ComicBooks

How to Create Your Own Comic Book – Tips for Beginners

If you’re reading this article, you’re probably a fan of comic books. From superheroes and science fiction to comedy and horror stories, this versatile format continues to captivate our imaginations. If you REALLY like comic books, then there’s a good chance that you’ve thought about trying your hand at creating your own comic book.

Maybe you’re already had a few ideas inspired by all the years of reading, and you picked up a pencil and tried to draw some characters. In other words, you’ve taken a creative leap of faith.

With the advent of self-publishing, it’s now easier than ever to transform your artistic vision into your very own comic book. But how do you get started? It takes skill, patience, and planning, but it’s so exciting to see all of the pieces come together in the end.

Start With a Concept That You Believe in

It’s your creative vision that will set you apart from all the other content out there, so you need to begin with a concept you truly believe in. You probably already have a rough idea of what you want your comic to be about. Once you get started, you’ll be putting in a lot of time in developing this initial idea, so you want to choose something that will keep you interested and motivated all the way to the finish line.

Everyone’s brainstorming process is a little different. Just let it happen naturally and keep a notebook handy to scribble down story ideas, dialogue, character backstory and drawings as they come to mind. Try to make a rough outline of all that’s relevant to your concept: major themes, plot points, characters, and tone.

Then you can think about sources of inspiration and comic books creators, styles, and techniques you’d like to emulate. With comic book readers, you need to strike a balance between familiarity and originality.

Design Your Main Characters

People care about a story if they care about the characters, so begin by deciding who will be the main characters in your story. Make a few sketches of what they’re going to look like. They can be historical figures, animals or just characters you invent from scratch. They don’t even have to be from this planet.

There’s no right or wrong way to create a character, so have fun with it! Think about their main personality traits and what motivates them. For example, one character is hot-tempered, loyal and will do anything for a cause they believe in.

Choose a Setting for Your Story

Next step is to think about a setting for your comic. It could be a time and place in history like the Wild West or another planet in the year 3000. It’s up to you. What matters is that it makes sense with the story you want to tell, and since this is your first time creating a comic, don’t choose something that’s very difficult to draw. If you choose a desert, for example, you’ll be making your life much easier.

Some comics have no setting, and the emphasis is on the characters and dialogue.

Plot and Conflict

Now that you know the general concept, the characters and the setting, you can move on to the plot and conflict. This is just a rough outline. Take a notebook and jot down what you want your main characters to do and the conflict in the simplest terms possible. It could be a superhero against a villain, two groups against each other or a conflict between ideals or belief systems like freedom against order. You can add several layers of conflict if you’d like.

If you’re creating a story based on comedic elements, you don’t need to have a conflict, but it does make the story a lot more interesting. You can either resolve the conflict by the end of the comic book or create a series.

Choose a Medium

If you want, you can go old-school and draw everything by hand. In that case, you can use standard printer paper or buy a sketchbook made specifically for drawing comic books. You can also download templates off the internet and draw on them directly. The internet is full of online resources. If you want to publish your comic book online but draw it by hand, you can scan the pages and merge them with the help of a PDF combiner which you can find here.

Then there’s the option of getting a drawing pad that you can plug into your computer. It has a stylus you can use to draw digitally with a software tool like Adobe Illustrator. You can still draw some of the panels by hand and then modify them on the computer. This will also be much easier since you can resize them and combine them as you like. Another advantage is that you can make major changes, and you don’t have to start another panel from scratch.

If you want to self-publish, you can also find a lot of online resources for that.

Write the Script

The last step before you start drawing your panels is to write the script. You already know who the characters are, where the story takes place and the main plot lines. It’s time to get into more details.

You can either do a page-by-page script or panel-by-panel. If you choose page-by-page, you need to write down what will happen on every page, considering one page can have up to ten panels. Most comic book writers start with panel-by-panel because you’ll have to get there anyway.

Don’t try to pack too much action into one page. You want the reader to turn the pages excitedly to see what’s going to happen next.

The dialogue should be short and sweet, and the story should wrap up in about 30 or 40 pages. As we mentioned before, you can also make a series or opt for a graphic novel. The point is that you’ll want to avoid cramming too much into one comic book because it will throw off the pacing.