Thanks for sharing your process. It’s always cool to see how unique each artist’s procedure is when handling a particular project. keep up the great work! It’s always fun seeing your stuff.

Old school Marvel/DC comics were made by: plot-pencil-dialogue-inks-color.

It’s a little weird, plotting first then dropping in what they are saying. In my case though, trying to adapt a full motion picture screenplay required a rewrite or cutting away the useless banter, changing the author’s show-don’t-tell approach, and the author was not too keen on chopping up “his baby”.

Once his job was initially done, I had to make thumbnails from the script. I was the person who could be “director” at that point; I decide where all the page breaks, beats, and major moments/action/deep focus takes place. This is most difficult, because it’s all imagination! You have to compose the entire scene in your head. Literally fantasizing. Read script, stare at blank paper, repeat. I started calling it Mental Legos.

The trick: I would get 6 sheets of 8.5×11″ paper, and fold it into a “dummy” copy of the comic. I could then pencil ultra-quick thumbnails and know which pages were collated together, facing each other for a double-page image, or the moments (panels) lead into each other, ect. My comic is 24 pages per issue, so the 6 sheets folded in half, and then drawn on each side, is 24 pages.

Importantly, when making these thumbnails, I am scrawling in blocks of dialogue—I need to know where talking break between panels, and literally who-stands-where (the balloons can’t wrap around people like a knot!)

That way, I could see not only the physical layout of the book, but the breaks and beats for action. Also, It gives me an overall pace of the story to make it all fit within 5 issues. If some scene -must- be 2 pages long, I can see that coming and ask for a necessary rewrite (or I choose how the panels/action lay out for that scene altogether).

It is collaborative in my case, but only within my patience and skill level. I know where I would make something a special scene, and take the author’s opinion into consideration.

Other collaborations approach the text-to-image process differently; 1989′s “Batman: Arkham Asylum” by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean was groundbreaking in it’s use of fine art to tell the story (instead of a more “illustrator-ly” approach). The recent re-release has many notes on how they worked on it including the script and thumbnails. But what is interesting to show is Morrison’s approach to writing a “screenplay-like” script with copious notes. It was McKean’s job to extrapolate the ideas but take them farther. If you’ve read the book, you can see how strange it would be to take the script and make these complex and elaborate paintings/assemblages into a narrative.

My word to you Dani, is that you made a lot of caveats about how you did it (“This is my first comic. Ever. Keep that in mind please”). What I’m saying overall, is that there is -no- hard and fast technique to adapt script to art, even in Bigtime Comics. Since the Marvel-DC assembly line style is outdated (but still used by some personally), it does ultimately come down to the artist who provides the visual interpretation (artist gets final say unless contractually obligated).

My good friend is a pro comic writer (I won’t name-drop). He writes very lazily in my opinion, but tells his artists -exactly- what he wants to see, from character design to page layouts/breaks. To each their own.

Thanks for letting me ramble! I had to really figure the way to do it on my own, and happy to share any insight. The re-release of “Arkham Asylum” (1989) is remarkably insightful on this subject.

To add: “The comic won’t work if the story is bad, no matter how great your artwork is.” Excellent advice– that is why my first comic when -nowhere-.