Comics making

A comic is a story told in a sequence of images the reader moves through at their own pace. That definition is doing more work than it looks: the reader controls the clock, and they can see the whole page at once. Those two facts are the entire reason comics are a distinct medium rather than illustrated prose or a stalled film, and almost every craft decision here follows from them.

The consequence is that the central skill is not drawing. It is choosing which moments to show and trusting the reader to supply what happens between them. A reader shown a raised hammer and then a bent nail has watched the blow land — you did not draw it, and drawing it would have made the sequence worse. Learning what to leave out is the whole discipline, and it is close to invisible when it is done well, which is why so little of the available instruction is about it.

The second consequence is the page. Because a reader takes in the shape of a page before they read a word of it, panel size, arrangement and what sits at the bottom right are pacing tools. A wide panel reads slower. A page turn is the only genuinely hidden moment in the medium and is where surprises belong. None of this requires any drawing ability at all, and all of it can be practised with boxes and stick figures.

The actual skill

Sequence, not rendering

Who controls pace

The reader, always

Cheapest real start

Paper, pencil, fineliner

Commonest failure

Unfinished, not bad

First project

Four to eight pages

1. 1

   Step 1: Pick something small and finishable

   A single incident with a beginning and an end, four to eight pages. Not a world, not a cast, not chapter one. The aim of the first project is to get through every stage of the process once, and length is the only thing that reliably stops that happening.

2. 2

   Step 2: Write it as a list of moments, not as a script

   One line per panel, describing what is seen. Doing this before drawing anything exposes the pacing while it is still cheap to change — and it will show you immediately that you have too many panels, which everybody does.

3. 3

   Step 3: Thumbnail the whole thing at postage-stamp size

   Tiny, fast, ugly boxes for the entire comic on one or two sheets. Small enough that you cannot draw detail is the point: it forces you to judge the page as a shape and the sequence as a rhythm. This stage is where a comic is actually made and it takes an hour.

4. 4

   Step 4: Letter before you finish the art, not after

   Place the balloons at the thumbnail or pencil stage. Lettering added at the end has to fit into space that was not left for it, which is why so many first comics have text covering a face. The balloons are part of the composition and reading order, not a layer on top of it.

5. 5

   Step 5: Pencil, ink and finish one page at a time

   Take a single page all the way to finished before starting the next. It is slower in theory and far faster in practice, because it tells you within a day whether your approach works at all, rather than after you have pencilled thirty pages in a style you cannot ink.

6. 6

   Step 6: Show it to somebody who does not read comics

   The only test that matters is whether a reader followed it. Ask them to tell you what happened, and listen for where they hesitated rather than for whether they liked it. Confusion about reading order or about who somebody is are the two faults worth fixing first.

The single most useful habit for somebody starting is to finish things that are too short. A completed four-page comic teaches more than sixty pages of an abandoned epic, because only the finished one contains an ending, and endings are the part nobody gets to practise.

A great deal of comics craft is expressible as rules with reasons, which makes it exactly the kind of thing that transfers in writing. What follows is that part. Drawing itself is not here, because it is served better by the enormous existing drawing literature and because it is not what makes a comic work.

• Reading order is a design responsibility — The reader follows a Z path in English-language comics, and anything that breaks it — a panel that sits ambiguously between two others, a balloon placed to the right of the one that should be read first — costs the reader a moment of confusion they will blame on themselves. Balloon placement decides reading order within a panel, so balloons are laid out before art, not after.
• Panel size is duration — A large panel is read for longer than a small one, and a row of narrow panels reads fast. This is the medium’s only real control over time and it is free. A page of six identical rectangles has deliberately given it up, which is occasionally the right choice and usually an accident.
• The page turn is the only hidden moment — Everything else on a spread is visible before it is read. What is over the page is not, which makes the turn the medium’s equivalent of a cut to black. Reveals, punchlines and shocks belong immediately after one, and putting them at the bottom right of a right-hand page throws them away.
• Cut every panel the reader could infer — The commonest structural fault in a first comic is redundancy: the character reaches for the door, opens the door, walks through the door. The gutter does that work. Cutting to the far side is not a shortcut, it is how the form reads, and the edit almost always improves pace and clarity at once.
• Establish, then move in — A reader who does not know where a scene is set will keep asking rather than following it. One wider panel early buys every close-up afterwards. This is the cheapest fix available for a page that feels claustrophobic without anybody being able to say why.
• Consistency beats quality for character — A reader needs to recognise somebody instantly, and they use silhouette, hair and clothing rather than facial likeness. Designing characters to be distinguishable in black shape alone solves more recognition problems than improving the faces does, and it works at any drawing level.
• Lettering is a craft, and bad lettering is loud — Even spacing, a consistent balloon shape, tails that point at the speaker without crossing, and text that does not touch the balloon edge. These are mechanical and learnable, and they are the difference readers register as "professional" without being able to name it.

