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How to draw comics
Articles & Resources Cartooning: Steve Barr Interview Comic Conventions Inking Step-By-Step Cartooning - Jeff Smith's Drawing Board Step 1: Plotting Usually I have a script, just a list of what characters say and what things are supposed to happen and when. In this case I just had an idea of Kawamori and GI Joe's Baroness going at it on an old battlefield. I always to my plotting on scrap paper. I always do the Team V pages on typing paper, but when you get up to doing stuff on expensive paper, plotting on something cheap is always good. There's ALWAYS a chance to mess up, better to get all the kinks out on some scrap. Here you can see it's all simple. Just a bunch of squares with rough figures drawn in them, some with names so I know who's going where. Notice I start with an establishing show, a pic to show where the whole thing is taking place. It's always good to let the audience know where you're taking them today. Another thing to keep in mind when plotting are page breaks. Where do you stop the page? Well, there's a reason good books are called "page turners." You want to end each page with a cliffhanger, to make the reader wonder what's going to happen next, so they'll want to...that's right...turn the page. After I settle on what characters are to appear on the pages I've planned, I go into research. That's where the models come in. I shoot myself time and time again by coming up with characters and costumes that are so danged complicated, so I need model sheets to remind me what goes where and so on. The Kawamori one is the same one I've used since Team V's day one. The Baroness one I did just for this occasion. These models help the artist keep everything in place. Notice I've also noted each gal's guns. For two characters it's not that hard to remember, but when you're drawing large groups, it's nice to keep everyone's stuff straight. Step
2: Layouts Other than the clean looking frames, you'll notice that the characters still look simple, maybe an eye here or there to remind me where the character is looking. This is so I can switch stuff around if I still want to. You may have caught that some of the poses, especially on page two, have been changed from the plots. Drawing on a bigger sheet of paper is different than drawing on scrap, and sometimes you may feel that you have more space to do stuff you want, or that you just simply changed your mind. Don't feel bad if this happens, change is a good thing. Before we go on to the next step...is something missing? Looks like Baroness is missing from the bottom of page one. At this point I was having trouble coming up with a pose I liked for that frame. Which leads us to...
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