Posts Tagged: articles

Matchmaking YOUR Questions With Your Favorite Creators

Have you ever wanted to ask your favorite comic creator a question? Maybe listened to a podcast and thought, I could ask a better question than that? Well, here’s your chance.

We at MakingComics.com are working on designing a new Gutter Talk project (which may potentially be unveiled as a panel at San Diego Comic-Con International 2018 – yes, THAT Comic-Con) and both the questions and the guests will be determined by you. We’ve been so blown away by the overwhelming positive response by learners in our “How To Make A Comic Book” Coursera course that we’ve decided we want you to be the center of what we are doing next.

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Comic Road 2: Scripting Time!

I’m not going to lie. Scripting is my jam. I’m a writing kinda guy, so excuse me if I get a little resource happy here. But there’s so much stuff to learn about scripts that just giving you guys only a couple of resources might break my heart. So we’ll start at square one.

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Comic Road 1: Starting Your Comic

So you want to make a comic? That’s great! In fact, that’s exactly what a class full of students down at Chula Vista High Tech High wanted to do. And after designing an extensive curriculum, Making Comics Worldwide CEO Patrick Yurick, and incredibly handsome Editor-In-Chief Kevin Cullen, decided to bring all of you burgeoning comic creators into the mixture by giving you the opportunity to follow along with the Graphic Novel Project (GNP) students step by step through this blog! (more…)

SO YOU WANNA PUBLISH A WEBCOMIC? – PART 5

Plugins for WordPress – making your like easier
In the last post, we started to add pages and widgets to the website so it would be a little more functional. Now we need to take advantage of the WordPress developer community and install some plugins to make our site more effective. (more…)

So You Wanna Publish A Webcomic? – Part 2

The idea with this series of posts about building and designing your own webcomic site is to really take things from a beginner stage through to something much more advanced and customized. For now, we’re at the beginner level and this post starts us at the basics. If you haven’t read part 1 about using WordPress and ComicPress and haven’t got everything installed yet, go back and we’ll wait… (more…)

You Have a New Idea! So What?

No one ever says to the surgeon, “You know, I think I’d really like to try performing a kidney transplant sometime.” Meanwhile, there is no professional or aspiring professional writer who has not heard, at least once, upon explaining his or her vocation, “You know, I think I’ve got a novel in me, somewhere.” It’s infuriating. (more…)

How to Write a Script for Your Comic

Intimidated by the writing process? Having a hard time getting what’s in your head down on paper? (Do you even use paper? If so, does it have “From the desk of…” printed at the top or is it 23 napkins that you snatched from the coffee shop?) In any event, I want to teach you the “quick and dirty” way of making a script for your comic. It’s not as complicated as you might think, and you don’t need any fancy software to do it either! (more…)

Overview Of The Comic Creation Process

Casual consumers of comic books around the world often have no idea of the work involved in producing the entertainment they enjoy. Effort and workload aside, merely the size of the team required for an idea to manifest can boggle the mind. Dozens of people handle specialized roles from writer to penciller, inker, colorist, letterer, and editor. Printers are needed to produce the physical copies and a distribution network is required for those comics to end up in your local comic shop.

Or maybe the comic in question is of a new breed — a webcomic — and most of the jobs are handled by one person.

This article is intended to be a quick reference for the most common methods of comic creation, both from the professional side of things as well as how those methods scale when applied to smaller projects.

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What To Read? Touchstones For Comic Makers

Samuel Beckett hit the nail on the head when he said: “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading.” Indeed, it’s only after we’ve studied the work of masters that we are able to amass a foundation from which we can create our best material. However, if you’re new to the world of comics, you may find some of the “classic masterpieces,” such as Watchmen or Maus, a bit advanced as teaching aids or references. I know I’ll get some hate mail for excluding these classics from the list, but hear me out. Though they are definitely ranked among the more important comic books, it takes time to really appreciate exactly what it is that makes these comics so important that they’re studied even in ivy-league colleges. For this reason I think it’s probably a good idea for newer readers and writers to begin their journey by sampling the best of a diverse array of genres. The goal is, of course, to saturate yourself with quality content by deconstructing the the comics themselves and finding out what makes them “tick.”

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