• Paper — Smooth bristol board takes ink without feathering and is the one paper upgrade that visibly changes results. Cartridge paper is fine to learn on. Working larger than final print size and reducing is a traditional trick that hides a great deal of unsteadiness in the line.
• Pencils — Any. A non-photo blue pencil for underdrawing is genuinely useful because it can be dropped out when scanning, which removes the erasing stage entirely.
• Inking tools — Fineliners for control and consistency, a brush pen for line weight and life. Most people should own both and will settle on one. Dip pens and brushes are wonderful and are not a beginner’s problem to solve.
• A ruler and a light source — Panel borders drawn freehand read as sloppiness rather than as style at the beginning. A window works as a lightbox for transferring thumbnails.
• A drawing tablet — A small screenless tablet at £50–£90 is a complete digital setup with free software and is a bigger jump in capability per pound than anything else here. Screen tablets are lovely and are not necessary.
• Software — Free options are genuinely sufficient, and one widely used comics application is a modest one-off cost. What to look for is panel and page management, a stabiliser for line quality, and proper text tools — general painting software is weaker at exactly the comics-specific parts.
• What to ignore at the start — Screentone, complex colour workflows, expensive markers and a scanner. All of them are solutions to problems you will not have until you have finished several comics, and shopping for them is a well-known substitute for making one.

Progress in this craft is unusually easy to mistake, because the visible thing improving is the drawing and the thing that decides whether the comic works is not. It is worth tracking them separately.

• Finish, then finish again — The reliable measure of a first year is number of completed comics, not pages drawn. Four finished shorts is a better position than a hundred pages of an unfinished book, in every respect including the drawing.
• Read as a maker — Take a page you admire and count the panels, then work out why the panel sizes are what they are and what happens on the turn. Half an hour of this teaches more about sequence than a month of tutorials, and it is the only way most people ever notice the page turn being used.
• Copy a page exactly, once — Reproducing a page you like from a comic you own — layout, panel sizes, balloon placement — shows you the decisions from the inside. It is a study exercise rather than something to publish.
• Work to a deadline you did not set — An anthology call or a small press fair table date does more for output than any amount of intention. British comics has a healthy anthology culture that exists partly for this reason.
• Separate the roles deliberately — Draw somebody else’s script, or write for somebody else. It isolates the skills and it is the fastest way to find out that you are, for instance, a much better letterer than you assumed.
• Then, and only then, chase the long project — A graphic novel is a reasonable second-year ambition and a poor first-month one. The difference is that by then you know what a page costs you in hours, which is the number the whole plan depends on.

British comics culture is small, unusually welcoming and organised almost entirely around small press. Fairs and conventions run in most large cities, tables are cheap, and the normal way to enter is to turn up with something you made and a folding table. There is very little gatekeeping and almost no expectation that anybody is professional.

Anthologies are the other spine of it. Open calls for short comics on a theme run constantly, they take submissions from people with no track record, and they impose the deadline and the page limit that most makers need. Being in one is also how most people meet everybody else.

The etiquette worth knowing is straightforward. Credit everybody who worked on a comic, on the comic. Ask before adapting somebody else’s characters or story, and never sell it. Paying collaborators is expected the moment money is involved, and "exposure" is not a rate. Fan work and tributes are a healthy and accepted part of the culture; passing off traced or copied work as your own is the one thing that ends a reputation quickly, and it is noticed faster than newcomers expect.

• Short-form and one-page comics — A complete idea in one to eight pages. Where nearly everybody should start, where a great deal of the best work in the form lives, and the format that anthologies and small press fairs actually run on.
• The long-form graphic novel — A book-length work, usually a solo project over years. The ambition most beginners arrive with and the one most likely to be abandoned, for the ordinary reason that it postpones every lesson an ending teaches.
• Webcomics and serial publishing — Published in instalments online, on a schedule. A completely different craft problem: the unit is the update rather than the page, and the discipline is sustainability rather than scope. The most common route to an audience by a wide margin.
• Zines and small press — Self-published, short-run, photocopied or print-on-demand, sold in person. The tradition that most of British comics culture actually runs on, and the cheapest way to have a finished object and a reader.
• Manga and its conventions — Comics from Japan and the very large body of work made elsewhere using its storytelling grammar — right-to-left reading, a distinctive approach to pacing that spends far more panels on a moment, and its own genre vocabulary. Worth reading whichever tradition you work in.
• Strips and gag comics — Three or four panels, a setup and a turn, endlessly repeatable. The most rigorous training in economy available anywhere in the medium, and a form where drawing ability matters least of all.
• Collaborative comics — Writer, artist, letterer and colourist as separate people, which is how most commercially published comics are made. Genuinely worth trying early: it is the fastest way to discover which of the four you actually enjoy.
• Autobiographical and documentary comics — Non-fiction in the medium, from memoir to reportage. A large and serious part of the modern form, and the branch where plain drawing and strong sequence most obviously outperform virtuosity.