Make Your Own Comic Book: Tips and Tools to Make it Awesome!

Let's start with what Joe Kubert's Comic Book Studio isn't. It's not a book that teaches you how to draw. It's a book that teaches you how to create a comic book. A cartooned Kubert teaches you how to:

1. Come up with story ideas.
2. Take that idea and write your story
3. How to take that story and set up your comic book layout.
4. Cool additions you might want to put in your comic books.
5. How to take your story and turn it into a comic book script.
6. How to develop your characters and settings.
7. You'll learn the importance of creating your own picture resource reference library.
8. Using thumbnails of your script to plan the comic book layout
9. How to create panels, pencil in your characters, create super cool lettering, inking, colouring and at last - your finished product!

Bet you didn't realise there's so much work to putting together a comic book, did you? It is a lot of work, but it's also a heck of a lot of fun.

Kubert's exciting, colourful step-by-step instruction book is filled with sketches, dialogue balloons, captions, and examples to show you the way. By the end, you'll have your very first comic book completed to make copies of and give away or sell to your friends!

Making a comic book cover is a lot easier than you might think. The easiest way to learn is by studying comic book covers you have in your collection! So, go pull out your comic book collection. Take a look at the following:

1. Look at the size, shape and location of the title. How much space does it take up on the cover?
2. How far are the drawings are from the edge of the page?
3. Is there any dialogue? What does it look like?
4. Look at the way things overlap one another. Overlapping is cool! It not only helps create a super cool 3D effect, but it's a lot more interesting to look at.
5. What other things do you see? Price? Comic Code?
6. What kind of scene is it? What does it tell you about the story inside?
7. How do the colours used make you feel when you look at the cover? Yip, colour is important!

Remember, if you don't have a lot of comic books, go to google images and type in "comic book covers" (without the quotation marks) and look through the hundreds of covers. The more comic book covers you study, the easier it will be to create your own.

Creating comic books with so-so artistic skills is fun, no doubt about it. But what if you want to bump your skills up and take your stickman from wimp to stickman on steroids, in other words - give him the Marvel look! The best place to learn how is with the bible of drawing comic book characters - "How to Draw Comics the MARVEL Way" by Stan Lee and John Buscema. As you can guess, it's totally awesome.

Here's what you'll learn:

1. The tools of the trade. (see below for their suggested tools)
2. Secrets of Form: Making an object look real
3. Power of perspective
4. Study the figure
5. Draw the figure
6. ACTION!
7. Foreshortening
8. Draw the human head
9. Composition
10. Draw your own comic book page
11. Creating the comic book cover
12. Lastly, the art of inking

Layout is easy to follow and there are tons of examples and of course, the Marvel humour.

If you want to get the most out of the book, I suggest picking up the DVD that goes with it as well. From personal experience, you'll find it an invaluable guide and learn a lot more faster, "more" meaning the basics to give you a solid foundation to build on. Not too mention, you'll enjoy watching Buscema draw the lessons while Stan Lee explains the concepts. (Tip: Watch Buscema's face while Lee talks away.)

Excelsior!

As you'll find in "How to Draw Comics the MARVEL Way", you really need either a drawing board or a drawing desk when creating your comic books. You can always use a desk or kitchen table, but from my own experience, if it's a choice between a kitchen table and an art desk - I'll take the art desk every time. Why?

1. Because they're more comfortable to draw at.
2. If I have an idea while working on one thing, I can quickly grab a sticky note, put the idea down and stick it to the desk.
3. The storage tray that runs along the side holds everything I need and I don't have to look around for anything.
4. I can tape my reference pics to the table and leave them there.
5. I don't have to worry about someone spilling coffee on my work.

Here's a few tips on buying your first desk:

1. Make sure the table is fully adjustable. You can use the flat position to put your comic books together.
2. Make sure it has an attachable side tray to hold all your tools.
3. Some desks have storage underneath. It's a great place to store reference books you need for your current project.

Tracing is an excellent way to get a feel for muscle structure and poses. The trick is to not just copy the picture, but think about what you're doing. Think about how it feels to draw the muscle, the leg, the cape, sword, hand, etc.

Trace through comic book after comic book. Pick up a book on human anatomy like "Bridgman's Complete Guide to Drawing From Life: Over 1,000 Illustrations" a favourite among animators.

You'll be surprised at how much your drawing will improve by spending time tracing.

Mini-comic books are a blast to make. An 8 page mini-comic is simply a cover, a back page and 6 little drawings with a mini script. If you look to the right you'll see one of my first mini-comic books. It was a two parter. Click the pic and it will take you to my doodle lens where you can download it.

Even though they're fun to make, I think they require a lot more thought than the larger comic books. It's like the difference between twitter (micro-blogging) and a regular blog. You can ramble along on a blog all you want, but if you micro-blog you're forced to really think about what you want to say and do it in only 140 characters.

The same with mini-comics. You can ramble along with a full-size comic book, but a mini-comic book makes you get straight to the heart of the story. Joe Kubert's Comic Book Studio is a big help here.

Give it a try! Click here to learn how to make your mini-comic book!