Drawing Words & Writing Pictures

Picked up Drawing Words & Writing Pictures by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden at the library recently. It's the distillation into book form of a college course on making graphic novels.

They broke down the essential ingredients to the narrative arc well:
1) protagonist: the character(s) who we ride the story through,
empathizeable: audience must care what happens to them
motivation: protagonist must want something enough to do things they won't usually. They can consiously or unconsciously want it, and it doesn't have to be in their best interests. "You can make a protagonist consciously want something what will actually work against his or her interest and unconsciously want the right thing, or vice versa."
ability: "The protagonist doesn't have to succeed, but he or she must have the potential capability to solve the conflict."
2)call to action: a non-routine event that creates an imbalance in the protagonists life they feel compelled to correct.
3) escalation: "a series of unexpected turns of events that make the protagonist work even harder to resolve his or her problem."
4) climax: final chance to fix things, either succeed or fail
5) denouement: the optional wrapping up of loose ends not related to the conflict at the end


advice on scanning artwork (they're assuming inked B&W artwork):
scan in gray scale at 600dpi at 100% scale
save as a TIFF using LZW compression (tiff's are non lossy)
go to image size and change resolution to 1200dpi (I don't see how this helps, it's already been scanned at 600, so that's the cap, but they insist this is important)
adjust Threshold to clean it up
clean (and don't use anti-aliasing)
change Mode to Bitmap (put threshold at 50% (128) which won't affect since we already manually thresholded)
and that's it, now it's ready for print, or converting to jpg for web I guess

they're big into traditional tools, they like traditional inking with a nib, or even better a brush. And they like traditional lettering using an Ames lettering guide

6"x9" is pretty standard printed size for US comics (a 2:3 ratio). Most artists draw at 9"x13.5" which is 150%. Most printers and photocopiers won't print out to the edge, so if you're doing it yourself, you're probably better off staying in the live area and not having bleeds. Good gutter size is 3/8" to 1/4" at 150%. Live area is the edge of what will be printed, so put the outside panel edges on the live area, and the printing will add the margin all around (don't include the margin within your live area, or you'll get double margin)(so for 9"x13.5" draw all the way out to 9 and assume the margin to the edge of the paper will be outside of that.)

the rest of the book has stuff about rhythm of panels and how that affects the readers sense of time, and talks about juxtaposing words and pictures to get new meanings from both. I appreciate that they start off saying you don't need to draw well to make comics.

Yay libraries!