I thought it might be interesting for readers to see the process Jetti and I go through to bring this world of DREAMtech to life. So here you go, a quick crash course in how to make a webcomic.
1. The Script: I write the webcomic in a panel script form. It’s kind of like a screenplay but custom formatted for comic books, it lays out the page, panels, direction and dialog. There is no real industry standard for formatting of a panel script so when I started writing I searched online for examples of writers I respected like Garth Ennis and Warren Ellis. When I write scripts I really think of the entire story in 12 chapters. In the case of this webcomic we plotted out 18 page chapters, broken down into mini arcs of 6 pages, each 6 page mini arc going up monthly. Although I use Final Draft for screenplays I use Microsoft Word for the panel scripts I write for comics. Next step, I email the script to Jetti and she begins her magic.
2. Pencils and Inks: Now this process has evolved for Jetti through the course of this actual comic. You’d never be able to tell when the transition took place but when we started off Jetti was drawing the comic on paper in pencil, inking it, then scanning it to shade and color digitally. Now she works completely on a stylus. In the previous process she would sometimes show me the pencils for notes (she’s gotten so used to my panel scripts that I rarely even need to provide notes between pencils and final inking) and then ink the pages. Then she would scan pages and start the colorization and toning/shading etc. Jetti uses mainly Photoshop for her digital work on the art. Next step, she sends it back to me for lettering.
3. Lettering: Jetti finishes the art off as a jpeg, which is no small task, layout, pencils, inks, coloring, shading THEN she sends it to me for the next step. Words. And word bubbles of course. I use Illustrator to letter the comic. I have a great selection of fonts but mainly my favorite fonts come from comicraft. I got used to using ASTROCITY when doing dialog on Motor City and ever since then can’t see myself using anything for dialog. I have a template of word bubbles in eps format, which I copy and paste to make things quick. Usually the process goes, like this. I go back to the script, copy and paste dialog into the comic page, roughly lay bubbles under all the dialog, add special sound effects letters BANG! BOOM! CRASH! Etc… Then go back through and refine, shaping the bubbles, combing them where needed then cleaning up and editing dialog where I can. Lettering comics has been INSANELY GOOD for me as a writer, its forced me into say as much possible with as few words as possible. You really are forced to get to the point when you cram all those words and ideas into tiny little bubbles on the page. Not all writers letter their own books, but having done so myself, I think more should try it as I’ve learned a lot. This stage of the process is done mainly in Illustrator.
4. Finishing for web: So we now have completed pages. We have the art, we have the words over the top of the art. Hopefully at this point we’re telling a sequential story. We’re finished! Not really… The next step is getting this thing ready for the world-wide-web. For me, one of the hardest tasks of the webcomic. Developing the look and layout of the webcomic site was a real challenge. It took longer than any other aspect of the comic. We had to come up with a site that would load fast, was easy to read mimicking the feel of reading a physical comic book and was easy to navigate. I looked at tons of other webcomics, choosing what worked and what didn’t about layout and navigation. We looked into software like Comicpress (which ended up being way too complicated for me) and ultimately decided in our case, less is more, to do it a very basic way. HTML. But let me tell you, I’m a writer, even that was too difficult for me, so we brought my brother onboard. Once the pages are finished, I use Photoshop to place them into a frame or bracket, which fits into our layout. I send the pages monthly to Greg (my brother) and he does the coding. The evil, evil coding which I could never in a million years understand how to do. Because he’s working in pure HTML, it’s a lot of manual work, not so automated. Greg uses a standard HTML editor to do this part of the process. It’s ironic, one of the main concepts of The Concrete World is a story about junkies who depend on other people for their addiction (I had once read and was intrigued about John Belushi being afraid of needles and dependent on others to inject him). In the case of this comic, Felix and Sera are dependent on Paulie to keep their equipment running so they can get their fix. Not unlike me, being dependent on the tech know-how of my brother, and the illustration talents of Jetti to get my vision out there. ha ha. Life imitating art or something like that.
Anyway… once the previously mentioned steps are accomplished, we have a webcomic for your to read… and hopefully enjoy. We go through this process monthly, this November will be The Concrete World’s two year anniversary. We are just past the halfway point of the complete story which will finish at about 220 pages!
Hope this was interesting or insightful to everyone. It’s a strange time in publishing and an even stranger time in comics. The printed page is a dying art, and yet there are generations of those such as myself who won’t let it go. And yet, we also don’t want to fear the future and be left behind. So we choose new mediums to tell our stories. In this case, the internet. We eventually will do a printed version of The Concrete World, but the artform of the webcomic is something not to be overlooked, it’s given thousands of people a voice in the world of comics, they may have otherwise never had. Keep reading, remember Freedom is the new drug and new pages come online in June!
Look at all the tiny little anime fans!
Booster Gold and The Blue Beetle 
This cool cat was chilling out
This Crimson Guard was awesome… and ready for action
Char was cracking me up
Gundam Unicorn!
