Page Design/Guiding the Reader

I lent a comic to a friend that never reads comics. Later, when we talked about her thoughts on the book, our conversation focused on the reading experience, rather than the specific content.

The visual language of comics combines text and images into specific sequences. How these juxtapositions are arranged not only guides the readers around the page, but also organizes how they receive and interpret information.

My friend told me that she didn’t know what to look at first, so she read all the dialogue and narration on the page, then went back to look at the artwork.

With this in mind, to reach a broader audience, and to bring in new readers, one might simplify the page layout so that the text can be arranged in a way that it will guide the reader through the panels in the appropriate sequence. An ideal composition might present a single path across the page, alternating between the text and the images in the desired order.

Here are some experiments with this idea from SDH: Day One.

Making Backgrounds

For the SDH scenes in Greenpoint, I drew the backgrounds and environments on location. I scanned these drawings and combined them with the character art to make the final compositions/layouts in Photoshop. For the exterior scenes in Williamsburg, I decided to try a slightly different approach.


This time I drew the above pages as a guide for what I needed and photographed the park and street. Using my monitor as a lightboard, I loosely traced the photographs and inked them to look similar to the hand drawn art on the earlier pages of the book.

Original vs. Final Page Compositions

Moving Forward

I finished SUPER DUPER HAM: DAY ONE about 2 months ago. It started out as bunch of random scenes built around characters and some action scenes I wanted to draw.

Then I decided to string it all together into some kind of story. I stubbornly played around with the material and reworked the pages until it held together. I work full-time, so this process took place over a period of 3 years.

The temptation to keep noodling over it and to keep tweaking it continues to flare up, but I have decided to move on. There are still a couple of things I'd like to change, but they're not necessary. It's more important to move on to the next comic and make it better than this one.

This comic just scratches the surface of the story I want to tell with SDH. I'm going to take a break from the material to illustrate a short story I have been developing, then I plan to return to this material.

Scott McCloud

LEARN FROM EVERYONE
FOLLOW NO ONE
WATCH FOR PATTERNS
WORK LIKE HELL

-Scott McCloud

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/scott_mccloud_on_comics.html
http://scottmccloud.com/

Margins

I've been talking to varies printers and have realized I need to start designing my comic pages within certain margins to make sure nothing important gets cut out.

Comic: 6.625x10.25"
Live area: 6x9"
Top Margin: .5"
Bottom Margin: .75" (9.5" from top of page)
Side Margins: .3125" (Right margin is 6.3125" from left of page)

Digest Comic: 6x9"
Live area: 5.375x8"
Top Margin: .375"
Bottom Margin: .625" (8.375" from top of page)
Side Margins: .3125" (Right margin is 5.6875" from left of page)

Business Registration in Brooklyn

The Kings County Clerk
Supreme Court Building
360 Adams Street, Room 189, Window #2
Brooklyn, NY 11201

1. To file as a single proprietor, you need the Blumberg form X201. To file as a partnership, the Blumberg form X74. You can pick these up at most stationary stores that carry legal forms.

2. You have to get three of these forms notarized. I found a notary at a Wachovia bank in Manhattan.

3. I paid a fee of $120. They want it in cash, certified check, or money order payable to the Kings County Clerk.