Creating My First Comic Book - "The Nefarious Mr. Green" Story (so far...)
This post is written by Keegan and is a companion post with Episode 3 of our podcast this week!
Creating my first comic book
I’m not sure what the moment was when it hit me, but once I decided I wanted to make a comic book there was no turning back. I decided to work from a screenplay that I had written 10 years prior with a college friend. We co-wrote the screenplay and it never really went anywhere and I doubted he would mind if I decided to turn it into a comic (he doesn’t…).
From Screenplay to Comic Book Script
The screenplay for The Nefarious Mr. Green was a full feature length script. Having started to do my research, I was disheartened and annoyed to discover that comic book artists hate, hate, hate!! working from screenplays (or prose, or poems, or anything else but a comic book script.) The only way to truly do a comic then would be to convert my screenplay to comic book script.
Seems easy enough right?
Wrong. It was taxing. Exhausting even. The screenplay is written and polished by screenwriters everywhere to be a minimalist masterwork. Short descriptions. One character description and then just dialogue. Very little expansion of what each action piece requires.
The comic book script is the opposite. It requires an extensive amount of detail or you’re leaving a comic book artist blind to what you envision. The best way to describe it is doing a beat breakdown as an actor and then converting that to a storyboard. It’s tedious stuff.
And I did it wrong. Because not only was I wading into another art form, but I was doing it relatively blindly. There’s not a lot of resources online for comic book script writing, beyond finding example scripts. But it wasn’t like I had a working knowledge of the theory and process yet. That would come from actually working with an artist. Sometimes learning as you go is inevitable.
Finding a Comic Book Artist
There are many comic book professionals who will recommend to people wanting to start creating their own comics that they learn how to draw themselves. This is completely sound advice. If you have the patience, time, and energy to do so. In fact, there are tons of great tutorials on how to draw on Youtube! You could even sign up for an online class or a community college art class.
As much as I wish (legitimately yearn) that I could draw half as good as a professional comic book artist, it’s just something I’m not skilled at doing. I don’t have the patience, time, or energy to learn how to do it better. I’ve spent thousands of hours learning how to write…drawing is just not my forte. Not that I cannot draw, which is the point of most comics professionals. Of course anyone can draw! Most great graphic novelists are self-taught artists and have a distinctive style based on their own sensibilities and ways of drawing. But for the purposes of “The Nefarious Mr. Green” that method would not work. I needed to find an actual comic artist.
I’ve covered different sites to look at to find a comic book artist in another blog post. So I’ll skip right to how I started.
Fiverr Artists
My first stop was Fiverr. I was more comfortable having a 3rd party system handle payment, and I could see the page rates upfront on the site.
I felt like I had dodged a bullet.
Prelude to an Artist
Not discussed on the podcast, the first artist I hired to draw the entire comic for a low (and laughable) price of $100 sent me this sketch of page 1 and then determined he could not do it and cancelled my order (an order he custom created, so it’s not all my fault here).
Artist #1
The first artist I hired (who completed an order) was Conradruiz89 who did a great job with my script but ultimately the style was not right. I also did not like the character designs (the characters Razor and Laser Larry are meant to be old men). With coloring, this page might have made more sense to the eye, but because of the number of panels, I think it ended up too chaotic. There are insert panels all over the place. Your eye doesn’t know where to go. I have to say, that van is stellar though!
Artist #2 was my favorite but ultimately was unavailable at the time when I was trying to get the comic off the ground.
Artist #2
I was literally blown away by the detail and artistry that went into this page made by dimitrisstamadi. Here’s what I sent to him as an initial message (besides the script) to see if he was available and his very reasonable response:
Me - Jul 29, 11:25 PM
Hello, I love your artwork! Are your finished pages available for commercial use? I am interested in commissioning about 15 pages as a first "book" in a limited series. I am working from a screenplay that is about 108 pages, and will eventually turn it into a graphic novel. It is about Super-Villains. It is in the same satirical dark comedic tone as Kick-Ass. I am attaching page 1 and page 2 scripts and an "example page layout" for page 1 because there are more panels than a standard page, but many of the panels are not meant to be very detailed and are smaller. Not all the pages are as complicated as page 1, but I think the pacing of the book is very important. Also, the example layout is meant as a suggestion and still would be fine with me if that is determined by you as the artist. Let me know if you're interested! i would want to do just the black-and-white for now, and it is fine if you leave off speech bubbles and lettering.
