ve got this pile of fun sparkly themes and scenes and character arcs, and then you have to actually string them all together into something that makes narrative sense. It’s about stitching up plot holes, figuring out where things fit, and tracking character arcs relative to each other and to the story as a whole.

Here are the first two pages of the Witch Boy outline:

I am keeping it pretty simple, in every scene trying to show what is being achieved and where our main character is at. I’m not worrying too much about how information will actually be conveyed - for example, there’s a big infodump with Aster’s mom at the beginning, but that information is crucial to the story moving forward, so I’ll figure out how to make it feel smoother when I’m scripting.

Story structure

There are a million books on story structure (Save The Cat is a classic in film). These books usually focus on a specific, Joseph Campbell-style hero’s journey. It’s what Western audiences are used to, the structure that underlies any major Hollywood film, what we’re conditioned to find satisfying and compelling and meaningful. Some people view it almost like a mathematical formula - plug in X and Y, solve for Z, and boom! you have a good story (spoilers - this doesn’t work. stories come from the heart!).

All this to say:

⚠️You can break story structure! ⚠️

Especially in comics, which are their own weird medium - and especially when you’re telling stories from viewpoints that are underrepresented, stories about the people who don’t usually get to be the heroes. Breaking the structure, doing the unexpected thing, is often what makes stories memorable.

I don’t go into my books thinking of structure. But sometimes I get stuck - there’s a moment of ‘I feel like something is missing’ or ‘things are happening in the wrong order’ or ‘how do I make this beat feel satisfying.’ And so, with all that in mind, story structure can be helpful.

Here’s my personal breakdown of classic three-act structure.

And here’s how it (loosely) applies to the Witch Boy. Again, I didn’t go into the story thinking of structure.

Let me repeat that: I did not do this up front.

I wrote a loose, messy outline, and then I looked at the three-act structure to see where things fell, to see if it gave me any ideas of ways to punch up the story.

Suggestions, not rules

• coincidences and other remarkable, out-of-the-blue occurrences should happen early. When Morgan and Keltie fall in love at first sight in The Girl From the Sea, I knew I had to show that semi-magical connection as soon as possible. Coincidences that happen early in the story are accepted as establishing the world and story rules; too late, and it feels too convenient. “Start as close to the end as possible” is a Kurt Vonnegut quote I think about a lot.

• scenes should serve a narrative purpose (or several). Of course, ‘purpose’ is very open-ended. An atmospheric landscape scene can be added because you want to evoke a sense of place. A seemingly trivial conversation can subtly point to the themes of the story. A slow scene of your character getting ready in the morning can establish their personality.

• a character should leave a scene with a different outlook or emotion than they had going in. This isn’t true for EVERY scene, especially early scenes where you want to establish tone - but if you’re in the middle of your outline and feeling like it’s dragging, consider this point and the one above.

• where the story ends summarizes the overall theme. You don’t have to have a happy or neat ending. Your characters’ problems don’t need to be solved. But the place you leave them should be different than where they began, and it’s a statement - of why you chose to tell the story, why you chose to capture this moment of their lives in fiction.

These are guidelines that help me tell the kinds of stories I want to. They are suggestions, not rules, and you might discover a set for yourself that totally contradict mine! The diversity of stories in this world is so exciting and there are truly no right or wrong ways to do it.

Do you have any personal guidelines? Times when breaking story structure really worked, for you or for something you were reading/watching? Let me know!

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I’m going to take you through the process of a graphic novel in a series of posts. This is from my perspective, as a writer and artist who makes fantasy books for middle grade and young adult readers - but hopefully it will be helpful even if you’re interested in making a different kind of book!

Coming up with an idea

Storytelling is as natural as breathing. We tell stories as kids, with our friends, on social media, in therapy. We tell stories to ourselves to make sense of the world, and then tell to them to other people so they can see the world the way we do. It’s a deep, old, very human thing.

It is ALSO hard! Because it’s not only having the idea, but organizing your thoughts in a way that OTHER people will understand it. And not just understand, but get pulled in and feel the emotions you want them to feel. It’s my favorite thing in the world, figuring out how to use words and pictures to perform an act of telepathy, and it drives me crazy.

For this post I’m going to talk about the big-brain, blue-sky phase of a project, when everything is possible because you haven’t actually started yet. What are things to consider, and what are ways to push your imagination?

I have a theory that all storytellers have a ‘first story’ - the one they’ve been mulling over for years, maybe a lifetime. When they sit down to make their first book, this story comes spilling out, full of life and ideas. Maybe this is true for you, maybe not. Maybe you’ve already told your first story! Regardless, stories start with a spark of an idea. Something that is compelling you to explore, to pull a thread.

