Process/Preview

Here's a few pages from my new comic book which I'll be selling at this weekend's MoCCA Art Festival, and my process in making it. It's called My First Mermaid Parade, and it's the story of the first time I went to Coney Island, saw the famous Mermaid Parade and visited Cha Cha's Paradise Lounge and Ruby's Bar and Grill, and involves a drunk, horny Russian girl, a Lower East hipster girl, her dog, and a jealous Puerto Rican.

It's a story I've told so many times, I didn't have to do much in the way of writing, so my script looked like this:

Mainly it's just a rough breakdown of panel action and dialogue, with occasional tiny thumbnail layouts on the side. It probably doesn't make a lot of sense to you, but it makes sense to me and that's all that matters.

Lettering is the hardest part for me. It's tedious and makes my hand hurt, and also I tend to overwrite and can't fit it all in. So I've taken to lettering first, so I can edit on the fly and get it out of the way. I also lightly sketch in figures and layouts; but they're so light they don't even show up in this scan.

Then I get to penciling. This is mostly a 2H pencil. I mostly concentrate on figures and important scenic elements at this point; most of the backgrounds I'll deal with later.

Finally, the inks. For these mini-comics, I generally use micron pens. The original art is larger than it'll be printed, but I'm doing it on 8.5X11 paper so it'll fit my scanner, so it's still pretty small. Then I scan it, clean it up, reduce and position all the pages in printing order on sheets, and then print, fold, and staple. D.I.Y. indeed.

So there it is, the behind-the-scenes magic of comic book-making!