dimitrisstamadi - Jul 30, 7:42 PM
Ok, in general american comics strive to get past 9 panels. Manga can be a bit larger up to 12 panels or so in certain cases. So if you really want 13-15 panels as the layout suggests, I think thats a bad call. Having read the pdf's I can see how it could work in one page, cause pg1 doesnt really contain that much information and with the right prep it can be squeezed into half a page or so. After that I am not sure if pg2 can all fit into the other half or not. Either way, let me try it out. I will create an order for you in the coming days, is that fine ? Do you have a specific timeframe/deadline ?
Artist #3
Of all the artists, this is the one who’s delivery I liked the least (which is why I’m not linking to his page). Part of it was my fault, I did pay extra for two pages with this artist when I had only done one test page with the other two. I also didn’t give him page one, like the others, I decided to try and get a “better understanding” of his abilities by plopping him in at page 14 and 15. This probably threw him off a bit. Part of it was his fault though. He blamed me for having poor character descriptions in his delivery but never asked me before delivery if I had any other details to give (I did for the record). In fact, one of the things I had done to think about the qualifications of the artists I was working with was left some things purposefully up to them. Artist #2, clearly an experienced artist, had the sense to ask me if there was a logo or any other descriptive details I should add. Beyond blaming me for bad descriptions, he also did not follow the descriptions I did provide — which is that these two heroes are supposed to be OLD MEN.
The worst part of these pages is the perspective. Page 1 notes (if I had sent him notes, which I did not…) would have looked like this: In panel one, you’ll see that Razor and Larry look like they are about twice as large as the characters sitting at the table. What is panel 2? Why is panel 2 so large? Panel 3…that arm is just strange. Has anyone ever thrown a knife like that? If the characters in the last two panels are supposed to be talking to each other, why are their mouths closed? What are the sight lines for this scene…they look like they’re looking in crazy directions in every which way…
Page two notes (again not actually sent to the artist) would have been something like: What is the background supposed to be in panel 1? I have no sense of where anyone is in the room on this page. The reverse shot of Mr. Green in panel 3 is not matching panels 1 and 2. Panel 4 makes Razor look like he is ten feet away (and hilariously smaller than the desk chair right next to him??) Larry looks miniature in panel 5, and Mr. Green is in different places between panel 5 and 6. Finally Razor’s body shape is completely different in the last panel than the rest.
In the end, I did not go with this artist. His work is not usually in action pages. It is my belief he is not very experienced at sequential art. There are rules of scene design that comic book artists and movie directors study that are broken in these pages and that is what makes them look so bizarre. It’s like whiplash for your eye. You can’t look at these panels individually and say he’s not a good illustrator. That’s why it’s good to do test pages!
Going with the right artist
Finally, not to give up on Fiverr, but simply to broaden my options, I decided to put an ad up on Reddit and Digitalwebbing.com. I received over twenty responses and one of which was the artist I am working with now - Luis Santamarina.
It came down to style. Luis had a comic called Birdman which was a satirical take on the super-hero genre that had a similar tone and style to my comic book script. He was responsive and gave a similar note about how page 1 had way too many panels to deal with as an artist. We ended up expanding page 1 of the script into two pages.
His style matches the goofy dark humor that is in the script. The action is easy to follow and the characters are well designed. I’m also a big fan of indie comics and Adult Swim cartoons and I personally like that it reminded me of those things. A Marvel-Style version of these pages could be out there somewhere with another artist, but when it comes down to it, that type of style would detract from the satirical side of this comic. Also, while Artist #2’s style would also have matched, it was perhaps going to lead to an exhausting read if done entirely in that style. In the end, Luis is also extremely fun to work with and adds his own sensibilities to the story which I think make the comic stronger overall.
All that’s left for “The Nefarious Mr. Green” is coloring all the pages, running a successful Kickstarter campaign, digitally and print publishing, and marketing!
If you have any questions about this process, or if you’d like to discuss your own project, please reach out!