A few examples of story sparks:

• an image that won’t leave your mind

• a desire to see a certain kind of story in media

• a real-life experience that you want or need to process through fiction

• anything you have a lot of feelings and opinions about

Building out your idea:

Once you have this spark, you can start asking it questions. To stick with the fire metaphor, you’re giving the spark oxygen (exploration, questions) and fuel (research, story planning, gathering inspiration) to grow into a healthy blaze, one that won’t be blown out by a gust of wind (the inevitable gut feeling that happens with every project where you realize it’s doomed and so are you and you’ll never make anything good in your brief lifespan) (this always happens, but it passes if you stick with it. I promise.)

Here are some questions I always find helpful to ask myself:

• What do you want to see in a story? What haven’t you seen before? What have you seen before, but it was done badly and you think you can do it better? (this last one is especially inspirational to me lol)

• What is the heart of the idea?

• What are you trying to say with the story? What’s the point? Why this story, why you, why now? Fyi - you don’t have to have a grand, smart-sounding answer for this! “I think a sitcom style comic about my pet guinea pigs’ drama would be fun“ is a valid reason.

• What do you (or your artist) want to draw? Make lists!

• What do you want to write? Make more lists!

• What do your characters want, and what is in their way?

• If you’re an artist, start sketching the characters. They’ll change a lot, but you’ll discover new things about them as you draw. This is an old, OLD drawing of Aster from the Witch Boy. The .psd is just entitled ‘kid’. The character would go on to change a lot, but I was already figuring things out about body language and presentation.

  

• Are there any specific scenes, character types, or narrative arcs you want to do? Images or places you want to go to? Dig into these. For the Witch Boy, I had a specific image in my head before I wrote any of the story. It became a tentpole - I knew I wanted to draw this scene, so that led to questions about what led up to it, and what happened afterwards.

  

Let yourself answer these questions fully and without judgement. If storytelling is a labyrinth (mixing metaphors, sorry) then putting words and sketches down will help you step forward, help you turn the next corner. Even if a promising-looking path turns into a dead end - now you have more information. You know that path isn’t right, and that puts you closer to finding the right one.

These are big questions, and it’s okay not to have all the answers. Sometimes I think the answer is one thing and only realize it is something else once the book is done. But they should get you thinking!

At this stage, it’s also very important to bring in inspiration in many different forms.

• Research! Even if your story is full fantasy, read about our world to bring in details. Find things you wouldn’t have known otherwise that make your story unique. This is an ongoing process, and even when you’re not working on a story, get in the habit of hoarding cool facts! This doubles as making you fun at parties.

• More research! If you’re writing about characters who don’t share your exact experience (race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, tbh probably all your characters unless it’s autobio!), you have a responsibility to do your research (even if your story is taking place in a fantasy world). Look for first hand accounts of these experiences from real people AND research how characters like that have appeared in media before. Educate yourself on tropes and stereotypes. (I’ll talk about sensitivity readers in a later post)

• Sometimes research will kill certain ideas as you learn they’re not realistic, or as you realize there’s some kind of trope or stereotype around them you don’t want to perpetuate. This is ALWAYS a good thing - it’s pushing your story to be stronger, more unique, and more considered. Doing this at the front of a project means you won’t get too attached to a harmful, regressive, or overplayed idea.

• Inspiration! What movies, shows, books, games, etc do you like? What are your favorite parts, and why? This is a vital part of being a storyteller - interrogating your own interests and understanding why other media succeeds or fails.

• More inspiration! This is a comic, so gather visuals. They can be paintings, other comics, a Pinterest moodboard, photos you take yourself. Even if you’re writing for someone else to draw, a comic is a visual medium first and should be approached in that way. Below are some early images I pulled for the Witch Boy that I returned to again and again when I needed background inspiration:

  

• If you are writing comics, and all you read are contemporary comics, expand your viewpoint. Look to other mediums, to nonfiction, to other cultures’ forms of storytelling, and into the history of comics. (this advice applies to every medium by the way - if you want to write for animation you have to watch more than just animation!) This is another way to make sure you’re telling a unique story, and not just a recycled version of something you’ve already read.

This is the blue sky process. It should be playful and transformative and creative. Be open to discovering new things about your story. Be open to realizing the heart of it is actually somewhere else. Be open to realizing the things you liked most about it at the start might be the things you have to throw out in service of a better story. People say ‘kill your darlings’, but in my opinion it’s more like - ‘thank your darlings for their service, and put them to rest.’

In the next post, I’ll talk about pulling these ideas together into an outline. Do you have any ways to come up with story ideas? Favorite places to go for visual research? Let me know!