Making a 12 Hour Comic (Part 1)

Well, more like a 24 hour penciled comic that still needs inks, colors, and lettering… but hey, the intention was there and now I have a comic in the works!

My recent experience hosting a 12 hour comic day with a local group of illustrators was SO great! I had a lot of fun and learned a lot about my capacity to focus. It turns out that, when you’re in a room full of people doing a thing, it motivates you to do that thing! I’m extremely thankful to all the people who made it such a great day, and I am STOKED to do it again. 

I could talk for hours about how great the experience was, but I will focus instead on the stages and methods I use for creating a short-form comic book. 

The stages of creating a comic:

IDEATION 

SCRIPT

CONCEPTS+DESIGNS

TESTS

THUMBNAILS

PENCILS

INKS

COLORS

LETTERS

Every story starts with an idea. For bridled flame, that first idea took the form of a young woman clad in leather, riding a chariot of fire through the sky. I wanted to tell a story about learning to tame the wild, destructive parts of ourselves. These initial sketches were completed about a year ago, when the story was just starting to take shape. 

By the time I got to writing the script, I knew the basic plot structure. The main things I needed to do were to 1) write it in a way that was fun to read, with characters moving you through the world as opposed to storybook narration and 2) nail it down in 12 pages or less. By the end of writing, rewriting and editing, I had 13 pages. 

Alongside writing the script, I was simultaneously drawing and designing. I needed to know what the characters would look like, how the environments appeared, the moods I wanted to capture, and the transformations undergone before I began the comic book pages. This is one of my favorite parts of the process, since there is so much freedom in the act of exploring. 

When I’m creating a world, I must walk into it without knowing what I’ll find. From the corners of my subconscious, I seek to shape shadowy impressions into tangible structures. For the unspoken words hiding in my mind, I have to form a voice. Artmaking is just as much an act of channeling as it is an act of crafting. I don’t believe that everything I make is new or original, but it is surely something I get to discover. 

As I develop concept art for the characters and world, I develop more familiar relationships and become more comfortable in the environments. After this process is well underway, I feel less like beginning the comic is walking into the unknown. 

The final piece of sketching is creating thumbnails for the page layouts, which ensures that I know exactly how pages should be drawn and formatted.

After all the preparation beforehand, the 12-hour comic day went very smoothly. I thought that I would need to shut the world out and ignore everyone around me in order to get anything good done. After all, I wanted to FINISH it. But what happened was that I actually just had fun with everyone there, and the fun pushed me through the drawing process. 

I learned early on that each penciled page would take me longer than I’d planned, and accepted it. 2 hours per page, and I would have to ink+color them later. What mattered to me more than finishing was creating something I would be proud of. 

Following that day, I returned to my normal work schedule and focused on my paid projects again—but I didn’t let those pages collect dust like I have with so many other comics. I committed to making something, and so I’m making it. 

By this point in my career, I know that comics aren’t made overnight, or in 12 hours. At least, my comics aren’t. I’m not discouraged by the slow grind because I can see where it leads—and I’m working my way there.