Dragging people into my world

Today I made a comic I was planning to do since I got my new comic sketch book. The world inside the comic book can seem so distant a foreign. For some this is comforting, but for those who like the world inside the comic book and like to escape inside the comic book. Breaking the barrier in between comic book and reality is most enjoyable, and allows a more intimate relationship in between author and reader. This techniques has been used since the very beginning of cartoon art:

From 1920s Tex Avery cartoons:

To Who Framed Roger Rabbit:


To flash animation of Animation Vs Animator:



 I started doing the same cross-over inspired by the works forth-mentioned. I wanted to blur the line in between real and cartoon. I felt that this work make my characters more three dimensional and allowed them to pop out of the page and jump into reality.

 

My comic book creation process

When I create comic books, I have to say that I don't always know how things are going to turn out. I generally have an idea about a subject, or I just think of something I'd like to comment on and then there can be 1 of 2 ways I go from there:

1. I put pen to paper straight away and improvise everything: I make up the text as I go along and the drawing, and try to do the most logical and intuitive layout design. I cannot say I truly improvise everything, I simply start at the top left, just thinking about what space I need for the text, and then every new item laid out on the page is created considering what has come before, but not thinking about what will be coming next. These designs are generally the simplest and have an easier less calculated flow.

2. The premeditated comic book design is not the simplest, especially now that I'm working on letter format paper, and not A4. The designs born from this are very calculated: everything has its place and have been positioned in many different places before pen is put to paper. All be it, I don't do a physical draft of my comic book designs, I do everything in mentally, picturing how things would look in different places and how the design and layout can enhance the story, or how I can maximise the impact with a calculated and thought through design.

The saying "read if you want to write" works very well with comic design. After reading comics, the logic of design appears and the "rules and exceptions" of the logic of telling a comic book story seems to become second nature. Most of it is based on the easy logic that we read text right to left and top to bottom, so that's how a comic book is designed to be read, each part of the comic being like a different paragraph. The notorious exception to this deign logic involves putting arrows leading from one square to the next ordering the squares out of their natural reading chronology and guiding the reader. I have done all I can to avoid doing so; I like to work with the layout and design and make them so simple and logic that their cannot be ambiguity on where to read next, and therefore no need for arrows.

The tools I use for the simple black and white comic designs are simple: paper and black ink fountain pens. Nothing is brought through the computer. Making everything by hand stops making comics using ctrl+c and ctrl+v (copy and pasting). Comic books like Cyanide and Happiness tend to just copy and paste every character and their body parts onto each different comic. By doing so the comic book loses personality, clumsiness, and ultimately charm. Webcomics are not renown for the artistic prowess in their execution, they mainly play on good and simple design, and charm and character. I cannot deny that in my case charm and character means mistakes and imperfect lines.

My wokstation:

A Blog has the same reading paradox as a manga!

When I was showing my work from my blog, someone said something interesting: "the problem with blogs is that they're the wrong way around". Actually, in the design logic, it isn't. When the readers open a blog, they get to see the latest news/post from the blog. That's one problem: if you're a follower from the start of the blog it's ok, because you get straight to what you want, but if you're new to this, you don't want to start reading the blog from the end? But this is just a design choice favouring the devoted followers of a blog over the new arrivals.

My analogy with mangas comes from the design choice forth-mentioned. The paradox is this: we read from left to right, and top to bottom, but blogs display their texts left to right and top to bottom, but the order of the posts are chronologically ordered bottom to top! So you have to read the post top to bottom, but go back on top to read the next post.

Where do mangas come in you might ask? Well it's simple: Japanese read right from left... And there comes the design decision when adapting a manga say into English: do we invert the picture allowing everything to flow left to right/top to bottom but have the characters left and right swapped around (swapping the image around on the vertical axis). Or! Do we leave the picture as it was originaly, but creating a new rule of reading: the text is read left to right, but the images are read right to left... Most choose the latter.

Design. It makes us have to choose. It demands logic, and in this case a decision of what to put first.


To the left: a "how to read" guide found before page 1 of some mangas.