The first thing I did was meet with the client to talk about what events or stories were going to be included. I got as much information as I possibly could, so I'd have plenty of material to whittle down to two pages. While we talked, and after, I was starting to form the idea of how to structure the panels. I started designing the layout, and once I was happy with that I wrote a script for the narrative text boxes and speech bubbles. I decided early on to adapt the stories as if they were simple adventure tales, so for example a holiday that included a tricky day out on a tandem bike became a struggle against sentient killer tandems, or a whale watching holiday would now be the two of them patrolling the seas in full karate pose, ready to fight off evil-doers and whale poachers.
While the recipient was a Judge Dredd fan, he was also a DC Comics fan, and considering the subject matter I thought the visual style of Golden Age or Silver Age DC would be a better fit than the grimmer, violent, noirish 2000AD style. Taking my cue from Dick Dillin-era Justice League comics which I had in trade paperback, I mapped out the exact dimensions of the pages which allowed me to size out each individual panel. I then used this framework to draw up a rough of the final piece, just to decide placement etc. The title, Nerd Mag, was another in-joke.
(Click pictures to view)
Then I picked up some Bristol board and doubled the dimensions of the pages above so I could include more detail (a technique that I only learned about when visiting comic conventions and seeing how real artists put their pages together). I asked the client to provide me with any photographs she could, so I could at least make a decent attempt at a likeness, and luckily these days pretty much everybody has a sizeable cache of photographs. Many of them were from the holidays that I was drawing, although I was much more concerned with representing the stories as cleanly and simply as possible. First, I laid down the frames in pencil, then inked them, then started pencilling the artwork. After that, I inked the panels ready for colouring. Where needed, I found it easier to write up text on separate sheets and glue them in place over the art work, to try and cut down on any mistakes.
I would have been tempted to colour digitally, in order to minimise the possibility of making mistakes that would be hard to correct given the relatively short turnaround time I had to put this together, but since I don't have a drawing tablet and my computer set up is pretty basic, I decided to take a chance and colour everything using Copic and Promarkers. From there, it was sent to a scanning/printing shop in London Bridge, Colourcentric, who did a great job of resizing and printing the work. They evened out the colouring as well, which was important in ensuring the finished piece looked convincing enough to pass as a real comic. In the future, I'd prefer to do this part myself, but the finished boards were just larger than A3 and large format scanners are tough to come by, and because of time pressures I was happy for someone else to turn this all around within a day.
Next up I scoured Orbital Comics looking for something very specific: a comic in to which I could staple my pages and have it look like it belongs. This was harder than expected, as the comic couldn't be too old, as the comics pages would be the wrong colour, or too recent, as my pages' white gutters would stand out against most comics these days which have a tendency to print in colour right to the edge of the page. In the end I found one which fit the bill, and loosened the staples and took it apart. I had two copies of my artwork, and stapled the two pages opposite each other with one or two pages in between so it would look more natural.
You can see above a disparity in the skin tones; the printing process had left them a little to pale so I used the same skin toned Copic I had before to put that colour back in. The page on the right is finished, the one on the left is in progress.
Finally, I had bought a large box frame in which to mount and display the comic. Using superglue, I pasted the back cover flat and the front cover slightly raised, so even though it was mounted vertically, it would look like it had been left open on a flat surface while being read. Each page was then carefully glued to the one below.
One minor speed bump was that, because I essentially had two identical pages fully stapled in, I accidentally ended up displaying the non-coloured pages rather than those I had retouched! After taking these photographs I punched up the skin tones on this version.
All in all I'm proud of the end result. I would maybe have liked to dwell more on the pencilling but the time limit I was given to finish actually helped me be less obsessive about the artwork. I think it captured the right tone, the right kind of lighthearted fun. And, it means a lot to think that I'll have work on somebody's wall from one of the most important days of their lives.
