Oh man there’s a lot, most of which you’ll be able to learn from any good scriptwriting workshop or book, but personally I would say the most important thing to remember is that (unless you’re hiring an artist), YOU will be the one drawing it all out eventually, so you really, really have to make something that excites you in some way.
Comics take a long time to make. Something that takes a paragraph to convey in prose can take an entire page. A background detail that could be said with one written sentence and then carried in the reader’s visual memory actually has to be drawn out, repeatedly, from multiple different angles. You’ll most likely draw the same faces, over and over, potentially for many years depending on the length of your project.
This isn’t to put you off! I believe the payoff is absolutely worth it – visual storytelling brings another entire level and even though it can be a tough road, having the ability to speak with more than words is extremely beautiful and cool imo.
I guess it’s kind of a waffly way to say: make sure whatever you’re making excites you in some way!! That doesn’t mean it needs to be super thrilling page-turning adventure or a murder mystery. There are many ways you could make a comic project exciting for yourself:
Research scenery that you love and use it for settings
Use an experimental art style
Challenge and push yourself with framing, layout, visual storytelling
Spend a lot of time with your characters outside the story, learn about them
Figure out what’s important to you, and how you could convey that to readers
Figure out what the POINT of your comic is. It doesn’t have to be a huge moral thesis, but for example if the point is just to show a peaceful slice of life, remember that
Think about why you were excited about the story in the first place
Because they are SUCH long term projects, a lot of comic writers/makers will have some times where they aren’t excited by their creation as much and that’s pretty natural. But you can try to keep it as fresh and exciting as possible, and while writing think about what you’re going to enjoy drawing later.
Pluto is an amazing work in general, but this early scene stuck with me hard for how perfectly Urasawa communicated the sense of loss and sorrow without resorting to traditional visual cues of emotion for the robot woman’s reaction. It’s one thing to convey the loss of a loved one, but it’s a whole other thing entirely to convey it with a character who can’t physically emote and still have it work flawlessly.
This tutorial contains tips about writing for webcomics, with my caveat that I’m not formally trained in any of this stuff~~ This is all just my personal observations and tips from the past 10 years of putting comics online, but they’ve served me pretty well so far! For some examples of this info applied to my own work, feel free to check out my webcomics at The Meek and Mare Internum.
All of my tutorials are released in lower-res format to the public 6 months after
publication at the Shingworks Patreon. You can access the full tutorial archive, as well as nearly 1.5
years worth of bonus content, by becoming a Patron :] I just wrapped up a two part tutorial about building and launching Patreons, good times.
“There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that that’s all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.”
Izzie’s tumblr archive 